Hands-On to Hands-Free: Empowering Operations Teams through AI and Automation

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from New Orleans in the United States. In Louisiana, he works at Shell as a lead power platform developer. He's just been featured in a brand new book called All Hands on Tech. We'll put links in the show notes to that book. It's published by Wiley and it's going to be well worth the read. So I highly suggest, after listening to this episode, that you check that out. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Stevie.

Stevie Sims: 1:04
Thank you for having me, Mark, pleasure to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:07
Good to have you on. We passed like ships in a night at the recent Vegas conference. Right, we didn't get a chance to talk in person, but now we do, which I'm looking forward to.

Stevie Sims: 1:18
Yeah, same here. Yeah, pleasure to connect and get to know more about you and everything low-code, no-code, and you know further evangelize. This is a development journey and digitalization journey that we're on, so excited to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:32
I like it. Tell us about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Stevie Sims: 1:36
Oh man, what a combination of those things. Right, because there's so much intertwined Food. Like you said, I'm from New Orleans, so a lot of great food culture here. I do enjoy to cook. I love to make gumbo, jambalaya, all the Cajun traditional dishes. Outside of cooking, I really enjoy sushi. I think most of the time I can imagine that I cook a great steak better than most restaurants. So typically if I'm dining out it's something like sushi. That's my favorite.

Stevie Sims: 2:08
Fun love the outdoors, love to get outdoors and spend so much time in front of these computers developing and working the week in the technology role. So any chance I can to do anything outdoors with the family Two beautiful kids, steven and Sadie. Beautiful girlfriend, jessie. Like you said, we live in New Orleans. I like to do all kinds of fun activities like tailgating, lsu game, spend time outdoors and so, yeah, that's a little bit about me. Is gumbo hot? Yeah, it's a warm soup. I guess it's the best way to describe it for listeners that don't have any context or clues as to what it is. It's a combination of sausage and chicken, but it's roux-based, so traditionally you would make it's roux-based. Traditionally you would make it with a flour-based roux and then add things like onions, celery, bell peppers, known as the trinity, cook it down with a bunch of chicken stock and it creates a large pot of soup, but referred to locally as gumbo.

Mark Smith: 3:14
I can remember the first time I had it I was a teenager and it was at a restaurant in new zealand. It was a louisiana inspired restaurant and I ordered it, not knowing what I was getting myself into, and when I ate it my face was on fire and I like literally put my finger in it because I'm like, is this actually burning me hot, like physically, or is it actually just the spices? It was just the spices. It was intense man, certainly a shock. Let's get on to how you got into tech. Like, what was the starting point? Were you in another career? Did you come into it? How did tech get on your radar?

Stevie Sims: 3:52
Yeah, for sure, and I've told my story a few times on other podcasts and, you know, everywhere I get a chance to because it's it very much speaks to the opportunity to upskill and reskill and, you know, get involved in this digital transformation journey. For me, like you said, I've been working in the show for almost 12 years, but most of that time was spent in operations. So worked in the field, turning valves, hard hat, no mix goggles in the field, turning valves, hard hat, Nomex goggles in the field, climbing towers Wow, you know. And just pursuit of being the best chemical operator for the company at the time I was working for. So that was my goal. And then I had an opportunity to get involved with doing some turnaround and major project planning. Doing some turnaround and major project planning so, if you can imagine, there's just tons of data that goes into you know all the different things that go into a turnaround plan or execution of. You know a major scope of work. And so I can remember early on it was, you know, just pulling documents into folders and getting better and more savvy at document management and storage. And I can remember doing things like you, things like learning how to do things in Excel.

Stevie Sims: 5:02
I was the type of person that, in 2019, I had never saved a spreadsheet before. I was very new, very much the person that was clicking on each row to try to resize them. I had no idea you can click a bunch of them and resize at the same time. So very early on, I was building small programs to help make things more efficient. And I remember where I was. It was July 3rd 2021, I believe. I had a person show me VLOOKUP and I was moving a bunch of data from one spreadsheet to another and he walked up and he was like what are you doing? Let me show you how to use this formula. And then that was really like a pivotal moment, uh, on my digital transformation journey, because it showed me that, hey, I can go learn new skills in excel. I could really make what I'm doing more efficient and I could just continue to combine those things. So just went on this journey to get really good at excel, uh, with macros and conditional formulas and everything I could do to build dashboards in Excel.

Stevie Sims: 6:02
And then fast forward a couple months. South Louisiana experienced a large hurricane, hurricane Ida, in the month of August 2021. And so I can remember asking a colleague hey, what can I do to get better at excel and building these dashboards and programs in excel? And they kind of introduced me to power bi. I never even heard of it at the time in 21. So, uh, started to learn a little bit about power bi.

Stevie Sims: 6:29
Early august of 21, hurricane ida hits and if you can imagine that, it's just tons of jobs, tons of things to capture, tons of data, tons of moving parts. And so I came back to the site after evacuating and built what became the Ida Recovery dashboard, a Power BI dashboard that is talked about in the book, and it was just a way for the command center to manage and see tons of moving parts, lots of jobs, execution of work, planning of work, and it became really effective. And at that time I remember my manager at the time explaining that I was likely not going back to operations ever again. And then we would start to figure out how can we learn, how to be more effective with Power BI visualizations. But then we also realized that we're really good at displaying the data, but what about inputting the data?

Stevie Sims: 7:20
And so at the time we knew a little bit about Power Apps but hadn't really started that journey, and so we started to look at business problems and we started to realize that we could use Power Apps solutions to solve some of the data input problems that we're having.

Stevie Sims: 7:34
So I started building Power Apps for the turnaround group locally there, built my first several apps in 21, 22, and then started to expand what I was building for other organizations and departments, and so that led to you know just how can we solve business problems with these new tools and apps and automations that we're learning and, you know, went on later in 2023 to become part of our Blue Sky technology team, continued to, you know, work in that department but build apps locally, and then, a year later, joined our US Gulf Coast IDT team where most of my role is focused around building apps and automation for the business. So kind of progress from what you would traditionally think of as a citizen developer to someone that works with a Fusion team to help citizen developers grow and coach but then also build highly complex apps and automation to solve business problems. Complex absence and automation to solve business problems Because as you build things and you download all that are possible, people realize what else could be done with the tools and the technology.

Mark Smith: 8:46
Yeah, this is such an interesting story and I have so many questions popping in my mind. So let me ask. So you're working with Power BI. You wanted an input method and Power Apps became that. Can you remember? How did you discover Power Apps? How did that get onto your radar?

Stevie Sims: 9:03
Yeah, I think honestly, just when I went on that Power BI journey obviously you're going to Google and you're going to YouTube and you're going to your local center of excellence and so you're reading about things that are part of Power Platform I can remember a few of us had started to do Microsoft Forms, gotcha, and the one hiccup there and it was like a local administrative level control was that we couldn't attach things. It was like whoa, you know, we can enter all this information but we can't take a picture. Or we can enter all this information but we can't attach a document. We're bound and limited what we could do in Microsoft Forms. So let's check out this Power App, right. And so if you think about something like Hurricane Ida, where you're displaying data about a bunch of things that are broken, the data input side of that usually comes with a lot of information that you want the user to give good, clean, accurate data but also take pictures of, right. So the first app we built there locally was inspired by what we were learning from that incident, right? So we built an app that allowed people to find things that were broken, take pictures, who, what, when and where. If you can imagine it hits, submit and the person on the other side of that data message was part of reviewing and approving and or determining how much that job is going to cost.

Stevie Sims: 10:19
And then we just had, you know, sequential levels of approvals tied into that workflow. And then we realized that, hey, we have tons of paper document forms that are filled out. We now have the Power App Hammer and everything's a nail. So, yeah, it just became a cycle of what is the most valuable thing that we can go and digitize now that makes the most sense, right? What is going to bring the most efficiency? And then some of these large-scale events when you can shed hours or days off of the entire six week event. That equates to high value. And we're realizing we could do that very efficiently with minimal effort. And we were able to take someone like ourselves that had a lot of business savvy and understood the workflows and processes but now had upskilled himself with the tools and technology, and so you start to be, you know, still could build a really, uh, a magical recipe for bringing out value, right yeah.

Mark Smith: 11:16
So when you think about what you do now, do you think you're you about what you do as somebody that works with the power platform, or are you still more just as? No, I use power apps and I use power bi. Or do you take a more holistic approach to solution implementation and go? You know what? Here's just a bunch of tools. I'm going to pick and choose what things are going to create the outcomes that I need to drive.

Stevie Sims: 11:39
Yeah, for sure. I think you start with the business problem and the customer and you work on that story right. What are the pain points, where are we not efficient, where do we have gaps, where can we improve? And then you take that collection and you map that out and realize and then recognize what tools are available to get us to that solution or answer that problem as efficiently as possible. So not everything is going to require large language model generative AI or AI builder, but most things are going to be a little bit more than, let's say, a Microsoft form can handle, right.

Stevie Sims: 12:17
So, naturally, a lot of apps and automation. And then you know, most business users want to get some data insights from what we're doing. In that, you know, with that tool set and that technology, so I primarily build apps and automation. But also, you know, with that tool set and that technology, so I primarily build apps and automation. But I also, you know, will deliver Power BI's. But we have other people on our team that are more focused on that skill and the delivery of those analytic reports.

Mark Smith: 13:12
Do you have anything to do with the governance of your tenant or are you purely as a team? Does that maybe the center of your tenant? Or are you purely as a team? Does that maybe the center of excellence team or something like that, and you just are a consumer of the service they provide?

Stevie Sims: 13:26
yeah, a little bit of both. So we do have a a really strong, really good center of excellence governing body globally for an organization, uh. But I do sit locally as a data coach, or what they call the diy data coach. Uh, meaning that I I helpskill, help deliver upskilling events and boot camps and also help people guide through the application lifecycle management policies. And also I'm very familiar with the big rules, do's and don'ts so I can help guide and coach people, but not necessarily make or set the policies and regulations, but more of a subject matter expert on it.

Stevie Sims: 14:00
And I understand, you know what connectors we can use, which things we can't, what limitations that we have, what is available or what's not. And then I'm just a huge study of all things. You know what's coming down the pipeline from Microsoft with the features, so that I can help communicate to the business and the problems that, hey, we might not have a solution yet, but here's what's on the horizon, what's coming soon, and then how can we work with our center of excellence to see when this is really going to be available for consumer use Interesting.

Mark Smith: 14:33
I've interviewed a range of companies across the globe people from companies that have done large-scale deployments, and often the kind of people. Architecture is very much matrixed, if you would like, rather than a central. We have a global strategy right. They've got a central way they run things and they've been able to scale to a phenomenal amount of apps I think 50,000 apps was the number they gave me a couple of weeks ago and I think close to 100,000 power, automated automations and things running in the business. So they've massively scaled out and it's a global initiative. So is that how you think about as well? Do you have influence into how you think of using this technology as a whole, or are you more just focused on your local part of the world?

Stevie Sims: 15:28
Because I had so much success in my journey as a citizen developer.

Stevie Sims: 15:35
You know, most citizen developers build one or two apps for their local business or teams and it's, you know, this is great and my journey very much started out like that right, like we're building things to meet a business problem.

Stevie Sims: 15:49
But as we scaled that just on my personal journey or locally within the US Gulf Coast we began to see where the learnings and the things that we could take away from that could be driven up to the central teams to say, hey, look, this is what we're seeing, right? We understand we've grown the amount of citizen developers by you know X amount of people, but, you know, are we still growing the amount of data coaches and people locally to support that right? And how do we, you know, combat that as we see that more and more people will continue to learn and upskill and want to build their apps and automations for the business problems? You know how do we make sure that we have a healthy balance of coaches there to support that, to host a bootcamp and upskilling events, but then also just to be a line or level of governance to make sure that things are being followed correctly and that we are doing all the right things and being data secure and stuff like that. So we have been able to share those things up and also take learnings down from the Center of Excellence and help make our scaling locally even more efficient.

Stevie Sims: 17:01
Do you still consider yourself a citizen developer I struggle with that often, you know, and even for a while. The term you know, do-it-yourself, I don't know. I just I really feel like I'm. I don't know where I'm at really with that one Mark, I guess by definition. I'm not sure you know, when you think about the term DIY or do-it-yourself, at some point I stopped building apps and automations for myself and for my local team and I started building them for other organizations and so I don't see myself anymore as a DIY developer.

Stevie Sims: 17:43
I don't know if I still qualify as a citizen developer, but I definitely don't try to hold the title as a pro code developer or pro developer. I feel like I'm just really, really good at solving business problems and puzzles with the Microsoft Power Platform no code suite of tools, yeah, and the reason there is because I have so much knowledge and background in the business right and I like to feel like I have a pretty good set of communication skills and people skills and I can work with people and understand their business problems and how we marry a solution to tackle that. That's enabled me to be really effective in terms of speed of delivery and just the magnitude at which I can pop out products throughout the year. It's hard to replicate that, though, right.

Mark Smith: 18:30
So that was. My next question was how do you replicate what you do? How do you bring you know if you're a vortex happening and creating this massive change for good in the organization? How do other people get sucked into that and realize, oh my gosh, once again they might start as a citizen developer and then go on a journey and all of a sudden their career is not so much climbing towers anymore or out doing those type of things, right, they're out building solutions that are enabling the organization. How do you codify that into your organization structure?

Stevie Sims: 19:04
Right. So then you really got to get back to the basics of the definition of citizen development and you have to have some top-down leadership buy-in as well. Right, and early on. And not to say it's totally gone away. But we got resistance in the fact that, like, hey, we don't want our engineers, our mechanical and electrical engineers, our rotating equipment engineers, building DIY products, and so then I would question, like, okay, if I walk into an office room or meeting room and I see your reliability engineer managing the meeting from a whiteboard physically on a wall, and I understand that that person spends X amount of hours updating that whiteboard, and I pause there and I upskill this person to be able to manage that data from a power BI, do we now shift the energy that that person was having into being able to focus more on his or her reliability engineering role? Right, and it's the same thing like with a safety professional, right?

Stevie Sims: 20:02
We have people that are spending X amount of hours updating charts and graphs and PowerPoint for the fact of being able to display that data in less time in a field being a safety personnel person where their attention is most required. And so, hey, how can we upskill these people to take on some of these small tasks and upskill and learn some of these tools so they could be more effective in their roles. Right, not to say we need people in every organization just yet becoming subject matter experts on apps and automation, but you need to, for surely, encourage and empower people to start learning these tools, because you can take somebody with that business savvy and upskill them to the point where not only can they build tools and features that bring value to their organization and teams, but they can also help foster the growth of other people that are going to be interested, because it's not for everybody, right, yeah, yeah. So you've got to get back to the basics of that citizen developer mindset, for sure.

Mark Smith: 21:08
How has that message landed? Because you just gave me a light bulb moment, which is, you know, take the safety officer, we give them a bunch of equipment. They have high-vis gear, they have hard hats, there's safety goggles, they have, you know, hard boots, all that kind of stuff, and we think of this as tools that they need to do their job effectively. And for some reason, in so many jobs around the world, we've separated out your need to be able to interface or work well with some software right to enable you, and, I think, a whiteboard in intricate detail and you know, on some mine site out the wazoo and it's and I ask and I go, what happens if a storm came through and wiped out your port-a-com unit? That you're sitting in there, you know, and, yeah, all that data would be gone because that's the only copy that's there.

Mark Smith: 22:12

And I see this resistance in organizations where we, well, you know, if they get into it, will we lose that member in our team. You know, do they now become Steve and become a full-time? You know maker slash, you know fusion team participant slash, really developer of solutions for the organization. But what I really you know and correct me if I'm wrong what I thought you were saying there is that. Not everybody goes your way. There'll be those that do it, that just are using it. You know they're going to have that wrench, they're going to have that hammer to do what they need to do, but they're not going out and building something new with it. They're using it to maintain what they're doing. And then there's going to be people like you, which I assume that you hope to find more of that have got massive organization, depth of knowledge of how you as a company run, and then can apply the tech to enhance everybody's life.

Stevie Sims: 23:05
Yeah for sure. And I met a wonderful lady at the Power Platform Conference named Aja Darden, who works for State Farm, and she described a concept on stage at the executive experience that my personal manager had proposed to the business locally as well, which was let's take people like that reliability engineer that I mentioned, that is, learning these tools. That's really, really effective, with being able to use the tools to be way more effective with reliability engineering, what would the concept look like to ring fence some of these all-star developers who have that itch, that have the very business background. We don't expect that they'll all leave their business function roles and become part of IT. Don't expect that they'll all leave their business function roles and become part of IT. But what would it take or what would it look like if we had them ring-fenced for several months where they could really advance, build products and then cycle back through their organizations with this three-month boot camp, if you wanted to call it that, where most of their time was focused on building apps and automation that very much supported their business functions, and then they come back as a sitting subject matter expert in their departments and if somebody in the group has a pain point, they have the know-how and the experience to be able to describe that, hey, there's these tools over here that could really solve these pain points of business problems. I think we've seen that in our upskilling events and our boot camps. Right, let's imagine that we have 20 people that attend. We might have two that build their first app. We have about 12 that realize that, hey, we have problems and we now know that there are people out there in organizations and tools that can help solve it. So you get a lot of benefit right, that you can't always measure.

Stevie Sims: 25:01
Not everybody is going to take the leap and do the career swap that I did.

Stevie Sims: 25:05
Right, the things that I've done for Shell far outweigh, you know, whatever value delivery I could have done being the best operator in a chemical plant, and so there was a loss there momentarily, but I think it was for a good investment and I think we'll continue to see that.

Stevie Sims: 25:28
I hope that we do. I think that's the evolution of where we're going right. We'll continue to move the business and the IT functions closer together and we'll continue to merge into this fusion organization right, where we have people like myself that came from the business that work with IT, but we have people in IT that are very savvy on the business problems and we can help build and create solutions to solve whatever problems that are still left out there. Right, and we'll continue to just you know, get new technology and toys and and make it faster and more efficient and, um, and we're seeing that now with things like ai builder and several proof of concept use cases where we're utilizing generative ai. Yeah, and you know who knows where we'll be two years from now on this journey, but it's fun.

Mark Smith: 26:21
One of the questions I get from large-scale deployments is that we're worried that if we've got all these people building apps and solutions, that they're going to duplicate effort. How do we make sure there's not? You know, bob over there is building a solution that Susie over here is building, and they're actually building the same thing. They're in a different department in the business, it's the same thing and we're now paying twice to have the same thing built. Or the delta of us is so small. Could we have a single solution with two forked versions of it? Maybe, but from a tech maintainability you know, technical debt, things like that how do we make sure that we're not duplicating efforts? Have you come up with that problem, have you faced it and how do you address it?

Stevie Sims: 27:02
Yeah, for sure, a lot of things to touch on there, I think for us locally. When I first met my boss, one of the things I was working on on the prior role was a tool or an app with some workflow automation that would allow people to enter in ideas, and these ideas were, at the time, intended to be focused on the department that I was in, which was the technology role. So your buddy could have had a wireless transmitter idea or he could have had some robotics idea, whatever combination of. I was hoping people would also enter in ideas for apps and automation. Right, and you think of it not as an idea tool necessarily, because people aren't going to have ideas, but they're going to have pain points and business problems, right? Yeah, so what that helps serve isn't as an entry tool where you can understand okay, we already have an app over here at another site or another department that does like.

Stevie Sims: 27:57
You talked about something very similar. Or we have a global app, or we have a point C solution that does this, and we really don't want to spend a whole lot of time to digitize it for a small niche product. So I say that to say that the more you can be accountable for all the things that are going on, without limiting that creative mindset that comes with a Canvas Power Platform app, or you don't want to overgovern this model that limits people to be creative and get in there and get their hands dirty and try to explore some of these tools. But you also want to make sure you're efficient, not only in terms of things like technical debt, but you also, you know, want to make sure you're efficient not only in terms of things like technical debt, but just in the mindset of computing all of the things that go into. You know the cost of, you know keeping up with all this data. So, you see, you know other companies and third-party solutions out there that are offering these insights and accountability to things like, hey, you know, this is how often this one data source is tapped every morning for these X amount of Power BI reports. Or we have X amount of apps that are doing very similar things and how can we combine those to be more efficient? Or how can we just be accountable to see how many users are actually using these tools and functionality?

Stevie Sims: 29:08
So, for us, locally, I feel like we've been in pretty good control of that because we kind of have our ways of working set up that if a person has an idea or a business pain point, they enter an entire triage funnel.

Stevie Sims: 29:23
It gets assessed, it gets assigned somebody to do some more investigation work. We stop and check that something already isn't in the works or hasn't already been developed, that something already isn't in the works or hasn't already been developed, and we get a very good understanding of the data architecture and what it's going to impact and what sources of data they're pulling. And then how are we going to manage the solution? And then how do we celebrate what's been built in order to broadcast that back out to the community so that somebody's sitting around thinking, hey, it'd be great to have an app that does XYZ here's an announcement on one that does that and also could possibly inspire somebody else to use the same similar technology or functionality to solve another problem. I think it's a growing problem. Like you said, it's going to continue to scale, but it's very important as well that we stay very accountable to the things we're building, that we're not overlapping anywhere.

Mark Smith: 30:19
How do you think about access to data in your role, so, in an organization and I just quickly looked up founded in what was it? 1907. So you're a 117-year-old company and part of that means there's a lot of data and a lot of systems. And we move into a world of AI now where you know, for AI to be really effective, it needs data, it needs grounding on data to you know to bring its best to bear. And, with that in mind, you you know systems like whether it be sap or any number of of different siloed applications that you'd have across the organization. How do you kind of you know if someone comes to you and and you go, well, where's the data and that's, it's an sap or something. How do you handle that kind of? You know the connectivity story to the data sets so that you can light them either into Power BI or into a Power App or something like that. How do you handle those type of use cases?

Stevie Sims: 31:20
Yeah, for sure, and I think this is, you know, managing. A lot of energy and thoughts go into this at the global level, like, how do we continue to produce things like data catalogs, right? How do we make sure that people are connected to a single source of truth, yes, how do we make sure we're not replicating and duplicating data and how do we ensure that that data is accurate? And so you know large effort and energy that goes into. You know doing things like pulling things like multiple data sources into single data lakes, and then you know then presenting that back.

Stevie Sims: 31:55
Obviously, we're a huge corporation, so tons of different organizations and lines of businesses. How do you ensure that people that want to tap into some data are going to the right place, that have some visibility to your data catalogs, and then how do you set up a system that allows them to request and get granted the permissions that they need because of their persona or whatever their activity might be right. So I think we do a really great job. You know, just always, you know we'll continue to need to improve there, especially when you talk about things like generative AI and grounding prompts and stuff like that, and so a lot of focus on data cataloging, but then also, how do we continue to clean up our data and how do we continue to make our data effective and where are the gaps there? What's limiting us from continuing that journey because of data quality issues, et cetera? So it allows people a lot of energy, or focus on that, for sure.

Mark Smith: 32:59
I like it. Stevie, it's been great having you on the show and so interesting talking to you. What's the name of that book again that people need to go buy from Amazon?

Stevie Sims: 33:07
So All Hands on Tech, AI Powered Citizen Developer Revolution.

Mark Smith: 33:12
Nice, nice.

Stevie Sims: 33:12
Yeah so, ian, citizen developer revolution, nice, nice. Yeah so, ian Barkin, tom Davenport, check it out. A couple of great stories from my company, but also a lot of people in the low code no code space that have written some incredible stories and proud to be part of it and continue to network and grow and learn more about how people are utilizing these tools and upskilling and reskilling and doing all those things and the sense of evangelizing this digital revolution that we're on. So, yeah, it's been exciting, it's been a fun, wild ride, but curious and excited to see where it goes next.

Mark Smith: 33:50
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.