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!

View from the office

It’s 0900 local time. I’m listening to BBC Radio 4 streamed through BBC Sounds linked to my phone on the yachts WiFi system via Bluetooth to the yacht’s sound system in the cockpit and saloon.

Had a brief chat with the team in Teams back in the UK where they are all working from home. My phone pings away with Teams messages and emails, while I plot the course to our next destination on the electronic chart system that would navigate the yacht all the way from this anchorage to the port we are headed to, but what would be the fun in that!

I can remember not that many years ago in a ski resort having to walk 2k to an Internet Cafe where I paid for a 30 minute connection to do my emails. That compares with last night being asked by the owner of the tiny restaurant on a tiny island in Croatia if we could just use email to make our next booking because he was struggling responding to Facebook Messenger, DM’s on Twitter, WhatsApp messages and SMS!

These days it is not a question of if you can be connected and continue to be engaged with your business, suppliers and customers, it is more a case of: can you disconnect and switch your mind off for a few days to get the headspace you need to reset!

Time to press ‘post’ and get this yacht underway.