#24 Intelligent Automation and Customer Success with Netcall's Richard Farrell

Hallo und willkommen zu another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Today's episode is a very special one for us. Usually here Arno and myself talking about all things process and automation, and recently we thought it would be a about time to invite interesting people who share the same passion for process and automation as we do. Yeah, this was great pleasure to welcome our first interview guest. He describes himself as German-born, Simpson-obsessed, and with a not-so-secret penchant for Welsh techno. And with that, we welcome Richard Farrell, NetCord's long-service Chief Information Officer, to the podcast. Hello, Richard. Thank you for joining us today.

Hello, guys. Thanks very much for inviting me. Should be a fun session.

Great, thank you. Yeah, please tell us a bit more about what you're doing and what you're responsible for at Netcall.

Yeah, so it's a groovy title, it's a bit of a West Coast US title, Chief Innovation Officer. I've been with Netcall for a good number of years, 19 years in fact, and the company has changed a lot over that time and my role has really changed over that time. But primarily it's about looking at the impact of newer technologies and how they might be appropriate for our customers, both now and in the future when they get to the right stage. So it's about trying to understand the, the benefits of the technology, looking at the potential costs, integration challenges, and looking at the sort of use cases and then benefits our customers could derive. Lots of good fun and lots of hype that I have to try and wade through.

Yeah, so 19 years, so that's what time, what kind of business process management, what era was it 19 years ago?

Well, from a technology perspective, it was most enterprises were all client-server, so we actually did have a cloud service way back in 2001, which was quite, quite an interesting proposition, um, a transaction-charged, um, platform as a service for some automations, um, predominantly in those days, um, we were dealing with call center, contact center automations, um, and this was about the reason the company name NetCall kind of came about was because it was trying to instigate voice calls from websites Okay, so before all of the lovely technologies, WebRTC and stuff you might use today, how would you actually link websites and those customers into contact centers for a variety of reasons?

Yeah, certainly lots of development since then. So you have seen everything in the space of process and automation, for sure. Fantastic. And yeah, I think Arno and myself, yeah, we haven't been in the field for such a long time, so quite a long time already. So that we now have picked up over this long, long time, I think, probably working relationships with like 15 different vendors. And yeah, we both are supporting companies with all things of process and automation and try to really help them to achieve their automation goals. So where do you see then, with all these different vendors out in the market, where do you see sort of the sweet spot for NetCall in the market?

It's a really interesting question, and of course you could talk about ones and zeros, and we've— I can talk to you about some of the technologies that we think make our solutions special, but it's about more than that. It's about what you deliver to your customers in terms of their outcomes. So our customers want to automate processes, but they don't want necessarily to have massive transformation programs And so that means that we need to make solutions easy to use for as wide a population as possible. We also want to get close to where people understand the business processes and the challenges with technologies and challenges with systems and so on. So we think where we're really good is about enabling people close to processes with IT professionals to actually make a start and to make an initial impact, and then to leverage that knowledge and benefit to do much more transformational things. So sweet spot, I would really say, you know, in terms of the actual solutions, it's for us, it's all about ease of use. That's the main goal for us. We want to have the easiest to use platforms, which then confer other benefits in terms of training and skills and time to value and all of the good business benefits. But that all comes from its sort of intuitive user interface, making things simple, having a mindset that it's not for professional developers. There aren't enough. And the only sort of credible strategy to dealing with more automation to get more improved processes within organizations is to democratize it. There are not enough IT and automation professionals to go around, but we need to automate. So how do we do that? I think that all comes together with the user experience.

Yeah, yeah. Now that's very interesting. And I think with the advent of low-code, we always talk about leveraging low-code to plug that skill shortage and that gap. But now more than ever, we see that being, you know, very relevant, especially when the times we live in where we need to execute very quickly, we need to, produce results fast. And, you know, sometimes we can't just rely on, on conventional IT development and their processes to create these applications and these, these tools for, for the business. So I think it is, it is good. And I, you know, obviously we, as, um, we have got good experience with, with the Netcore platform, and it still amazes me how you can take the platform, take a real-world sort of problem, and quickly assemble it. And, you know, within a couple of days come back to people and say, this is what I've produced. And, you know, and they still— there's still points where, um, you know, people still can't believe it, you know, which is really exciting. And, um, you know, that, that's what we— I guess that's one of the drives, you know, being, um, you know, involved with, with, with, with all these different platforms and, and they abilities. Richard, if I may, so in the last sort of 12 months, and, you know, this, this is very kind of popular with, with our listeners out there, what would you say are some of the sort of most exciting or impactful use cases that's been delivered on, on the Netcore platform?

Yes, it's certainly been an interesting sort of 12, 13 months or so. So in terms of, of interest in use cases, there have been many. I think what we can do is we can almost see with our customers almost a chronology of what happened with the pandemic and the sorts of applications that were required. So we have a large number of NHS trusts who are customers. We also have a large number of local government customers.

Yeah.

And to your point about, you know, the the low-code platforms have been there and those capabilities have been around. I think what changed in the last 12 months is suddenly we had a compelling call to action. It wasn't about, well, you know, what should we do for our strategy in 5 years' time? It was, we need to deliver new services tomorrow. Yeah. For our health customers, you know, in terms of impact, the very first applications we developed with our health customers were around COVID testing, initially for staff. Um, so it was all about getting data from test systems in a splendid isolation and getting them into the Liberty Create platform so that we could provide dashboards, analysis, and proactive notification. So in the very early days when there weren't any national systems about, the hospitals were testing their individual workers. How do we get those test results back into proactive notifications? So that was the very first thing that we did. And then over the period of time, there have been some really interesting medical use cases. So we've seen things like PPE distribution. Yeah. There have been things like worker safety and worker location applications, which have been really interesting. And we then, if you follow it on the health side of things, we We've then actually been through into vaccination now, which is fantastic stuff. So we've got applications out there which are dealing with vaccinations and timings and so on. And that was quite an interesting one because obviously those, in terms of sort of low-code and application development, this was something that was a movable feast with regulation as the applications were being built. So the NHS Trust knew that they were going to be doing some vaccinations but they weren't sure to whom, with what vaccinations, with what time intervals between them. So how do you work, you know, and you can't go and buy commercial off-the-shelf product for that. So it's fantastic working with those. And in local government, there are a whole load of range of things like business rates relief grants. Again, integration with existing systems, whether it's these days data of council taxpayers and businesses, and then ways to reach out and notify them that they're eligible for benefits. So more of this communication, text and email, but then coming back and managing the process to actually enable these grants. And that back end of it, it wasn't just sending out a cheque, it was of course some validation, there was fraud checking in there as well, and then finally the BACS transfer to actually make the payment. So all of that in a low-code application, and that was one that Croydon Council built themselves and they built it in 120 hours. And it was also, it was also their first Liberty Create application where they integrated it with the rest of their environment. So included in those 120 hours were things like single sign-on integration, which can obviously be reused with many other applications after that. So they, they were really hot on this business developer and being able to get the applications out quickly. Some really great examples of that. And then probably Um, I suppose the, the, the most interesting one for me in terms of the application of the technology, and then probably the most impactful, um, low-code application. So the one that, um, sort of caught me on the back foot was, um, video integration. So, um, immediately the pandemic struck and we're thinking of technologies that our customers will need. And obviously in health you're going to have a reluctance to have face-to-face appointments. There's going to be a much greater propensity for video appointments. Now, that was something that, that was missing in a compelling event. There were lots of technologies that could do it, but nobody was really driving Health to do it.

Yeah.

And so we, um, we, we did our integration with a video solution, and, um, we built some initial accelerators and models to see how it worked with virtual appointments and so on. And the surprise for me was that one of our customers, the NHBC, the National House Building Confederation, they actually took the technology and the platform and used it for building inspections. So I was expecting that this was going to be patients end-to-end with healthcare professionals. It's not. It's guys out in the field doing video of foundations and roofs. So I thought that was quite amusing in terms of how you predict these things are going to be used. I think the most impactful one is back to sort of COVID and health. Cumbria County Council built their own test and trace application using the NetCall platform, using the Liberty Create. Their contact success rate was in the high 90s. So you compare it to national tracing where it's been, you know, 60s or 80s. High 90% contact tracing, and And of course, what that means is it stops transmission and impactful, you know, it can save lives. So that's probably about the best we can do, life-saving applications.

Absolutely, yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I think that, yeah, definitely the pandemic has accelerated as well a lot of this, the adoption of these platforms and now in the need of, putting these applications out in pretty much no time. I think now they're all seeing the big benefit of low-code. And yes, you mentioned you combined it already with other technologies. I think that leads us nicely into sort of the buzzwords and which are currently out there: intelligent automation, hyperautomation, and all sorts of automation, whatever comes next. So when you look into your— or look into the future, where do you see things developing for for you as a software company, as a vendor, and for companies around the automation space?

Yeah, it's interesting times. You are absolutely right, pandemic has driven acceleration. I think because lots of things failed. So that's why there's a big drive. There's also restrictions on budgets as well. So how do we do all this smarter? How do we cut out cost? And automation obviously can do lots for that. Yeah, the buzzwords are great. When you look behind some of the definitions, I think Forrester with intelligent automation, I think I've got 19 technologies, and I think Gartner's, the last time I looked, I think there were 18 specific technologies that fit under hyperautomation. And I was discussing with one of my marketing colleagues today whether it was hyperintelligent automation. So, you know, we'll get some more superlatives in there. But what does it mean? Um, for us, it's about using the best tools for different use cases. So I don't, I don't really mind so much whether it's, um, the latest hype term. Um, when we moved into low-code, it wasn't a particularly hyped term, and we've seen that, um, grow in influence. And we've sort of come to RPA, I think we've come a bit post-hype. We've come after the first generation. So we've, we're actually building on the failings of the initial pure-play RPA solutions. Um, what do I think we need to do? Um, I think we need to have access to the tools in toolkits which are easy to use and easy to deploy. So if we look at specifics, what that means— things like it's got to be in the cloud, obviously. Um, it's got to be easy to use, got to be safe and secure, got all your data protection and data privacy. Um, it's It then leads into other sort of questions about where some of the processing occurs. So for our Liberty RPA solution, for example, we can do AI at the edge, which has some interesting implications in some of the sectors. Health, for example, you wouldn't necessarily want a whole load of health data to be matched against a machine learning model in the cloud somewhere. You may want to keep that close within your environment. So, so that's an interesting angle. I think that there's just going to be more convergence. I think we'll see less pure-play vendors. So RPA vendors are already moving into low-code and have their own view on, on that, and vice versa, low-code experts are moving into RPA. We don't sort of hang our flag to any ideological movement, and we're not going to say, um, that one technology is always the right answer because that's just not true. There are different use cases where different technologies are, are required. In terms of low-code and RPA, um, we could be really purist and say that, um, we'll only deploy our low-code platform and we'll only integrate if you've got APIs to an open system. But the real world is there are legacy systems out there. There are, you know, there are still terminal applications in some environments. So the reality is you just can't get to this data. So what do you do? You know, you could be sniffy and refuse it, or you could be pragmatic, use some of the tools that are available, integrate them with the rest of your process, and just use them where you need, you need to. Theoretically, when you're doing that, you should always plan for the long-term replacement of the system. But again, that's a bit idealistic. In the real world, that's still a challenge.

Yeah.

Especially when things are moving so quickly, yeah.

Yeah, and obviously, there's so many innovative technologies out there and available. So we often get a question from our listeners, what technology do we use? Where should we use it? So in your view, Richard, you know, what advice can you give companies out there that wants to get started with process automation and automation projects in general?

It's interesting. I've seen a sort of evolution over the years on how— because there are challenges about deployment and implementation and all the IT security and all the things that make it hard to do things in the real world. The— I think the best advice, especially the reaction for internal audiences, is to choose a process, often one that's internal but quite visible and that people know is poor, and try and automate that. And then you use that as your case study and your reference for everybody else within the organization. So, you know, I would love it if our customers could come to us with a blank canvas and we can look at— we can define end-to-end customer journeys and have a brand new technology environment for everything. It's not— it doesn't— well, it happens now and again, but it doesn't happen very often. So we've got to be a bit more pragmatic. And I would say, partly because of the internal PR, choose one of these internal projects, because then when you bring it back to the business, everybody can see it and they start asking you 'All right, if I can do that with this process, can I do it with my process?' And we see some really good uptake in adoption and different sorts of applications when that happens. So probably not the purest 'define your 5-year plan, look at your total economic impact' and all the rest of it. Start relatively small, have a sort of a snowball effect, prove the value, prove the time to market, prove how easy things are to do, and then use that internally. You'll be getting great customer feedback as well. There was a recent case study for one of our insurance customers. They actually, um, they were able to put their name to it, so it's Tesco Underwriting. So their driver for using low-code was to improve automation of claims processes. So, you know, what is customer service in insurance? It's how you handle claims. That's how you differentiate, really. There's no differentiation in price or policy. Your claims is how you differentiate your service. Um, they, um, quoted on— we've got a case study on the website. They quote a 57% improvement in claims throughput per hour. So they're doing more than half as many claims per hour as they did previously. But the other thing that they're also proud to show is that that was also coincided with an 8-point improvement in the Net Promoter Score from their customers. So I really love it when these things come together, when you can get the positive feedback either from employees or customers. This is making a difference. These are some of my pain points. This is stuff that causes friction and lessens value and replaces it by something that's good. Yeah, I've, I've another one of our customers and this, this is a personal anecdote. We had a power failure on you on Christmas Eve. So if we're thinking about emotional and peak experiences, you know, we've got a fridge and a freezer full of food. We've got, it was about 4 in the afternoon. So it was the darkness was coming in and we've got a power cut. I would say fortunately, but UK Power Networks is one of our customers and they use the low-code platform. In terms of my user experience, it was fantastic because not only did I not need to have an account to check the status, and I could drill into the information without, you know, giving away a whole lot of personal data, it also then offered me the options for proactive updates and notifications as well. So rather than me getting stressed and having to check on the web page and refresh it, um, you know, my kids soon noticed the Wi-Fi was down, so I'm getting grief internally as well. I was getting updated with the status. They were telling me how many houses were still without power periodically. They were telling me where the engineers were, what they were up to. And then they all followed it up by asking me about my customer experience, and it was all resolved.

It's fantastic what's possible, isn't it? Yeah. So when you use the right technology, it's really simple then to to produce this stickiness, isn't it, with your customers and satisfaction. It's incredible.

Yeah, and in terms of promoter, so I will happily mention UK Power Networks. I won't mention my broadband provider in a similar context, but I will mention UK Power Networks. And the good news for them is that's reflected in their customer feedback as well. Excuse me. There, because it's a regulated industry, customer experience is measured from a regulatory perspective. So this is important not only because it's doing the right thing, but it's also because it's a mandatory requirement and also has an impact on return on capital that can be derived.

Yeah, absolutely. Not many companies— there are plenty of companies out there who understand that, but there are still as well plenty of companies who should start adopting it to make a real big difference as well to the bottom line, isn't it? So sometimes that initial investment, yeah, they rule that out somehow because it doesn't seem too appealing. They can't see the real value of it yet, but it is incredible when the project is delivered right and with these very, very powerful technologies.

Yeah, I think that sort of snowball effect as well. So if I go back to Croydon Council, so they started with the business rates grant application and they delivered then within a year another 9 applications within their team.

Wow.

And now we've got to the stage where they're looking at replacing core systems. So we're now at the stage where they're looking to replace their Dynamics CRM with a low-code platform. So, you know, once you get it in there, it's much easier to prove the value, and then it snowballs from there. And you can get really— yeah, every organization, just go to a contact center and ask your agents what doesn't work. You know, just go on your website and pretend you're a customer. You know, there are so many failures and disjointed processes and gaps and silos of data everywhere. There are some real low-hanging fruit for most organizations.

Oh, that's great. Do you like to add anything to this one as well?

I think it is, it is really interesting. There's, you know, that's obviously an impressive array of success stories there, Richard. It's, it's really good. You know, we see the same on our side as well, you know, using the Netcore platform. And, you know, it is very satisfying to get to that point where you can actually see the impact this is bringing in terms of customer experience. So, very, very exciting times. And like you rightly said, choose the processes which you think is going to have the biggest impact in terms of internal promotion that will have a a very big impact in terms of a good success story, because that drives adoption, doesn't it? And nothing drives adoption more than happy customers and good customer experience. So, so yeah, very, very good. I think very, very, very good answer. You know what we see as well, really.

Great. Yeah. And especially as you mentioned, the impactful ones, the use cases really doing good during a crisis. I think, I think that's, that's That's fantastic. And local government, you mentioned, is a big one. Yeah, I think they definitely need really good solutions in place because their budget will shrink even more, I guess, because the government had to spend so much money. I think it will get tougher and tougher for them. So they even have to come up with more good ideas to do more with less and doing it all better, isn't it?

Sure. And I can tell you something that's really interesting there as well. One thing that we launched a couple of years ago is the NetCall Community, and as part of that we have our Community AppShare. And the Community AppShare is low-code and RPA and some customer engagement applications, widgets, configurations, flows for different business use cases. And there are right the way up to full-blown applications in there. So for example, we've made our IT support application, which we've built on Liberty Create, that's available through our app share, free of charge, no, no, no royalties required, and also customizable by the, the client. We've also done that with our CRM replacement, so that's available there. And there are about 200 items of content. The Croydon application that I mentioned they made that available on the AppShare. The test and trace application that Cumbria built, they made that available on the AppShare. So in local government, you can pick up these applications and just install them, do that final bit of modification, um, and we found that has been fantastically well received by the community. And, um, somebody mentioned gamification to me, and I hadn't really even considered it, but I think there's almost some gamification going on there between the different councils to see how many different applications we would accept into the environment. So at the moment there's a bit of a battle going on between Croydon and Ada and Worthing and Cumbria and some others in the mix as well.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah, otherwise you have to go through this lengthy procurement processes until they come up to a conclusion what solutions might be right. But if you just give it to them with this app share, they just could just pick it and go with it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So in, you know, local government, every council has to do blue badges, um, in England, a bit different in Scotland, but every, every council has to do blue badges. It's all a very similar process, um, you know, why go out and spend on a custom application when it's really, you know, a pretty simple case management process? Um, you can drop in an application from our app share, um, and, you know, you're 90% of the way there. Half a day's customization with your logo and so on, and it's there.

Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, this is what we need more of. I think definitely local government and all the charities and public sector, or every company really, even small businesses, they would not even jump on this, on this whole thing of automation because they as well see the cost hurdle, they see the implementation hurdle, the supporting hurdle, all that stuff. But now they can get going very quickly.

Yeah, and we also, you know, we consider the wider market as well, so it's less likely for a commercial organization to share their application. We do have some partners that build some, so for things like the CRM I mentioned and the help desk that I mentioned, and also things like employee monitoring, these are applications that we build and that are available as accelerators on the AppShare.

Great, perfect. So yeah, Richard, so we thought our listeners might get to know you a little bit more than just the technical and the business side. So that's why we thought about sort of 5 quick questions. Are you up for it?

Yeah, go for it.

Okay, so we touched on this during the introduction already, the Simpsons obsessedness, if this is the right word for it, but, and the the techno, the Welsh techno part. So, uh, how did this, uh, come about?

It sounds an interesting mashup, doesn't it?

Yes.

Okay, so I mean, I've been a fan of The Simpsons since, um, since, well, since Sky started broadcasting it back in the day. I do remember on The Tracey Ullman Show, even before that. Um, it's just fantastic on so many levels— consistent, well-written, um, and the, the The satire and the script works on just so many levels, it's fantastic, with pastiches of other movies and content and so on. It's really good, and you can learn things from it all the time. I learned something about The Simpsons this week, which is that, um, Matt Groening, when he was writing the episodes, um, he contends that it's easier to edit a piece of work than it is to create a new piece of work. So his technique is just to write it all down in one go with all of the errors and all the corny jokes and stuff that won't work in one go, and then put it to bed, and then go back to it the next day when it's much easier to edit it than it is to come up with the original idea. So that's something I learned only this week.

I'm very good.

I'm going to try it out with the next report I write. I'll let you know how I get on with that.

Well, it's a bit like low-code, right? I think you could just throw all the ideas in and experiment and chop and change your mind without the cost of, you know, all of the conventional development where it's quite dear to throw away code, whereas configuration is okay. You can move things about and cut things out.

Yeah, you can. And I suppose you can reuse components, which you would do in animation. Yeah, there's some analogy. So that's what led me to low-code then. Simpsons led me to low-code. Perfect.

Yeah, that's excellent. So tell us about this obsession.

Well, no. So my marketing team, when they got this on the website, they asked some fairly ordinary questions like, what's your favorite music? Or what was the last concert you went to? And then they, of course, changed it into a penchant for Welsh techno. So the artist in question is somebody called DJ Sasha, who is from Bangor in North Wales. He's been around as a DJ and as a producer for a long period of time. I actually have, um, on May the 29th, I have one of my first sort of post-pandemic easing concerts, which is at Alexandra Palace Theatre on the 29th of May, where he's performing a DJ set. So, um, that's where it comes from, and I think it's similar stuff, you know. Um, these are patterns of 32 bars of music. Which you move about and chop and change and modify and customize. So yeah, I think, I think I like, I think I must like my patterns and reuse of things.

So we have to ask you then, you know, who is your idol and why? And is it DJ Sasha? Or is it one of them?

That would be a bit narrow, wouldn't it? I mean, who would be my idol? Um, see, that's, that's a really tough one. I mean, so the first name that popped into my head was Mandela, um, because of the dignity and the quiet struggle. I mean, obviously there's a history before that as well, you know, in the early '60s and so on. Um, but Mandela was the name that, that popped into my head just for that dignity. Um, and then the, the reaction, um, after freedom where it wasn't vindictive and it was reconciliation, was certainly the way it came across in the UK. So that was the name that instantly popped into my head. Music is a little bit narrow.

Okay, if you imagine you could get all the contents and knowledge of a book instantly, like a robot or AI just digesting everything, and then you know and you understand, which would which book would you choose?

You know, we played with this, so with IBM Watson, and we're doing some work now with the BERT Q&A technology, but we essentially had a free rein on what we'd like to develop as a corpus with IBM Watson for natural language question and answering. Now, the very first one I did was the Registrar's Handbook of Scotland, with all the rules for what happens when people get married and die, which was a 458-page guide on all of those rules. What would I take outside of that? I mean, I could be a bit business and hackneyed and say The Art of War. Tom Peters might get in there, In Search of Excellence. Stuff that's more— well, older stuff. W. Edwards Deming, if you've come across him. All around process management. Okay, yeah, Duarte and people did some work on statistical process control. This is getting boring again, I'm back to numbers and patterns, aren't I?

No, it's fine, absolutely fine. I think that knowledge is so practical, isn't it, in every day, if you would have it immediately available at every second straight away. Yeah, absolutely, very applicable.

I didn't pick a novel or anything, did I? Um, 1984.

Ah, great. Excellent. So in terms of if you think back at your life and, you know, obviously not just professional life, just also just sort of growing up, you know, what's the best advice you've ever received?

That's a really interesting question, isn't it? That's a really wide one.

You can choose a humanitarian angle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, so I suppose that the best, the best sort of practical advice is don't be scared. Um, you know, it's what's the worst that could happen? Um, because a lot of, a lot of our challenges are our own self-doubt and our own bias that we're struggling to overcome. You know, I've done a podcast with you guys before, but it seems like it's been quite good fun. Um, you know, what's the worst that could happen? Um, so, you know, sometimes we constrain ourselves, we build our own barriers. Um, so, you know, emancipate yourself from mental slavery. So, um, so yeah, go for it.

Um, yeah, that's a good one.

Yeah, yeah, you know you, you will have not got the outcome you wanted if you didn't try. Um, even if you failed, you'll have learned something.

Yeah, true.

Very good advice. I think it is, uh, um, like you say, sometimes you can be predispositioned into doing certain things and be anxious about it. But, uh, I guess adopting a bit more of a free-thinking mind, freestyling stuff, you know, it's a bit kind of back to the low-code again. Yes, let's, let's kind of just kick around and see, see, see what happens. And it's about failing fast and learning from mistakes, picking yourself up and moving forward, right?

Yeah, the, the, the fear of failure, um, does ham— and, you know, it's a challenge for businesses. I think that's, that's something that we have seen with the, the really uptake and adoption of automation technologies in the last year when organizations had to do things. We've got all these great stories. Before that, you know, we were still discussing, well, what might you do, what could you do, and there were some early adopters and so on. So, um, yeah, remove the fear of decision-making. What's the worst that could happen? Um, something like a cloud platform, you'll have invested a bit of time and, you know, some— a few days training for people here and there, but it's not a big capital investment. You're not going to be spending millions on servers and infrastructure. So get results quickly and fail fast. Yeah, you know, it's one of my child— one of my son's birthdays today, so my, um, all my photo albums on my phone have been looping around for all on this day in all over the years. And of course, you know, you go back to when they're toddlers and they fall over. Yeah, you know, they fail. Um, and what do we do? We encourage them. That was a good effort. Try again. What if you do something a bit differently? Don't pull on that dining, you know, don't pull on that table, don't pull on that lamp, all the good stuff. So governance and control around there, but yeah, encourage some failure as well now and again.

I think that's, yeah, it's great advice. And I think that's exactly, I guess, leads us to the next question. So Olympic athletes, I think they wouldn't be Olympic athletes and succeeding in Olympic Games or so if they would just hold back. So they go for it, they go for it, and they make lots of mistakes, but they push and push and go on. So if you could be an Olympic athlete, what sport would you choose?

See, these are fantastic questions. So, not really, because— okay, so I will choose Usain Bolt, And we should just park that he was the finest sprinter of all time, and we shall look at— there are some clips going around on the socials of how he reacted to the kids and so on that were collecting his kit at the start of the races. So you'll have to— we'll have to find one and we'll share the link, but essentially you've got the young kids who take the tracksuits and stuff away from the athletes just before the races, and at moments before, you know, the most tense and nerve-wracking, the culmination of literally years of practice and dedication, you've got these kids who are taking away your kit. And if you look at Usain Bolt, he is always engaging with them and he's joking with them and he's, you know, he's making them feel comfortable. So He was a good guy, is really where it gets to. Even with all of that pressure and focus and expectation that was on his shoulders, he still found time to make other people feel comfortable. So I think, you know, as a characteristic in a human, that was fantastic. So don't look at the races, look at what he does before the races.

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I think lots of great athletes Yeah, they look out for others as well and not necessarily just egoistic. Yeah, it's the right mindset I think people can just adopt. Absolutely.

Yeah, I think we had Marcus Rashford in the UK this year, not Olympics, but a similar sort of idea, isn't it? You can transcend your boundaries a bit as well. We're back to low-code again now.

Fantastic. Yeah, that brings us to the end of the interview nearly. I think to close So if our listeners would like to get in touch with you and your company Netcall, how would they ideally, or what is the best way to get in touch?

Okay, so for Netcall, just visit the website netcall.com, N-E-T-C-A-L-L, and there's plenty of ways to get engaged there and seek more information and contact. For me personally, probably the best way is through LinkedIn. So, yeah, search out my profile on LinkedIn and then we can engage in that way. And then, you know, for wider information, there's normally some great stuff on the Netcool blogs as well. So check those out. They've really got some interesting bits and pieces.

That's fantastic. Yeah, we will put all the links and the information, the links to your profile, to the website into the show notes. And so then everyone can have them in any episode later on. Yeah, it was a great pleasure to have you here on the show. Thank you very much for all your insights and the views on what's happening in the market, and thank you for sharing as well a little bit more on the personal side. And yeah, it was a fantastic session. Thank you very much.

Thanks very much for your time. Thanks for the questions as well.

Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!

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