The Early Adopter Paradox – the electric car and Power Platform comparison!

Driving back from the #soutcoastsummit recently I was pondering all the great content we had heard jammed into a couple of days.

I was particularly mindful of the challenges associated with unleashing the creativity within an organisation by enabling citizen developers to build apps while ensuring good governance over the organisation’s data.

At this point I needed to charge my electric car…. I first stopped at a services to find I had been ICE’d – part of my new vocabulary now I’m an EC driver.

So, next stop was Winchester, where I was assured by one of the many apps I now have on my phone in my ‘car’ folder there would be plentiful charging points. However, this is where I discovered what Tesler car owners do on a Sunday morning, charge their cars. At the fourth charging point I thought I had struck lucky only to find the charging point was out of service. At the fifth charging point I finally made it, except that the contactless payment was not working so I had to download yet another app and create another account.

At this point I had seven miles of charge left…

This gave me 40 minutes over a cup of coffee to do some more reflection.

Bring an early adopter is great. I love new shiny stuff to play with, but this approach does come with its drawbacks, and that tends to be that the less exciting elements of infrastructure that sit behind the glitz may not be fully in place. This cost money, time, effort and doesn’t normally make a sales person get excited (unless they are selling EV charging stations I suppose). So there is a lag. For the user you have to be ready to accept that sometimes the glitz can be flaky, or need revisiting. In the case of Power Apps this could be the need to update connectors that are deprecated, and most importantly, building in the governance needed to ensure the platform is secure and appropriately utilised.

For EVs it’s a charging infrastructure!!!

Coffee drunk. Anxiety levels reduced. Time to hit the road again. I do love a bit of shiny!