Empowering employees to create business applications

In this episode of the EY Microsoft Tech Directions podcast series, we discuss Microsoft Power Apps and the rise of business innovation.

Simon Hobbs

This is the EY podcast, Empowering employees to create business apps, ideas for leadership from EY, offering clients the expertise they need to harness cutting edge technologies from Microsoft. I'm your host Simon Hobbs in California. You know, a couple of years ago, young ambitious graduates would frequently tell you they had a great idea for a new app, an original idea that they dreamed would deliver them both business success and financial rewards. Now that entrepreneurial flair is exactly what CEOs running big established businesses can now capture and nourish deep within their own organisations using the latest Microsoft technology. Power Apps is an easy-to-use platform that empowers employees to use their skills and their subject expertise to become citizen developers creating new powerful apps within their own departments. Citizen apps are capable of making organisations significantly more agile and responsive to accelerating change. And we're about to meet two of their prime movers. Please remember conversations during EY podcasts should not be relied upon as accounting, tax, legal investment, nor other professional advice, listeners must consult their own advisors. Joining me now from Seattle, Microsoft’s General Manager for Power Apps, Ryan Cunningham, I am fascinated to meet you, Ryan, thank you for sparing the time.

Ryan Cunningham

Absolutely happy to be here, Simon. Thanks for making the time and inviting Power Apps into this awesome forum.

Hobbs

And from Denver, Colorado, EY Principal, Kristie Reid, who leads the EY client delivery team implementing Microsoft business apps. Kristie, you're clearly at the cutting edge of this as well. Welcome. Nice to have you on board.

Kristie Reid

Simon, thanks for facilitating the discussion. And thank you to Ryan for helping us out here.

Hobbs

You're both very welcome. I just want to start by acknowledging the journey that I think we've all shared together over the last 15 years with apps, as basically I suppose developers use them almost one by one, to effectively build an interactive world around us, Ryan, you have a stellar resume on LinkedIn. But I can't help notice that by the time you'd entered the workforce, smartphones had already been introduced, I guess really, in many senses, your generation has never really known a world without apps.

Cunningham

I suppose you're right. I think in my very first job, I was an early adopter of one of those Compaq brand personal digital assistants with the stylus and even then, you know, apps, were starting to become a thing on small screens. But man, it's been quite a journey since then, in terms of how far the technology has come in a really short amount of time.

Hobbs

You know, Kristie, I confess, in the early days, I had no idea of the sheer economic power that even just social media apps or messaging apps would eventually unleash, you know, literally, we're looking at the creation of trillions of dollars of stock market value. And all the attendant controversies that we know about, given your strong early background in consulting, did the app revolution, if we can call it that, go where you predicted.

Reid

So to be honest, I am constantly amazed at how these applications continue to revolutionise not only businesses, but whole entire industries. You can even think of a lot of those things that have happened, right? So I would never ever suppose to say that I would have imagined that it would have gone this far. But I'm really excited to be part of it all

Hobbs

Hey Ryan give me some examples of the apps that you personally use in your in your own life, maybe away from work. I mean, do you write your own? I assume you do. I mean, you're the product lead?

Cunningham

Indeed. You know, we were chatting just before the recording started, I guess I'll use this example about boating and sailing and being on the water. And you would be shocked how many apps there are for that. So we've got a little place on the Puget Sound here in the greater Seattle area. And I've got apps for monitoring tide charts and apps for wind speed and apps for knowing what giant ships are coming through the channel and when and I've even started building my own power apps to sort of tie all that information together into a useful view just for me local to where I'm at. But now with APIs available behind everything and tools on top to build with, that type of stuff becomes actually pretty quick to click together and make very bespoke experiences. You know, whether it's, you know, surviving an afternoon in a canoe or revolutionising the logistics industry. At the end of the day, they may look similar.

Hobbs

Kristie on your LinkedIn you list skiing, sailing and trying amazing food. Do you have apps for that as well?

Reid

Of course I do. I actually want to steal Ryan’s app when he's done with it for the sailing, but the one I will mention that's my favourite, we have an app that you know tracks everything we do when we ski, how many runs, we've done the distance, etc. And so I can't keep up with my kids anymore to be 100% honest. But the app that we use captures your max speed. And just for a second, if I can hit a max speed that's close to my kids, I can still compete with them in that one little area.

Hobbs

Very nice. Ryan, I mean, let's be clear here, that the revolution that you're leading is in the building of apps moving us away from the need for complex coding, is the argument towards a new low-code, no-code environment? How do you explain that to people in practical terms?

Cunningham

That's a great question. You know, I think the, in some ways, this is not a new thing, in some ways, people have been sort of working around the boundaries of what their software can do for them for a very long time. You know, Microsoft is the company that shipped Excel 35/36 years ago, and people have been using that for a long time to sort of make their own solutions. Really, what we're doing with low-code is serving that need in a modern world, a modern world that has a lot of data in the cloud, a modern world that has a lot of devices in everybody's hands, and a lot of information coming from different sources in real time. And to kind of apply that same desire to put together the pieces and solve your own problem that has been serving people in an information worker capacity for many, many years. But put it on my phone, connect the data that I use in my job, put it together myself. That's really what we're what we're focused on here is empowering those people to move faster.

Hobbs

And how do you view that over at EY Kristie? I mean, how do you explain to your clients, the ease with which employees can now create mobile apps, or I guess, more importantly, for a lot of them build websites, say, using the drag-and-drop tools?

Reid

You know, I always use myself as an example, no one wants me coding, especially our development team. But what these tools do enable us to do is sit down with our clients and collaboratively design these applications, we can sit in a conference room pilot-like situation, and really use that those drag-and drop-capabilities to show them what these applications could look like in their end state, and then hand it over to the development team to you know, open up Visual Studio, or whatever their toolset of choice is to make all of the complex integrations and data exchanges happen in the background. But only after the client has already seen what the potential of the application could be.

Hobbs

Ryan, how far down the track to empowering people with minimal technical skills, are you really in effect?

Cunningham

You know, we are we're pretty far Simon. I mean, I won't lie building a power app is not easy in the way that, you know, making maybe a PowerPoint presentation is second nature for many people. But it's certainly a lot easier by orders of magnitude than going and getting computer science degree. I relate it to learning tools like maybe Photoshop for photo editing, right, it's very accessible to a wide range of novices, and to Kristie's point, also usable by professionals. And so bringing, bringing a little bit of passion and a little bit of desire to learn, you can get started with very simple things and then sort of go up in sophistication as you learn more, or perhaps even hand something off to a developer that is more sophisticated to finish off. That that scalability of the toolset is key. But you know, we've seen everyone from airport security guards to elementary school teachers to former truck drivers, you know, and many more personas really grasp on to these tools, and teach themselves and meet the community and become very productive in Power Apps today already.

Hobbs

That has actually real implications of retraining. But let's come on to that as obviously we face structural problems in the economy. Kristie, if you're empowering employees who sit outside the traditional confines of a big organization's IT department to build apps. Are you also effectively acknowledging that change in existing IT ecosystems is often too slow, maybe through no fault of their own? I mean, which IT department wouldn't argue that they're understaffed and underfunded?

Reid

Yeah, absolutely. I worked in corporate IT for many years. And it was frustrating to not be able to meet the demands of all of our clients and all of all of the requests that they have, especially when they were high value and important. But instead, the things that were getting done were those that are kind of spearheaded by the people who've screamed the loudest. So I really see what happens in those situations is that businesses go off and they form their own shadow IT departments and then inevitably, the corporate IT team is responsible for the continual support and maintenance of those tools, often that they're not hired or staffed to, to be able to manage. So I think one of the benefits that I see of companies standardising on a toolset like power platform is you've already got the skills in house, you're encouraging the business to create their own applications and, and meet their own needs. But you can still rely on IT for that support, because they already have the staff in place, or at least the skill sets in place, if not necessarily the number of people that they ultimately will need.

Hobbs

From your point of view, Ryan, the problems that Kristie identifies where do they typically lead? I mean, how common is it for departments in a sense to go rogue buying their own plugins? If IT says it's just going to take months for them to get to them?

Cunningham

I think it's incredibly, incredibly rare for departments to not solve their own problems under pressure. Right? You know, I think that you're kind of getting in the fundamental crux of the issue, which is, every business unit on the planet is under a tonne of pressure to do more with less and move the needle, especially over the last year, every IT department on the planet is under pressure to maintain compliance, maintain security, and also do more with less. And that just creates this this conflict. And if we don't change the economics of how software is developed at some fundamental level, we don't get out of that, that problem. And that's really, ultimately where this leads is, you know, organisations holistically, it's not a business versus IT it's an organisation holistically realising if we can have more people participate, and we can have our professionals go faster on one platform that is secure and governable. We can solve a lot of these problems and get out of this duality of shadow IT in departments going.

Hobbs

I just wanted to drill down on that further, Kristie. I mean, how often when you open up a client, and you look into their IT systems, do you find this patchwork set of solutions which Ryan was referencing? And what are the common customer challenges in taking that forward?

Reid

I would say 100% of the time, right. But what I do think that the main thing that organisations can start focusing on immediately is a data strategy. How do you make sure that you are not making the problem exponentially worse by copying this data into even more disparate systems, and making additional integration points that you need to continue to maintain? So I think as we look forward, and we talk about artificial intelligence, and all of the insights that organisations want to gain from there, this data strategy is the foundation of that. And then once that's in place, all of these either citizen or professional developers can build their applications referring to the business data that they need. And then they can also augment that data and utilise it to their full capacity as opposed to what they do now often, which is export into Excel, create another column, and now that data is lost on someone's hard drive, as opposed to being available to the rest of the organisation.

Cunningham

Kristie you're spot on with that observation. And we see that all the time in our customer base. In fact, we have a customer in a corporate IT role who classically was very sceptical of low-code, but has very much come around to be an advocate for low-code in the organisation, famously has quipped, look, I came around to low-code when I realised that a well regulated open market is generally better than a black market. That ultimately, by providing a platform on which business units can solve their own problems, and bring their own data, you can effectively start to crowdsource that data into one place, and not have this sort of rigid system in which you encourage people to take it out of a central context and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. And so that's how we start to see this really begin to turn and play out inside of larger organisations as they make that realisation.

Hobbs

So Ryan talk me through the practical process of putting power in the hands of citizen developers, how does it work?

Cunningham

Absolutely. So the power is already in the hands of citizen developers who are using Office 365, or Microsoft 365. If I'm a user who has access to teams has access to SharePoint Online has access to excel, Power Apps and power platform are just part of those user experiences. And it's easy to get started over that data that's already in office 365. And that's pretty safe data that's already governed by data loss prevention policies and organisation by corporate access through Active Directory. And so individual citizen developers can get started, you know, in many cases with what they already have. Now, where IT gets involved, it begins with monitoring and measuring that use and getting a handle on what people are building and where they're finding success, where they're seeing challenges. But then also bringing in the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, and looking for opportunities to connect that simple personal productivity use of the platform to actual corporate business needs and more sensitive corporate business data. And so typically, a customer will, you know, either pick one project that sort of represents a more advanced use of the platform, pull in a great partner like EY and go after it and learn about how to use the platform. For those use cases, and/or they'll start to invest in in a centre of excellence strategy to really monitor and nurture and train this broader citizen developer movement in the organisation.

Hobbs

I just want to point out for followers of business news that Microsoft probably has the biggest recurring revenue bundle in the history of commerce with 365. And, and what you just described, and Microsoft is building further features into that which is incredibly significant, I think for the position that the company has moving forward. But Kristie, tell me how you feel about what Ryan is describing, in a sense, you're giving people an opportunity, I guess, many times to shine that they didn't have before, to try and do their job better on behalf of everybody else.

Reid

Yeah I completely agree that the thing that you have to think about for those citizen developers or for those business users, is you're empowering them to also learn new tools, which is really motivating for them, not only to continue to grow in their career, but also to improve the processes that they are most familiar with, they're the ones doing it every day. And to make them more efficient, which historically, a lot of those people probably have never been asked how to do their job better. So they just can take it and run with it themselves without having to think of business requirements that they're handing over to someone else to build, they can think out of the box themselves without needing that support.

Hobbs

Ryan, let me pick up on something that you keep mentioning almost in passing, where this leads professional IT people. I mean, what you seem to be saying is they are not cut out of the loop on this.

Cunningham

Not at all, I would say in fact, the inverse, IT has a crucial role in getting low-code right in an organisation and more than that, a huge opportunity. There are individuals in IT organizsations in our customer base that have almost single handedly saved their organisations 10s of millions of dollars by enabling citizen development and low code by making it possible to deliver solutions that would not have otherwise been delivered by people with expertise that would not have otherwise been easy to put in the head of a software developer, even if they were available to work on the project. And so, you know, this is more than just defence and keeping things secure. This is really about, you know, a huge opportunity for IT organisations to serve their primary mission, which is enable the organisation with technology and do it in a secure, compliant and scalable way.

Hobbs

Kristie the obvious question becomes how do you stop this being like the Wild West, how do you create a proper framework or structure for all this energy that you're going to unleash? How do organisations keep some control? Where are the guardrails?

Reid

Yeah, so we help a lot of organisations stand out the COEs, similar to what Ryan has talked about, right? So in addition to all of the security and controls that Ryan has mentioned, along with the training, there's also the communications How should these tools be used when they should they be used as opposed to perhaps buying an off-the-shelf application? How are these tools going to be supported after the fact, right? Remember that if someone in accounting creates an application that all of a sudden 200 people use, and she or he leaves the company, who is going to continue to maintain that application that has now become a business critical part of a business or business process? So the goal of all of this structure is to make sure that we still follow all the guidelines that are needed from an IT governance perspective, but not stifling the innovation that can thrive in the right environment.

Hobbs

Ryan, how does the CIO know that the applications are built correctly, that they're not draining server time that they're efficient?

Cunningham

That's a great question for any software platform. It's certainly important for a low code platform, you know, and I would say it's actually very connected to this idea of enable innovation, but closely monitor and manage it, you know, you want to make sure that people can get started on the platform with data sources that are familiar to them, and tools that are familiar to them. But as you monitor that signal, not just of usage, but also of performance of stability, reliability, through monitoring tools, and that you have resources in place that can come assist with those issues. That ultimately is key to how a centre of excellence maintains excellence and ownership and apps that become crucial to their departments or to the company as a whole. There's a whole range of capabilities in the product for doing this that include, you know, a rich static analysis that can run, you know, a deep automatic analysis of performance and stability issues on an application, debugging tools like the Power Apps monitor for figuring out what's going wrong when things are going wrong. monitoring tools for showing you how many people open the app, how fast was it when they opened it? How many errors did they hit? So there are there are many tools at the disposal. The key is just operationalizing them and helping people use them in the right way at scale. And that's, that's really the role that a centre of excellence plays in a power platform deployment at scale.

Hobbs

Right let me just punch that out the power platform Centre of Excellence. Kristie, is something that Microsoft and I have been working on together, correct?

Reid

Absolutely.

Hobbs

Just give me your take on it, if you would.

Reid

Yeah, I'll say with the COE, you know, organisations stand up COEs all over the place, right? What I think is different about this. And I often think of it as a centre of enablement, as opposed to excellence, because that's really the goal is to enable development, innovative development. And I think it's a huge cultural shift from what organisations think of traditionally. And if that culture shift is not led from the top, if there aren't leaders within the organisation saying that we need to change how we build applications and any other process automation that we have within the organisation. If they aren't stating that, then it's bound to just end up in the same cycle that all other development has been done for all time there right?

Hobbs

Ryan you’ve drawn our attention to the fact that Power Apps is embedded in Microsoft Teams. Why is that important? When you use this expression, no cliffs, what does that mean?

Cunningham

Those are two great questions that are related, but ultimately distinct. Power Platform embedded in Teams is crucial, because especially over the last year, year and a half, hundreds of millions of people are living in Teams as their workplace. And a lot of our processes in business have moved to this frame that we're talking to each other in right now, being able to bring business process applications into that frame, both built by amateurs, and delivered by professionals, is just really crucial to continuing to adapt to the conditions of remote work and hybrid work that we find ourselves in now and will for some time. No cliff says a moniker is connected to that idea, but really to this idea of moving from the simple to the sophisticated. And a challenge you've seen with low-code platforms of the past is that they would be great for a certain set of use cases in the very long tail. But when you hit a limit of sophistication, or a limit of scale, that would often feel like a cliff, you know, and those solutions would need to be completely rebuilt or moved outside of the low-code environment and re-done by a professional, which really sacrifices a lot of the value of getting started and low-code from the beginning. And so when we talk about no cliffs, we really talk about that incremental scalability of sophistication, the ability to just start with something very simple built by a citizen developer, but then through individual components, be able to upgrade that solution to much more robust sophistication, still in the low-code world. But to be able to bring a component built by a developer, you know, either a data source maintained by a professional or a UX component built by a developer and react, plug it into the low-code world, and not have to throw out or give away all the great benefit that had been created up to that point.

Reid

So adding on to that, Ryan, I think one important message for development teams is that we are not replacing the need for developers with these types of applications. We are empowering citizen developers or whatever you want to call those business users to create their base use case, and then the developer of can still come in behind them and expand that sort of an enterprise solution.

Hobbs

So where Kristie are you most proud of seeing this work well?

Reid

Yeah, honestly, I'm gonna use EY as the example. So we use the power platform in three different ways. Obviously, we're developing and implementing tools for our customers. That's what we've talked about to date. But we're also using it internally. First of all, just again, back to the customers, we're building a lot of our platforms that we then managed services for our customers with on top of power platform, so really making sure that we are being as efficient and effective for our customers as we can be, as they outsource pieces of their business to organisations like EY. The other thing is that we actually have a whole programme, it's called the collaborative automation platform or cap for short. That is really encouraging all EY employees to submit ideas of how we can automate or streamline business processes. And this group is responsible for finding developers to build out those applications or automate those processes so that we start gaining efficiencies internally. And the pairing of the idea and younger people who really want to learn new skills within our organisation to make our lives, my life specifically, easier, and then save time has been really, really powerful.

Hobbs

Hey Ryan, what are the use cases that you often cite?

Cunningham

There's a number of places where power ups continues to sort of pop up, whether it's in industries or different types of uses, but a lot of them come down to these common conditions where a really specific and tailored process is necessary to get the job done. And there just isn't off the shelf software available for it, you know, whether that's operating heavy machinery way off the grid for a manufacturing process, whether that's, you know, being somebody repairing a wind turbine or an elevator or an elevator shaft, somebody inspecting, you know, whether a product was delivered on time or whether a facility is clean to operate. You know, there's so many of these things in, in business, and in operating companies that have traditionally really suffered from a lack of bespoke software, you know, many of them still based on pieces of paper and clipboards or much more manual implementations of technology, being able to really rapidly modernise those is not only saving a lot of money for customers, and improving their efficiency, it's just making the lives of people doing those jobs better all the time. And to be able to have those people be a participant in improving that experience. Is just really cool across the board.

Hobbs

Let's just take a step back here, because this is actually quite radical, what you're talking about is unlocking untapped human capital, you know, releasing a huge amount of value within a business, it's almost, if you like lurking in unexpected corners, Kristie, to get there, I guess, you almost require an emotional encouragement to get people to step up in the first place. This is a very different way of talking to groups of people, I imagine, isn't it?

Reid

Yeah, absolutely. And really, what I think the mindset needs to be is putting humans at the centre of that design, we actually have a strategy that we've been we've had in place here for a while called transformation realised. And that's one of those core values. The other core value that I think really supports what Ryan and his team are doing is innovation at scale and technology at speeds. So that's what we're talking about right is being able to rapidly create applications that can also be rolled out to entire organisations, as opposed to just efficiencies that can be gained by individuals. Part of that whole concept is really around design thinking principles, and how do you gather ideas from people without sitting down like you do traditionally and saying, ‘What do you want?’, right? A lot of times, they don't know, until you get those creative juices flowing, and really get them thinking about what we can do to make our lives better.

Cunningham

I would love to pick up on that, Kristie, because you're so right, that, you know, really what's going on here is not just a change in how software is built by bits and coding. It's also a change in how humans go about the process. You know, we're guilty, sometimes in technology of being very tech centric. And assuming that expertise is only technical expertise. The truth is, it takes a lot of expertise to know how to efficiently process a loan application or a lot of expertise to know how to efficiently operate a piece of heavy machinery. And our methods for extracting that expertise traditionally have been very limited, right? Because these two worlds can't actually work in the same set of tools in classic software development, you have to spend a whole bunch of time figuring out what would be a better business process. And then trying to put that in the heads of software engineers and hoping that something good comes out the other side. And part of what's really transformational in power platform is you can actually have these people start to work on the same page, and work together and bring their expertise together. It doesn't make either one of them less necessary. It just makes the way they interact, much more efficient. And that's part of what's really transformational here in low code.

Hobbs

Ryan, what I think is interesting that first off as a young man, as you were named product lead for this, the way that you approach the marketplace with Power Apps, coincidentally through COVID-19 looks like you actively sought to create a new community of young people, you know, you ran a weekly challenge with prizes through social media hashtag made it with Power Apps, then there was the Microsoft power break sweepstake, people posting photos, GIFs and stories and so on. I mean, you've really approached this from a different point of view from what I can see online.

Cunningham

Well, I'm flattered by your compliment of considering me young, I'll take that. But look, I think I think a lot of these things converge on the same ultimate movement of what's going on. You know, there are a lot of people in the workforce today. Many of them young, many of them not who have just a radically different personal technology experience, you know, as you call it out at the top of the call. We all walk into work every morning with an amazing set of apps we use on our phones and our other devices in our personal lives that are all beautifully designed and constantly updated and globally relevant. And so people's tolerance for technology in the workplace, you know in their expectations of what their jobs will provide them has gone way up recently, right? And on top of that, you have a whole generation of workers who are used to solving things for themselves, and getting their hands dirty and creating their own solutions to problems. And then behind all of that you have an incredibly social community driven workforce, right? If you can bring those things together involve a community in solving their own problems, to make their jobs feel better and feel more like their personal lives. You've hit a nerve with people that it really resonates with them today. And that's certainly true for the new generation entering the workforce. I think at some level, it's true for all of us in our expectations of how we want to think about our jobs.

Hobbs

Kristie, how did EY and Microsoft go about training these citizen developers, I see you've got App In a Day training to build an application in 4 to 6 hours, you stage hackathons as well, don't you?

Reid

Yes, the App in a Day training is very popular. So this is hands-on keyboard training, this isn't kind of listening to the philosophy or watching someone else do this work. So Microsoft offers this, anyone can go on and take that themselves. But what we've learned is that it's much more impactful to organisations if the experience or the app that they're building is tailored to their business, and it speaks to the audience. The hackathons are also really, really great, because what they allow is in one week, people bring their ideas into these hackathons. And they build out their own application with the help and assistance of other experts in the room.

Hobbs

Ryan how do you feel about how EY is leading on this, because they are a first mover with Microsoft of the Big Four, in setting up these dedicated teams to help you with where you are, I mean, these are massive funnels now that are being provided to your Business Centre, right?

Cunningham

When and it's absolutely mutually beneficial. And by mutually I mean, in all three ways for Microsoft, for EY and for customers of Microsoft and EY. You know, at the end of the day, we're building a software platform, but that is only as good as it can be put into action for customers and actually solve problems. And that's where EY, you’re spot on, is not just a first mover, but is really at the vanguard of what can be done with low code at scale, for organisations that you know, as Kristie called out earlier, have been super impressed with how EY has adopted this not only internally within EY, and also individually within their customer base, but also now at sort of a repeatable level, building solutions, a top power platform that that address industry needs and can go faster across, you know, a whole range of customers. Just really incredible innovation holistically there, both internally and externally that has been a big boost to a lot of mutual customers.

Hobbs

Kristie how do people feel when they've started to do this, and they've been successful within these organisations that you see and how the other people around them react to their success?

Reid

You know, I think it's really exciting for them, I look back 10 or 15 years ago, when you would get picked for a big ERP implementation or a CRM implementation and get chosen to be on that team. But those are large and long projects. These are kind of immediate rewards, right. And you can get recognised very quickly for the impact that you individually can have. And I think that's exciting. This is no longer I get sent off to a training and I may or may not be relevant to the job that I do. But I take this training, and I can decide what to do and how to make my lives and those are the people that I work with better.

Hobbs

You know Kristie many of the podcasts that we've done, have featured senior leaders arguing that the future of in particular tax departments is to hire science and math graduates, because the technology and the big data are becoming more and more important. Am I correct in assuming that that is not relevant to what you're talking about with us today?

Reid

The data scientists and those types of roles, while they are very important organisations, I again want to re-emphasise the data governance model and strategy, which those individuals are probably using as well. These tools are much more impactful and add a lot more value to the business when they can use actual business data. So this needs to be the first thing that organisations work through.

Hobbs

Ryan I imagine not only can this be used as a way to identify original practical thinkers in an organisation, but it must go some way to improving retention. If staff feel they're being engaged and they're creating change whilst acquiring new skill sets. I mean, this must be very powerful. If you look at what people say they want from an employer.

Cunningham

You're right. It's a very insightful conjecture, but actually the satisfaction of end users, not the makers, but the end users of Power Apps using those apps is actually quite high compared to standard business applications. And part of that is because, you know, you can you can assume that an app built in Power Apps was built with a lot of knowledge and sensitivity for the needs of that worker and when it's really tailored to what that person needs and it's making their life better, in part because it was built by or helped by somebody who shares their role, then that piece of software is going to be much better received than any other piece of software that was sort of forced upon them. And it's not only going to make the person that participated in the building feel better about it, but it's actually gonna make everybody using it feel like they're using something that was made for them and by them in a way. And so we see that in the in the SAT numbers in a really clear way that those apps that are highly tailored and customised for a particular need, everybody's getting a satisfaction benefit out of it. And you can, you can clearly extrapolate that to happier employees, more productive employees and better retained employees over time.

Hobbs

You know, Kristie, this is obviously a relatively new project, a big project, but relatively new for both of you do you already have real world examples of how this has transformed businesses within the EY sphere?

Reid

Yeah, the application that I'm most proud of is a great example of a concept that came from the business. And then we transform this into a really robust application. So this was specific for an oil and gas company that we work closely with, they have operations centres out in their fields that monitor and service assets such as wells, compressors, batteries, etc. Previously, they received any data that they had on what was going on with those assets from disparate spreadsheets, typically on a daily basis, if that. And then people had to parse through those spreadsheets and determine where to spend their time. So we started consolidating those spreadsheets into Power BI reports to first visualise the information, which was helpful, but it has added a tonne of value, because they weren't able to action on it very quickly. So we developed a power app that now gathers and displays the information that those resources need in real time, so that the field personnel can focus on the assets that need immediate attention. And more importantly, they can determine the best route to get to those assets, which is saving them dangerous driving time, because you know, they're out in these fields. So we have already measured a significant decrease in downtime of those assets and efficiencies, which has led to a lot of value to the organisation.

Hobbs

Sadly, we're almost at a time. Let me ask you both one final question. I don't know, with the current acceleration in the pace of change, that any of us know what things will look like in five, let alone 10 years. But what's your hunch? Where do you think citizen developers within an organisation could lead us, Ryan?

Cunningham

Well if you if you look to Gartner, you know, they're predicting that almost more than 60% I believe, of enterprise software development will happen in the low- code category over the next four to five years. So the majority of development will shift to using this type of toolset in some way that feels very bold to people that are sitting in an organisation that isn't necessarily embracing low-code or Power Platform yet. But if you look at some of the customers that Kristie and I have worked with, that have already today 1000s of Power Apps in production in their environments, and 1000s of people working on them, and 10s of 1000s of people benefiting from them. That seems like a logical extension of where we're at today. You know, if we're really going to digitally transform at scale, in a short amount of time, we have to make citizen development a prominent part of the story. And there are organisations that are already well on that road.

Hobbs

That is a phenomenal prediction, Kristie.

Reid

Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that I'm really looking forward to is understanding how machine learning and artificial intelligence will lead into the development of better, more impactful, more valuable applications throughout an organisation because a lot of times customers don't know where to look to find that value. And so I think, again, back to having the right data in the hands of the right people and having tools that kind of analyse that data for those individuals is really going to spawn a whole new chain of new applications that we probably hadn't even thought of.

Hobbs

Kristie Reed principal at EY and Ryan Cunningham Microsoft’s General Manager for Power Apps. This has been a really great conversation. Thank you both.

Cunningham

Thank you, Simon. This has been a good way to open the week with some great enthusiasm for what we're doing here. I appreciate it.

Reid

Ryan, it's always amazing to hear insights, really appreciate your perspective. And Simon, thank you so much for facilitating this discussion.

Hobbs

For more information, visit EY.com/Microsoft. A quick note from the attorneys. The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organisation nor its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time in which they were made. I'm Simon Hobbs. I hope you'll join me again for the next edition of the EY podcast, EY and Microsoft, your digital world realized

Presenters

Kristie Reid

EY Americas Microsoft Business Applications Leader

Ryan Cunningham

Speaker, EY-Microsoft Tech Directions

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Episode 2

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40m 2s

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EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

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Empowering employees to create business applications

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Kristie Reid

Ryan Cunningham

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