Raw Data By P3 Adaptive 99% is the New Zero, w/ Microsoft Director Shelly Avery
Shelly Avery is a member of Microsoft's Healthcare Solution Acceleration Team, helping Healthcare customers digitally transform their businesses. As you listen to this conversation you'll realize, as we did, that Shelly knows the tech AND the human side of the tech very well!
References in this episode:
Tom Scott - There is No Algorithm for Truth Episode Timeline:- 4:30 - The high value of customization and integrations in BI in the current era of Middleware, Microsoft Teams and how good it is at connecting humans, The speed of Innovation at MS (some of which is directly customer influenced)
- 32:10 - Microsoft's FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability) is revolutionizing the rather large problem of interoperability in the Healthcare space
- 49:30 - Microsoft Viva is born from My Analytics, Rob gets into Headspace, using data for nefarious purposes
Episode Transcript:
Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guest is Shelly Avery. We've had a lot of Microsoft employees on the show and Shelley continues that tradition. The reason we have that tradition is because there are so many interesting things going on at Microsoft these days. And Shelley brought some super fascinating topics and perspectives to our conversation. For instance, she has a deep background and history with the Teams product for Microsoft. And so we got into the question of what is it that makes Teams so special? I really, really, really appreciated and enjoyed her answer.
Rob Collie (00:00:31): And given her current focus on the healthcare industry and on health solutions, we talked a lot about how Microsoft's business applications and Power Platform strategy is actually a perfect fit for what's going on in healthcare today. We did touch on some familiar themes there, such as the new era of middleware, how a 99% solution to a problem is often a 0% solution to a problem. How even 100% of a solution itself is a moving target. And my only slightly partisan opinion that may be Microsoft's competitors in all of these spaces should just save themselves the trouble and tap out now. We talk about the virtual teams that exist on the Teams team at Microsoft. Sorry, I just had to work that into the intro.
Rob Collie (00:01:17): I learned a new acronym, FHIR, which is the new upcoming regulatory and technological standard for data interoperability in the healthcare space. We talk a little bit about Veeva. Have you heard of Veeva? I hadn't. It's one of those technologies with a tremendous amount of potential to be used in a positive way and maybe a little bit of potential to be misused if we're not careful. And that conversation was also the excuse for our first ever sound effects here on the Raw Data Podcast. We spared no expense. An iPhone was held very close to a microphone. All in all, just a delightful conversation. I smiled the whole time. We also had the ever upbeat and awesome Krissy in the co-pilot's chair for the duration of this conversation. And with that completely unintentional rhyme out of the way, let's get into it.
Announcer (00:02:04): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?
Rob Collie (00:02:11): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host, Rob Collie. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Welcome to the show. Shelly Avery, how are you doing this morning?
Shelly Avery (00:02:35): Hey guys, doing good today.
Rob Collie (00:02:37): Well, thanks so much for being here. Another brave soul, first time meeting us. You're willing to have it recorded. That's into the breach. I like it.
Shelly Avery (00:02:45): It's good to meet you guys. I'm happy to talk to you today.
Rob Collie (00:02:48): We brought Krissy today.
Krissy Dyess (00:02:49): How's everybody doing?
Rob Collie (00:02:51): How are you Krissy? I mean, it's earlier your time.
Krissy Dyess (00:02:53): It is early. Yeah. So normally we do these in the afternoon, but it's early. I'm enjoying the sunrise this morning.
Rob Collie (00:03:00): Oh, fantastic.
Krissy Dyess (00:03:00): Doing good.
Rob Collie (00:03:01): Yeah. A cup of joe, maybe.
Krissy Dyess (00:03:03): I don't drink coffee.
Shelly Avery (00:03:04): I've had two today.
Rob Collie (00:03:05): Shelly, I actually already noticed that. I had noticed before we started recording that the color of your coffee cup changed. That, yeah, she just hot swaps the coffee.
Shelly Avery (00:03:16): Travel mug to drop off the kids this morning and then real mug once I got back to the home office.
Rob Collie (00:03:22): So Shelly, why don't you tell us what you're doing these days. Give us your CV.
Shelly Avery (00:03:25): I am at Microsoft now. I am in a new role that Microsoft has created. I am on a team that is called the Healthcare Solution Acceleration team. And our job is to really help our healthcare customers digitally transform their businesses, hopefully using Microsoft technology. But I've been here five years. I started as a technical specialist, helping customers migrate from on-premise server base infrastructure to Office 365, Exchange and SharePoint in OneDrive. And then Microsoft Teams came around because it wasn't around. It didn't exist when I started, and I became a Microsoft Teams technical specialist. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved it.
Shelly Avery (00:04:12): Teams has really empowered the world to figure out how to do work different. It created lots of opportunities for people to create new ways of solving their business problems. And it was a lot of fun to be able to partner with our customers and really help them understand how technology can be an advocate for them and just help them do things faster and more efficiently and on their own terms. And so that was super fun, especially working with healthcare. I learned through that about some other features that Microsoft had, not that I didn't know, they didn't exist, but Power Platform, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and then later Power Virtual Agents.
Shelly Avery (00:05:00): And using those inside of the UI of Microsoft Teams to even further enhance what Teams does, which is communication and collaboration, but then putting apps, low-code, no-code apps, and BI and data at the fingertips of these individuals to really, really step up their game and how they're solving their business problems. It's just been super fun and I thoroughly enjoy it. And so taking all of that into my new role, specifically working with healthcare and trying to help them accelerate solutions in their organization to solve their business problems. I thoroughly enjoy what I do every day.
Rob Collie (00:05:41): Do you think that your recent background in Teams was a selection criteria for going into health? It would really seem to me like that strong basis in Teams is really quite an asset for you in the healthcare specific role.
Shelly Avery (00:05:55): Well, I of course would love to say yes. And I think it is for me, that's how I learned. It's a background that I feel like I'm an asset to my customers, but my new team is comprised of people from all different backgrounds. And so what our new team hopes to be is people who are deep in various different technology areas so that we can lean on each other's expertise when a solution isn't bound by Microsoft Teams. So maybe we need to create a bot in Azure and build it off of a SQL database and put it in Teams. And so we're crossing the entire Microsoft stack. And so, yes, I'm deep in Office 365 and Teams and getting much better into the Power Platform, but as soon as I need to build a bot in Azure, I'm like, "What, how do I do that?"
Shelly Avery (00:06:59): So I need that other person on my team who is deep in that area. We're here with you guys. I know y'all are deep in Power BI. We have data scientists on our team and experts in Power BI, which I am not that, but I leverage them because when I talk to my customers, they want to create dashboards and reports that they can have actionable insights on. And so I understand the use case or the problem they're trying to solve. And then I work with my data scientists on the team to help. We come together and bring our skills together to help the customer. So it's just a super fun team. We all geek out in our own area.
Rob Collie (00:07:38): Yeah. I mean, it is really a perfect little microcosm of what Microsoft is trying to do with the Power Platform in general. Isn't it? Years ago when they renamed, they Microsoft renamed the Data Insights Summit to be the Business Applications Summit, it wasn't really clear what was going on. There just seemed like one of those funky Microsoft renames. You know how Microsoft changes the acronyms for all you folks in the field, every 18 months, just for yucks. It seemed like one of those, but no, that wasn't it at all, right? There actually was a really long-term grand plan that was already clear behind the scenes there, that just wasn't really clear on the outside.
Rob Collie (00:08:18): And all of these technologies coming together, the low-code, no-code or rapid development, whatever you want to call it, right? All of these tools, they enable something to come to life that every single environment, every single customer is different and their needs are different. Their fundamental technological systems that they use, all their mind of business applications, all of those are different and unique. They're unique mix. Plus then you add in the unique challenges that are going on in their particular environment.
Rob Collie (00:08:45): You want something off the shelf, but at the same time, if it's not incredibly flexible, if it's not incredibly customizable, it's never ever, ever going to meet the needs of that reality. And I think Microsoft has one of the strongest long-term bets I've ever seen Microsoft make. And it's been really interesting to see it come into focus over the years.
Shelly Avery (00:09:06): I'm glad you see that and a lot of people do, but we have a lot of customers. I keep saying health because that's who I work with, that there are health care pointed solutions that are out there that have a single purpose and they are off the shelf. And they do usually do a great job at what they do, but they only do one thing. And we find that almost every application or SaaS that they subscribe to or purchase, has to be connected to data or systems or things like that. And then they have 50 different apps all connected to 50 different things, and it becomes complex. And you have service contracts and everything has to be managed. And so we are pushing that we have a turnkey solution.
Shelly Avery (00:09:54): We're actually saying the opposite. We have a solution that gets you 80, 85% of the way there, but then that last bit is fully customizable to make it exactly like you want. And so sometimes that's hard to tell a customer that, "Hey, you're going to pay for something and then you have to build it," or, "You have to pay someone else to help you build it." And they have to be able to see the benefit of that to keep costs down and reduce complexity and app sprawl is something that we see a lot. And so being able to streamline that is something that we definitely try to do and help our customers understand the benefit of.
Rob Collie (00:10:33): Sometimes 99% rounds to zero. You have a 99% solution to something, but you simply cannot do the last 1%. And a lot of cases, that's just a failure. I think a lot of off the shelf software, even if it got to 99% of what you need, which is a phenomenal number, it's still not doing it. Plus we also got to remember that the 100% target is also not static. Things change. Even if you're 100% today, your needs tomorrow are going to be different. The ability to customize, the ability to create new integrations and new applications, even if they're lightweight within your environment, is an ongoing must.
Rob Collie (00:11:16): I think approaching this as a platform while at the same time making that platform very humane, it doesn't require me to sit down and write C-Sharp every single time I need something new, that's just amazing. I think if you zoom back on all of this, it's almost obvious once you know what to look for. All of the individual systems that we buy, and this is even true of our business here at P3. We're, "Best of breed," in terms of all the line of business software that we've adopted. Best of breed, AKA, whatever we stumbled into at that particular point in time. All those little silos, those line of business silos are very competent. Maybe not excellent all the time, but they're very competent at what that silo is supposed to do.
Rob Collie (00:11:59): But an overall business environment, an overall team environment doesn't stop at those silos. It's like the whole thing. It's the whole picture. It's the whole organic total across all of those silos. That's where you live. You don't live in one of them. And so integration across them of various flavors. I think we're in this new second or third era of middleware right now. And Microsoft is just so, so, so well positioned in this game. I didn't see this coming. I just woke up one day and went, "Oh, oh my gosh. Look at what my old buddies are up to." Checkmate. It's been really cool to watch.
Shelly Avery (00:12:40): Yeah. It's been really awesome to be here and live it. Sometimes when you're in it, you don't see it happening. And then you look back and you say, "Wow, we've come a long way in the last three years or five years."
Rob Collie (00:12:52): Yeah. Let's talk about Teams a little bit more before we switch back into health.
Shelly Avery (00:12:57): Yeah, sure.
Rob Collie (00:12:57): I find the Teams phenomenon to be just fascinating, which is another way of saying that I missed it a little way, right? Back when I worked on the Excel team, every few years whenever office would finish a release, there'd be like this open season of recruiting. People could move around within office, like a passport free zone. You could just go wherever you wanted. I always struggled to get people who had never worked on Excel to come work on Excel. It was scary.
Rob Collie (00:13:24): They've been working on things like Outlook or Word or something like that. It's easy to be, "An expert user of Outlook." It's easy to be an expert user of Word. In other words, the difference between the 80th percentile user of those apps and the 99th percentile user of those apps, it's hard to even distinguish. You can't even really tell the difference between them and practical usage. That's not true for Excel though, right?
Shelly Avery (00:13:44): Right.
Rob Collie (00:13:45): An Excel expert is like a magician compared to an amateur. And so that was really intimidating, I think. That was the fundamental reason why people struggled to take the leap to come to the Excel team. They felt more comfortable where they were, but a pitch I always gave, which were about a 20% success rate, was data fits through a computer really well. A CPU can improve data. It's built for that. Whereas Outlook and Word, even PowerPoint, I've revised my opinion on all of these since then, but this is me in my early 30s. Going, all those other things, those are about ideas, and communication, and collaboration.
Rob Collie (00:14:25): And that's all human stuff. And human stuff doesn't really fit through a CPU all that well. It doesn't come out the other side, enriched in the same way that data does it. Hubris in hindsight, right? I said, "There's never an end to how the improvement that can happen in Excel." Whereas something like Outlook or Word, might be essentially nearing its end state. Then comes Teams, right? Teams is the kryptonite to that whole pitch. I hear myself back in the early 2000s, Teams is all about human interaction. I guess that's what it does.
Rob Collie (00:15:02): I guess, to me, it's this alien form, Teams has just exploded. People love it. It's everywhere. I mean, this is an impossible question to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because it's fun to do. What is it? Why are people so excited about Teams? For a while there, it's like SharePoint held a fraction of this excitement. It's in a similar spot, the hub for collaboration in the Microsoft ecosystem. It feels like Teams has said, "Here, let me show you what that really looks like."
Shelly Avery (00:15:36): Yeah. I'll do my best to try, but this is my opinion. I don't know what anybody else thinks, but I think it takes the best of the consumer world and the best of the enterprise or commercial world and puts it together all in one app. It has things that when you chat with somebody, it's like you're using a text message. So it's no different than, if you're an Apple user, you open your phone and you go to the green text message app or you go to the Teams app and it looks exactly the same. It has gifts and it has reactions, and you can put stickers and memes in there. And so it's super fun.
Shelly Avery (00:16:19): But then you take that enterprise and you can also share a OneDrive link or create a meeting or send someone an Outlook invite or whatever. So it takes that enterprise and mushes it with consumerism. And so it's like taking Facebook and LinkedIn and Office and SharePoint and smashing it all into one app. And so you can have fun with it. You can build relationships with your colleagues or even people external to your organization, but then you can also build presentations and dashboards and create, and even use the Power Platform from a low-code dev perspective, right inside of Teams.
Shelly Avery (00:17:02): It spans the spectrum of fun to developing brand new stuff. And so everybody can get something out of it and they can use it the way they want to use it for the purpose that they need to work on, whatever they're doing for the day. And so it can be great for various different people in various different ways.
Rob Collie (00:17:28): I love that answer.
Krissy Dyess (00:17:29): I have a different perspective. I came from a background of data and technical and all of that type of thing, but this Teams, really with everything transitioning to remote in a hurry over the last year, I feel like it really helps with a level of organization and communication and assets that you talked about, Shelly, to centralize all that because in a difference of data coming at you from many places, now we have communications, now we have remote teams.
Krissy Dyess (00:18:05): And I love, like you said, it is fun, it's interactive. Here's where I'm struggling a little bit with Teams. I love it, but what is proper Teams etiquette in terms of like meetings and conversations? For example, I'm having a meeting and I don't want to interrupt somebody, so I'm going to put it in the chat. But then sometimes people feel like, well, the chat is still a form of interruption. I see it as a form of participation. And so I think people are still learning how to embrace these tools.
Shelly Avery (00:18:38): Yeah. Well, I think that it also comes to culture.
Krissy Dyess (00:18:41): Sure.
Shelly Avery (00:18:41): And Microsoft has an amazing culture. We have been on a journey through Satya, our CEO, on really changing the culture of inclusivity and a growth mindset. And it's interesting when we interact with customers who don't have a very friendly and open culture. But I think you use it the way it works for you and for the people that you're working with and your culture. So if you're in a small team setting and it's friendly people, you should feel comfortable to use it the way that it makes you feel comfortable.
Shelly Avery (00:19:23): But if you're in a quarterly business review with executives, I mean, think about it. If you're going to lunch with your buddies, you're going to act different than if you're going to a formal dinner with executives, right? And so you use the technology in a way that you would use real life. And so if I'm going to lunch with my buddies, I'm going to be cutting up and giving them funny gifts and patting them on the back. And if I'm in a business meeting with executives, I'm going to have my best dress on and my polite manners. So I'm going to act that way in a meeting too.
Krissy Dyess (00:19:51): I totally agree with you. I've had the opportunity recently to work with the Microsoft team and I agree there's a completely different culture than what we see, even from my background, even from our culture, I mean, we're all friendly and stuff. Every organization does have their own culture and exactly what you pointed out, even within that organization, there are different levels and cadences.
Shelly Avery (00:20:13): Yeah, it's crazy. So I spent the last three years helping IT organizations deploy Microsoft Teams. And I did that in the midst of COVID, in healthcare. So when you say remote work overnight, literally help telecare organizations enable 35,000 individuals for Teams over a weekend. To the question about culture, it was very difficult for some of the IT organizations to say, "Well, what should we allow our users to do?" There's sensitivity that you can set on gifts in a team. You can say, do we want them to be explicit or PG-13 or PG or G?
Shelly Avery (00:20:58): And I had one organization that if there was anything to do with a gift that had to do with politics, that was seen offensive, because what if I sent you a Trump gift and you were a Biden person. I mean, how dare you do that? And so that company was very, very sensitive and they would only allow gifts at a G rating. And a G rating were like cartoons and stickers, where other organizations are like, whatever. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Shelly Avery (00:21:29): So there's definitely different cultures and different organizations across the country. And so luckily, there are the controls in the back end and the administrative section on those kinds of things. And then for data too, do you want data to be shared externally or do you want people to be able to chat externally or not? And who do they want to be able to chat with? So there's lots of governance and data protection controls in the background.
Krissy Dyess (00:21:58): And being a data person, what is really cool about Teams and all these things that you just described is on the backend, all of that stuff is just data. That's why you can control. That's why you can help your organization with these. And I think that's really cool. I am super excited about Teams. I was excited about Power Pivot in Excel, and I was excited with Power BI Desktop, and what you explained too, how it starts to integrate the Power Apps, the bots, all of that into this changing ecosystem of how we work, the ability to bring that from the top level all the way down to the frontline workers, to impact and drive actions, I am super excited about Teams. I can't wait to see how organizations learn more, how that they can adopt these tools, because I think there's so much that people just don't know because it is so new and it's a different way, just like Power BI was.
Shelly Avery (00:22:57): I'll give you an example about that. We have this one group inside of Microsoft, it's called the [SLATE 00:23:04] team. And you know how Microsoft is with making acronyms. I have no idea what SLATE actually stands for, but what they do is they work with customers who have a unique idea and they help them build low-code or apps inside a Teams. And they built this one app called the Company Communicator. Basically what it is, is it's like a mass texting app, where I can create a little message and push it out via chat or via a Team to everyone in the organization or to a subset of people.
Shelly Avery (00:23:39): And it created a cute little adaptive card where you could put a headline and a picture, and then a little message. After that got so popular, Microsoft built it into the product, right? It started from a customer, it went through a program. It was customer purpose built. Then it got so much organic growth through all of our customers loving this idea of pushing notifications. So we turned it into code and now it's in the product. I think that, that is so cool, how Teams is democratizing the ability for customers to influence product and future releases that now everybody in the world gets to take advantage of.
Shelly Avery (00:24:28): So that's another thing that I just, I love about it as a product, but also we call it the Teams team at Microsoft, is they're innovating so fast and I'm just a few months out of that role and I already feel behind. I just saw a blog with what's new in Teams in August. And I'm like, I need to go and read this to make sure I know everything that's new because they just come out with so much new stuff every month. And it closes the gap, Rob, you mentioned earlier, when a product's only 99%, it's really zero.
Shelly Avery (00:25:03): I think the bet on Microsoft is, it might be 99% today, but it's probably going to be 100% in a couple of months because we're innovating so fast. And your 99% today, isn't going to be your 99% in six months. And so it's a moving target, not only for the customer, but for Microsoft too. And so we want to catch up with features that are on the backlog, but the backlog just keeps growing and growing. And so the faster we can innovate and build these into the product, we will.
Rob Collie (00:25:33): I just feel like if you're watching a really high stakes chess match, which I never do, but imagine that you did, to the untrained eye, this is an even game. And all of a sudden, one of the chess masters just resigned, just tips the king over and says, "Yeah, I've lost." I just feel like as a software industry, we should just take a moment and say, "Hey, Salesforce, all your other, your SAP, do y'all just want to call it, you want to just tip your Kings over, save us all a lot of trouble." I don't even work for Microsoft and I'm looking at this going, "Oh, boy." Remember, I'm not paid to say this. I really think Microsoft has really, really, really dialed it in.
Rob Collie (00:26:16): I'd like to also go back to your answer about why Teams is so special. I think it was a perfect answer. Rewind 10 years, 11 years, I'm struggling to explain to people why this whole DAX and tabular data modeling thing that was only present at that time, only in the Excel environment, and only as an add in, it was, in some ways the most primitive exposure possible of this new technology. I was trying to explain to people why this was so special. And it was particularly difficult to explain it to people who had intimately known it's [4Runner 00:26:49], which was the analysis services multi-dimensional.
Rob Collie (00:26:52): And really, technologically speaking, there wasn't too much about this new thing that was superior. If you looked that gift horse in the mouth and examined its lines and everything, you'd be like, there's really not much different here or it's clearly better. Now it had one thing that was clearly better, which was the in-memory column oriented compression. And that was pretty sci-fi. That was pretty cool, but it wasn't the tech. It wasn't like one of these was able to make the CPU scream at 500% capacity or something like that. It wasn't that at all. It was that this new tech fit the way humans work so perfectly. It met the humans where they were, whereas the previous one forced the human world to bend to its will. The humans had to come to it and meet it where it was. And this is a very subtle and nuanced point.
Rob Collie (00:27:49): But in practice, it is everything. In practice, it means that a company like ours, that operates completely differently than the data consulting firms and BI professional services firms of the past, and really honestly, today, I think most firms are still operating that old way. We're a completely different species of a company. And we exist because these tools work a different way for the humans. And over and over and over again, this is why the ROI from Power BI is so insane when you use it the right way, when you really lean into it strikes. Your explanation about Teams, it echoed that for me. It's professional tool that fits the humans really well.
Rob Collie (00:28:36): And you don't typically talk about stuff like that. If you're a technology professional, those kinds of answers, you're always looking for some sort of more hardcore answer. It's capabilities. Look at the check boxes it's got on the box, right? This other description of it fits the humans really well, it's not a good sales pitch, but in reality, it's everything. It's a difficult thing to do, right?
Rob Collie (00:28:59): One of its chief strengths is also just, doesn't make a good sound bite or like, oh, okay. So now you have to wait and see it for yourself. You have to experience it. And I think that's what we've seen. Is that the people who've really leaned into Teams, they all have this surprised reaction, or they say, six to 12 months after really getting into it, as they describe how much they like it, there's this undertone of, "Yeah, it's really turned out to be amazing." You can tell that they didn't quite expect it. And now they're a convert.
Shelly Avery (00:29:31): Well, I think a lot of IT organizations, they push applications out and Teams to the masses is, oh, it's just another application that IT is forcing us to use. And they're resistant to change because the last app IT pushed out wasn't great. And then they finally get in there and they do what you and I are talking about. They chat in it, they text in it, they meet in it, they have fun in it. And then six months later, they're like, "How did I do my job without this?" They enjoy it. It's easy to use, it's very accommodating and friendly to different personalities and different work types. And it's so unique in the way that you and I and Krissy can all use it all day long, every day, and we use it completely differently, and yet we all have the same opinion of it, is it works great for me.
Rob Collie (00:30:30): That's the whole mark of a successful product. And one that spreads itself, right? It develops impassioned evangelists. Again, just like everyone else, I would not have seen that coming.
Shelly Avery (00:30:41): You were at Microsoft from an Excel Power Pivot perspective and you now are not, and have started your own business and they're successful in that. I know people that worked at Microsoft and literally quit Microsoft just to be a YouTube star on how awesome Teams is and all the cool stuff you can do with it, and they've made a living out of it because it's a product that does so much and it's never ending in the way that it can be used and how unique it is. It blows me away when I actually saw a gentleman who was at Microsoft as a product manager and I followed him on YouTube, and then one day he said, his YouTube post was, "I am retiring from Microsoft." And he was younger than I am. I'm like, "How are you mean you're retiring?"
Krissy Dyess (00:31:32): I followed the same story that you did, Shelly. I know exactly who you're talking about. What I really love, what the appeal of it to me is, is it's always these little things that people don't know that make the biggest impact. And when you're in an environment where you're not exposed to people doing those neat tips and tricks, having the ability of finding somebody out onto YouTube sharing that, and then you can bring it into your organization and start to spread it, it's really impactful because a lot of times people think, "Oh, it needs to be this complicated technical solution." And honestly, it's always the little things that people are like, "Wow, I didn't know I could do that."
Shelly Avery (00:32:12): Agreed.
Rob Collie (00:32:13): So let's turn the corner. Let's talk about health, Shelly. Where should we start?
Shelly Avery (00:32:16): Well, when you were talking earlier about how Microsoft Teams is this new thing, I think people had an aha moment and I think there is an aha moment that is about to come in health. And I'd love to talk about that for a minute. I think it plays into your audience well because it's about data.
Rob Collie (00:32:41): Very important question. Are there people involved?
Shelly Avery (00:32:43): There are people involved.
Rob Collie (00:32:45): Oh, okay then. We're good. We're good.
Shelly Avery (00:32:46): Yeah, yeah.
Rob Collie (00:32:47): Okay. All right.
Shelly Avery (00:32:48): Yeah. There is interoperability of data in health. So think about, from a human perspective, heaven forbid you get in a car accident and you go to an ER and they have to bandage you up. That ER is owned by some health organization and they now have data on you, but it's not the same health organization where you go to see your primary care physician. And so how does your primary care physician know about your ER visit and how do they know what medicines that you were given and whether those had adverse reactions to you or not?
Shelly Avery (00:33:22): Well, without interoperability of data, that just doesn't happen. And there is an old version of healthcare interoperability called HL7. Again, another acronym, but the new interoperability standard is called FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability. The idea of FHIR is supposed to be universal so that that ER can digitally transfer that information to your PCP, your primary care physician. And so your medical record and your information can stay up-to-date with all the people that are medically treating you or for even you, like if you move to another city and you want to say, "Hey, I need all my information. I'm going to take it to my new doctor."
Shelly Avery (00:34:10): And so this idea of interoperability, it's not a Microsoft thing. It's a healthcare standard that is happening in the industry. But what Microsoft has done is we have gone full steam ahead on this FHIR interoperability and built a stack of technology solutions based on ingesting data through FHIR. And we have a bunch of healthcare APIs, FHIR API being one of them, to now take all those low-code, Power Platform, Microsoft Teams, bots, and hydrate those apps with all of this data from healthcare to now be able to really unleash this data.
Shelly Avery (00:35:02): So you need an app to have a rounding solution bedside in a hospital. You now have the ability to suck that data in from Rob, that he's been to the ER and his primary care physician, and now you're in for knee surgery. And so I have all that information that's aggregated from all over, and now it's in this cute little rounding app that we built off of Power Platform, or same thing with Power BI, or a chat bot in Teams. We can chat this health data and say, "Hey, is Rob's labs ready yet?" And the chat bot goes and sucks that data in and says, "Yes, here's Rob's labs. Here's the link to it."
Shelly Avery (00:35:44): And so just being able to unleash that and build these apps or bots or experiences for the human to be able to interact with that data is really what we are trying to do. And so I'm super excited about it. This is a new team that I'm on and this is really what we're trying to drive. So I think it's going to be game changer for the industry.
Rob Collie (00:36:09): So this is my first time hearing of this new interoperability standard. First of all, FHIR, it sounds cool. I like it. It definitely sounds like it's useful for sharing healthcare and patient information across organizations. Do you also see it as something that's going to be useful even within an organization, like between the silos, between these different systems within a single entity?
Shelly Avery (00:36:32): Yes. And it will do that first before it goes across organizations. And-
Rob Collie (00:36:37): Okay.
Shelly Avery (00:36:38): This is a challenge internally too, because there's software technology that these electronic medical records, that your medical record, my medical records sit in at each of these organizations. And most large healthcare providers have multiple instances of these electronic medical records. Sometimes they have multiple different types through mergers and acquisitions and growth over time, or this department got an upgrade, but the other department didn't. And even amongst themselves, they can't share information with each other. And so if a call center services 10,000 patients, but they have four different electronic medical records, when Rob calls into that call center, how the heck do I know which one you're in and who you are and all that?
Shelly Avery (00:37:30): So if we can use this FHIR interoperability to aggregate all of that and have it in a single place, now we've built this great call center app that knows that Rob is calling in and who you are. And I immediately have your information. I could say, "Oh, Rob, are you calling about the meds that you got from your ER visit last week?" It's very personalized. So let's personalize care. Let's have better patient engagement. Let's round with our patients and have the right information where we need it, regardless of where the original data sits.
Rob Collie (00:38:01): So it's a new standard, FHIR, right?
Shelly Avery (00:38:04): Yes.
Rob Collie (00:38:04): And so let's pretend I'm a healthcare organization and I have, again, these, "I've got a best of breed set up." I've got a jillion different siloed line of business systems. Some of them are new, some of them are not. These older systems that I have, they're not going to be playing nice with this new FHIR standard. They haven't even heard of it, that software. So-
Shelly Avery (00:38:24): That's correct.
Rob Collie (00:38:25): How do I, as an organization, connect those wires when some of my more long-ended two systems aren't going to be supporting the standard natively?
Shelly Avery (00:38:36): And that's part of our challenge right now. A lot of the customers that we're talking to, they see the future, they like the vision that Microsoft is painting. They want these human interactions like we're discussing, but they'll say to us, "We aren't ready for FHIR," or, "We haven't made that transition yet." Our comment back to them is we can help you get there. And it is a requirement that they get there by a certain date in the future. So why not have a company like Microsoft help them?
Shelly Avery (00:39:11): Now, it's not necessarily an easy task. There are data mappings that have to happen. And a lot of these electronic medical systems are in the old standard, which we can map from the old standard to the new standard. It takes a little bit of manual work, but you only have to do it once, because once you do it once, it's in the standard and now you've unleashed that data. There's also custom fields though. Some developers-
Rob Collie (00:39:38): Of course.
Shelly Avery (00:39:38): Have gone into these electronic medical records and they built some custom field that doesn't map to FHIR. So then you got to have somebody who knows that. And so there is hard work to do it in the beginning. I'm not trying to say that there isn't, but we do have healthcare interoperability partners, and system integrators, and Microsoft to help these organizations get into that standard. And the new marketed term for all of this is the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
Shelly Avery (00:40:10): And so it's all about ingesting that data and then unleashing that data to create these great, either apps or applets, or bots, or scenarios that empower the people who either work at these systems or even for patients to be able to interact with and have better experiences for themselves. And so, you only have to do the hard work once and then it's in there. And so you're right. It isn't a turnkey, there is work that has to be done, but they're going to have to do it eventually. So we'd love to be able to partner with them and help them get to meet those regulatory compliances that are coming in the near future.
Rob Collie (00:40:52): Yeah. Another example of where it's good to have a platform, right?
Shelly Avery (00:40:55): Right.
Rob Collie (00:40:56): If that missing 1% is interoperability, that's a big 1% that a platform like Microsoft is very, very, very prepared to help you connect those dots. It also, it's really helpful that these older systems that we're talking about, if they already had to, as you pointed out, if they already had to play ball with an older interoperability format, that's end sharp contrast to your average line of business software that has no interest in interoperability at all. T
Rob Collie (00:41:26): he average line of business system is like, no, no, no, no, no. We are a silo and we like being a silo. And why would we ... Mm-mm (negative), no. We are here to hoard the valuable data that is collected in here. Mm-mm (negative), no. Even though it sounds rightfully like labor intensive, one time investment, compared to the average interoperability game that happens across the world, across all industries, it sounds like there's already a really, really, really strong starting point. That's a big, big, big point in your favor. Plus if it's going to be a regulatory standard in the future, that is unheard either.
Shelly Avery (00:42:00): Right.
Krissy Dyess (00:42:01): I'm curious though, as to what changed, because honestly, it is one of the reasons why I'm appointment averse, is because every time you go into a different doctor and it's really common for people to move nowadays. And you're like, oh, I got to fill out all the same forms, over and over again. In my mind, I always thought it's somewhere. Why can't it be everywhere? I guess I thought maybe there was some privacy reason that was the blocker. Has something changed there?
Shelly Avery (00:42:28): You're absolutely right. And no, there is still what's called the HIPAA regulations. And so the entire Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is HIPAA compliant. It does meet all of the requirements for that. And so the FHIR standard, FHIR mandate is under that HIPAA compliance. And so that's a U.S. regulation. It's not in the EU or others. They have their alternative to HIPAA around keeping healthcare information protected. And it's important to be able to do that. And so the old HL7 standard of interoperability was highly customizable and the new FHIR standard is less customizable, and that is how it is able to have more liquid interoperability.
Shelly Avery (00:43:27): I'll give you an example. Sex and gender are two completely different things. And we know that in this day and age, but in the FHIR standard, there is a born sex and it is one or another, and you can't really change it. But in the HL7, you could add seven or eight or nine or 10 different categories for that. So when you have the FHIR standards met, born sex is a one or a zero, basically. Right now they have the other category of gender that there's a bunch of options there. And then they even have another category. And so it's creating the standard that everyone in healthcare has to meet as opposed to going in and making it where I can make 37 customizations because in my hospital, I allow them to have 37 choices.
Shelly Avery (00:44:28): Religion is another one. Religion is huge. I mean, there's endless amounts of religions. In the FHIR standard, there's a set amount and then in other. And so you have to fall into either the set amount or other, and that allows for that more liquid interoperability, or that is the goal. That's the goal of FHIR. Now, I'm getting a little deeper into more of the regulatory compliance and how the standards work. There's tons more deep technical experts on healthcare compliance than I am. I'm more of a technologist than a healthcare compliance expert, but knowing how it works a little bit helps you understand why the technology is empowering or we hope in the future has the potential to empower the industry to be able to do more with this data.
Rob Collie (00:45:18): Even that little deep dive there, I mean, that really, for me and for the listeners, you really just certified your bonafides there. If anyone was wondering how deep you were into this stuff. You always got to be careful. You're not the expert on that. There are people who know it much better than you. The fact that you know that much while also being on top about all those other stuff, you're in the right role. Like Holy cow.
Shelly Avery (00:45:41): For my role, they did require healthcare expertise. And we have another team that partners with us that actually are folks from the industry. So we have MDs, PhDs, ex-CIOs and nurses with their RNs, from industry that work at Microsoft as the healthcare industry team, that partner with us around more of these deep healthcare needs. And when we're talking to chief medical officers or chief nursing officers, who doesn't like their title to be matched.
Shelly Avery (00:46:18): So when we have a chief medical officer like Dr. Rhew at Microsoft, or a chief nursing officer, or ex-CIOs of healthcare organizations to come in and talk to current CIOs, they feel like we're talking to them from their shoes. And so my team partners with that industry team. Not that they aren't technical and don't understand how the technology works, but we are supposed to understand healthcare enough and how the technology fits for those healthcare scenarios and use cases that they need help with.
Rob Collie (00:46:52): To use a metaphor, if you're going to build re race cars, it helps to hire some people who drive race cars.
Shelly Avery (00:47:00): Exactly.
Rob Collie (00:47:00): Right. I've seen this evolution on the Excel team over the years too. There's more and more people on the Excel team who came up not originally as software engineers, but as people in finance and things like that. Whereas I was a computer science major that had to learn Excel in order to work on the Excel team. And so it was, if you populate a team with nothing but me, back then anyway, you end up with a team of mechanics who has no idea what it's like to go into turn three cars ride. I'm using a racing metaphor. I don't even watch racing. I find it incredibly dull, but I love a good metaphor though.
Shelly Avery (00:47:40): Sure. Absolutely. I think Microsoft has done that and is continuing to expand that industry team, even our president of health and life sciences comes from the industry. A lot of our leaders from even a marketing perspective or from a product development perspective, they're starting to hire from the industry.
Rob Collie (00:48:03): That's wisdom. That's humility. I think 20 years ago, we would've probably seen Microsoft put some up and coming computer science guard in that role. And you still need those people for sure. Someone who grew writing C++ isn't going to know everything that they need to know. It's again, there's this whole notion of collaboration. The thing we keep coming back to. It takes a lifetime to amass the expertise to be truly good at something.
Rob Collie (00:48:29): And so, guess what, you're never going to find everything that you need in one person. You're going to need people with different histories in order to be successful. And so it's simple. And yet I don't take it for granted, when I see teams being assembled this way, I've learned to respect it, that it is a necessary and good thing. It's always worth praising even if it seems like it's table stakes. A lot of people don't view it as table stakes. Still, they've got some things to learn.
Krissy Dyess (00:48:55): So Teams is empowering, it's a central hub, it's a window into all these other applications, the Power BI that brings the insights, the bots, the Power Apps, the drives actions. Tell me a little bit about the Veeva. I hear about Veeva, that whole human side. Tell me how you're seeing Veeva start to make its way to help balance, I think.
Rob Collie (00:49:21): And what is Veeva?
Krissy Dyess (00:49:21): Yes. Veeva.
Shelly Avery (00:49:23): Yeah, sure. Microsoft Veeva is what we have marketed the name of our employee experience platform. If you're a Microsoft E, you've probably seen in the past years something in Outlook called MyAnalytics. MyAnalytics was the very early stages of what is now Microsoft Veeva. MyAnalytics was a analytics engine that had some AI in it that would give you insights about your day, or your week, or your month. It would tell you, "Hey, Shelly, you were meeting with Krissy like every week for a few weeks and you haven't talked to her in a while. Do you think it's about time to reach out?" And then it will even give you a button that says, chat with Krissy now, or schedule a meeting with Krissy now.
Krissy Dyess (00:50:18): And I love that.
Shelly Avery (00:50:19): Yeah. It would pop open your calendar-
Krissy Dyess (00:50:21): Because I would forget. You have all your lists and you have all your things. And honestly, when those things would come across, I was like, "Oh, yeah, you're right." And I was like, wait a minute. The technology is getting on top of all this stuff that I can't keep track of. It's amazing.
Shelly Avery (00:50:34): Yeah. That was the beginning of it. Microsoft also came out with another tool called Workplace Analytics, which was the next step of MyAnalytics, where it would anonymize the data and send it to your manager or to your direct report and it would go up the chain all the way. So if my manager had 10 people on it, he would get a daily or weekly report that said, "Hey, your 10 people, this is what they're doing. They're multitasking in their meetings or they're working after hours. Hey, maybe you should encourage them to close the lid of their laptop at night. Let them have better work-life balance." It provides the manager with insights. Right?
Krissy Dyess (00:51:17): That's right. Because these are important. This is important to your overall health of your business, your company, your culture.
Shelly Avery (00:51:24): Exactly. So Microsoft Veeva took MyAnalytics and turned it into what is now called Veeva Insights. And then there is Manager Insights and Workplace Insights. And so insights is really just a rebranding and a movement from MyAnalytics in Outlook. And it's now insight of Microsoft Teams. Because Teams has that developer side of it, there's so much more that you can do with that information in Teams than it is within Outlook. And so it gives you nudges also to set focus time on your calendar or set learning time on your calendar, and it updates your status, your green, yellow, red, to focusing or away or things like that. And so it uses AI to help you know maybe when you're overworking or who you might need to collaborate with. Recently, Microsoft made a investment with a meditation company, Headspace.
Krissy Dyess (00:52:30): Yes. Yes. See, this speaks to me. I love it.
Shelly Avery (00:52:33): Yeah. It's built into Microsoft Veeva. What I use it for is there's a feature called your Virtual Commute. We all used to drive in and drive out of the office and you had, and I forgot about it, but you had that me time in the car. We could listen to a podcast or veg out on the radio or something, but it was some me time while you were in the car, going home from work. And we lost that when we all went remote. It's like I literally shut my computer and then I walk in the kitchen and start cooking dinner. It's like, where is that me time? And so I use the Virtual Commute and I don't use it every day. It's about a five to seven minute decompression. It says, are you ready to wrap up your day?
Krissy Dyess (00:53:17): I need this.
Shelly Avery (00:53:17): Do you have any last minute emails you need to send? Do you need to create any to-dos? And it integrates with Microsoft to-dos, so you can click on things and say, add to my to-do. And then it walks you through a little meditation. Yeah, Rob's got it on right now.
Krissy Dyess (00:53:38): This feels amazing. You just took this conversation to a new place and adding in the music. I'm feeling it. This is just taking work to a new level.
Rob Collie (00:53:50): Imagine a world of Raw Data. Data with the human element.
Krissy Dyess (00:53:58): No, no. Make it come back.
Shelly Avery (00:54:00): Yeah.
Krissy Dyess (00:54:00): Oh, no. Can we get that?
Rob Collie (00:54:06): I couldn't help it.
Krissy Dyess (00:54:08): No. This is what people need. Honestly, when I heard about this, and I'm surprised when I say Veeva, people are like, "What's Veeva?" And I loved your explanation because it gave so much more detail and history, people need this. Think about like, it gives tap it into how long you've been sitting and giving you that balance. This is amazing. Wow. I'm even more excited about this.
Shelly Avery (00:54:31): Well, and I think-
Krissy Dyess (00:54:33): I think I can make it another 50 years in the work environment now, like [inaudible 00:54:37].
Rob Collie (00:54:37): I said, that was the plutonium battery that you needed.
Shelly Avery (00:54:41): Well, and it's so cool because just like there's a Teams team, there's a Veeva team and they are just getting started. They're integrating LinkedIn learning into Veeva learning and all these other learning platforms. So you can learn right in the UI of Teams and you don't have to single sign on and then MFA and forget your password to log into all these other learning tools. And it allows you to share it right inside of Team, say, "Hey, team, I just did this great learning. I think it'd be great for you."
Shelly Avery (00:55:11): And customers can upload their own learning modules to it. There's Veeva topics, which is this Wikipedia where it's self-curated information. And what is great, like we've talked about acronyms at Microsoft, every acronym has a topic page now at Microsoft. So anytime you type an acronym, it hyperlinks it. So I'm chatting you in Teams and I say FHIR. And it's like, what the heck is FHIR? You hyperlink it and it gives you an explanation of what FHIR is.
Krissy Dyess (00:55:43): That's game changer in itself.
Rob Collie (00:55:46): So, does it also pick up pop culture, like if I type IKR, I know, right? And someone else doesn't know what that means. Usually I'm on the receiving end of this. Someone used an acronym yesterday in a chat with me that I'm sitting there going like, "Oh, what new hipsters saying is this?" And it turned out, no, no, no, no, no. That's the customer, Rob.
Krissy Dyess (00:56:08): Here's something really weird too. I love this Veeva thing. I love Teams and all this productivity and pulling all the pieces together. Gosh, back in the day, when I moved from back east to Phoenix out west and I started working at the company I was with, they actually had a meditation person that would come in every so often and they would have us stand up and do exercises. And then even to just like little chair massages and it all-
Rob Collie (00:56:41): Please continue.
Krissy Dyess (00:56:42): Right. Oh, this is just as amazing. I don't even know what track you got, what meditation track, but I just need this in my day. And so many other people do.
Rob Collie (00:56:55): Do you see that? I feel compelled to not even hold the phone steady. I have to move it in a circle, a very gentle circle as I play it into the microphone. I didn't even know I was doing that.
Shelly Avery (00:57:06): It makes you want to sway.
Rob Collie (00:57:11): Yeah. In the middle of the meditation music, you heard my reminder for my next meeting go off. Oh, it really spoiled the mood.
Krissy Dyess (00:57:21): And you haven't reviewed that 50 page slide deck. And then-
Rob Collie (00:57:25): That's right.
Krissy Dyess (00:57:26): Here it goes. Reality comes right back in. You're like, "Oh, okay. Veeva, Veeva, help me."
Shelly Avery (00:57:32): I Mean, not to pitch, I'm not selling Veeva anymore. I'm a user of it, but those are also things it does. It gives you alert in the beginning of the day that says, "Hey, Shelly, here's what your day looks like. You got these six meetings. Here's a PowerPoint that you were working on, that might go with this meeting. Do you need to review it?" The Outlook team has also built in, I don't know if you guys have seen this. In Outlook now, you can create 25 minute meetings, 45 minute meetings or 55 minute meetings that either start five minutes late or in five minutes early to give that bio break meeting buffer between meetings.
Krissy Dyess (00:58:14): That's right.
Shelly Avery (00:58:14): Because when you're fully remote, all I do is sit around and I click the join button all day. I need to go refresh my drink, I need to stand up, I need to stretch. And so, again, we talked about culture at Microsoft earlier, and Satya has been on multiple news outlets talking about how we were the customer zero for Veeva and for this workplace balance. And it's so incredibly crazy to me how much people care about people. It's what we need to do as a human race. We just need to care about people more and allowing technology to play a part in that. It's so cool that we have that. Hopefully organizations take advantage of it for their employees. So more people can have ... It's just the little things-
Krissy Dyess (00:59:06): It is the little things.
Shelly Avery (00:59:06): You mentioned, Krissy, earlier, it's the little things, like five minute less meetings. It's a sign of respect. Let me use the restroom. Don't be mad at me if I'm not on at the top of the hour. I need two minutes to jump from my last meeting to switch my train of thought to get into the next one. And I think that it's super cool that I get to be a part of a company that's offering that to others. And I hope the rest of the world sees it and gets to take advantage of it.
Krissy Dyess (00:59:35): This week, just recently, because I am seeing the five minute grace period, the meetings start five after, but I just, this week, because now people are starting to creep in at 10 after. So it's like everybody expects that five minute because exactly like you said, you're on back-to-back meetings, you don't get a break, but now that five minutes, now it's okay if you're 10 minutes after. Then it's going to be 15. Right?
Rob Collie (00:59:59): Yeah. It's like back when I used to teach classes, I would tell people we're going to take a five minute break and we'll resume in 10. Right?
Shelly Avery (01:00:08): Yeah.
Krissy Dyess (01:00:09): That's right.
Rob Collie (01:00:10): But if I tell you it's a 10 minute break, it becomes a 15 minute break. You can't have that. So just say, "Five minute break, but I'll see you in 10 minutes."
Krissy Dyess (01:00:17): When I was training, there was no break. So all my students out there-
Rob Collie (01:00:20): You just powered through?
Krissy Dyess (01:00:22): Because there was so much cool things that I ... I was like, "No breaks. Let's keep going." And they're looking at me.
Rob Collie (01:00:28): In the morning, everybody please come in, sit down at a seat that has a book in front of it. And in the bag next to it, is your astronaut diapers for the day.
Krissy Dyess (01:00:38): Don't drink water or you might have to go.
Rob Collie (01:00:41): Yeah, yeah. We have capitas.
Krissy Dyess (01:00:43): I was a different person back then. Now I'm embracing the Veeva and the breaks. I feel sorry for all my students, but that's what I did, because there was so much cool stuff. No breaks.
Rob Collie (01:00:52): While we're on this topic, just briefly, this Veeva thing, it seems like one of those technologies that it's not the only thing like it, for sure. But it can be used for good, but it could also be used in a very dark way, if we're not careful. When we were talking to Jen [Stirrup 01:01:08] on a recent podcast, even dashboards reports and things can be used as a form of workplace surveillance. I do see all of the glass half full potential here. Are there any concerns about customers saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll use this for the positive, the meditation and the humane," but then they just turn around and roll it out as like the Amazon horror stories of the driver's not allowed to take bathroom breaks. And this is a means of enforcing that.
Shelly Avery (01:01:36): Yeah. I think there is fear of that. I mean, I know a ton of people they put duct tape over their cameras and they don't want windows hello because they think the world's spying on them. There are just people that have that fear.
Rob Collie (01:01:49): I don't know any of those.
Shelly Avery (01:01:51): Yeah. But I think Microsoft is trying to protect customers a little bit in this area, that you are the only one that can see your data. Everything else is anonymous. Now, if you're a team of one and you report to your manager, obviously the manager is going to know it's you or a team of two, there are those things. But as you go up from a manager one to an M two, to a director, to a VP, and then all the way up to HR, unless you're a very, very small company, the data is segregated into demographics, and geographies, and departments, and roles, and skills, and tenure. And they slice and dice that data to learn insights as to how one population is performing or working over another population.
Shelly Avery (01:02:42): I think it was one engineering group at Microsoft that was really, really being overworked. Not that they weren't all being overworked. I'm sure everybody is overworked in every position at every company everywhere. But there was this one in particular organization at Microsoft, I think they were putting in like 18 hour days. It was ridiculous. And the feedback they got from these individuals was, "We have to work after hours because we are in meetings all day." And they were individual contributor. They were coders. They needed that three to four hours to get that line of code written or tested or whatever.
Shelly Avery (01:03:17): They made a meeting free Wednesdays. They literally wouldn't allow people to have meetings. Now you could collaborate with people and set your own, but no internal or manager type meetings those days. And the productivity of that group after three or four months, just completely changed. And so using the data, that's what the data is meant to be there for. Now, there are people in the world that are just going to make Ponzi schemes. They're just evil people. Data can be used, I'm sure in malicious ways. I think Microsoft is trying their best to make it so they can't be super micromanagement at least down to the individual level.
Rob Collie (01:04:02): It's a certainly a very, very challenging frontier for a technology company, right? We're going there as an industry. It's inevitable. It's happening. There's no point in trying to say, "Oh, no, let's put up the firewall here." We're seeing this thing. This goes back to my original, something I said a long time ago in this discussion about how certain things don't go through a computer very well. I think this is one of those examples. We're seeing it with Facebook and YouTube. Technology companies, they're in the position now, these companies, of being the arbiters of truth and there's no algorithm.
Rob Collie (01:04:36): There's actually a really great YouTube video, or this one guy in the UK talks about, there is no algorithm for truth, but we've created these platforms that are the primary disseminators of information in the world and they're completely and forever ill equipped to be arbiter of truth. Wow, look at the world that we're in. So, I don't think this particular topic is on that scale. It doesn't have that same reach. I don't think as the other things, but I think it's a cousin of those problems in some ways. It's a more solvable problem, I think, than the Facebook and YouTube problem that we're seeing. But this is where the real stuff is. Is like, how do we deploy these things in a way that is a net benefit to humanity? And not just as a net benefit to shareholders.
Shelly Avery (01:05:27): Exactly.
Rob Collie (01:05:28): That's attention, especially I think in the United States. It's a very different dynamic like in Europe, for instance. I can imagine the adoption profile of something like Veeva in Europe will be very different than in the USA.
Shelly Avery (01:05:40): Well, it will have to meet European standards. European has GDPR around privacy laws. And so there might be different settings or features that can or can't be enabled in a product like Veeva in UK or in Europe to comply with those.
Rob Collie (01:05:58): A lot of consumer products in the United States, they have to meet California standards.
Shelly Avery (01:06:03): Exactly.
Rob Collie (01:06:04): And then because of that, the whole country is California in terms of its standards, because you're manufacturing product. Software's a little different, it can be tuned differently in different places. Shelly, I have really enjoyed this conversation and thank you so much for making the time. You also get a gif of yourself. Why don't have to be mentioned that.
Krissy Dyess (01:06:19): A G-I-F not G-I-F-T. Gif.
Rob Collie (01:06:22): Right. Not a gift, but it is a gift-
Krissy Dyess (01:06:24): It's a gift or a gif.
Rob Collie (01:06:29): Or a gif. Yeah.
Shelly Avery (01:06:29): Yay. Fun.
Rob Collie (01:06:29): Yeah.
Krissy Dyess (01:06:29): And you could frame it.
Rob Collie (01:06:29): It needs to be a movable frame. We could sell it as an NFT.
Shelly Avery (01:06:32): Yeah.
Rob Collie (01:06:37): And I also want to say, I really, really, really detected just a tremendous amount of wisdom in you, in this conversation. And that's not something that you necessarily run into all of the time in technology, but I think there's something about the way that you approach problems, the way that you think about them, that I find very valuable and special. And I wanted to make sure that I said that before wrapped up. So, thanks for being here. Yeah. And thanks for bringing your perspective, which I really appreciated it.
Shelly Avery (01:07:04): Thanks so much guys.
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