HR Vision Podcast #28 – HR Technology development ft. Matthew Bonnici

Ivo:
Hey everyone, and welcome to the HR Vision podcast. I'm your host, Ivo. And every week I'm going to have a conversation that matters about HR.

Tis week I have Matthew Bonnici with me. Welcome Matthew. How's it going?

Matthew:
Hi! I'm good. How are you doing?

Ivo:
I'm doing great. Thank you for asking.

Matthew is a Medior Technical Consultant and he belongs to Edward's team, who was our guest last week on the podcast. Matthew is involved with the development of all the solutions we provide as well, and we're going to peek into the technical side once more this week. So Matthew, are you ready?

Matthew:
Yes, let's go!

Ivo:
Yeah, let's go for it. Let's go for it, alright? With every guest, we start with a small introduction. So yeah, if you can tell us a bit about yourself, what you've been doing, and why you essentially.

Matthew:
I'm Matthew Bonnici, I'm from Malta. I'm a very technical guy, so yeah, that's my role here as well. I started with the Dynamics products, started with D12 and then moved to F&O and HR when that came along. But I branched off very early and I focused more into integrations, than just F&O itself. So integrations, before CDS and Dataverse where a thing, we had the old SOAP interfaces in 2012, with the new services and F&O, so on.

Now that this Microsoft has been growing this, it's interesting to see what we're going to be working with in the coming months.

Ivo:
OK, alright, and you always worked with Microsoft products? Or did you have experience before with other products?

Matthew:
So I started with Microsoft products, yes. As I said, I started with the old AX12 before it became Finance and Operations. But at some point, we switched, Microsoft as well. At some point I had a brief 6 month period where I worked for gaming companies. So while I still used Microsoft products, 'cause it was still .NET and C# and Azure at the time, it was completely something that was totally unrelated to Dynamics.

So it was a good learning experience. Doing something outside of Dynamics and how it's handled in its own way.

Ivo:
I can definitely imagine that, but your career, like your studies were always around, I guess IT, technical engineering, development.

Matthew:
Yes, I started as a software developer in my university course and it's always been like that. So when I was when I was young, I used to play these these little video games and they wouldn't always work and I would like to try to fix them and say like so "OK, so there's something wrong with this and I don't know what it is but I want to fix it, so I need to know why." and then eventually when I got good at fixing the broken stuff then I started getting interested - "OK? This works, this works really well, but now why? Why is that? Why does that work well?"

And it just kept going on and on like that. And then obviously I picked up programming. My uncle had the computer store so I would visit there quite frequently. Yeah, I was growing up surrounded by these things and then it just made sense.

Ivo:
Yeah that's cool! I can really understand that. That's fascinating.

HR came into your life by chance? You know, what happened?

Matthew:
So yes, it was a bit by chance. When I started working at back at my previous company, I actually worked with FourVision products. So it was the HR Plus itself, the ISV that we have with for Dynamics. Generally on most client projects I worked, it was always HR customizations, and there was some Finance here and there. But it was mostly HR, so well, I wasn't really specializing into it, just always came that way and then it stuck.

Then when I came here, obviously with just HR specialists, it helped me to have this previous experience. But no, it wasn't, you know something that I planned for unplanned. It just happened and went along with it.

Ivo:
You're happy, do you think it's a nice area of business to be developing for? Or what you feel?

Matthew:
It is, because at the end of the day you're working to build systems to be used by people to manage other people, so it makes you think. The information: It's not just numbers, these are people. And you know, you have to build a system such a way. It makes it easier for the users and the people who are in the system as data to make their lives easier; to make better for them at the end of the day.

It keeps you grounded, like this isn't just random numbers and data. There's people working with it, so it's a different kind of mindset.

Ivo:
That's a very good perspective to have. I guess you can see the work having some impact on people, indeed. It's not just that you fix the problem, but actually this will have impact on and will translate into people's lives, in terms of business, right?

Matthew:
Yeah, something like working on skills management. Technically-wise, it's a very simple thing to do. But if you think about it, this will dictate someone life choice. So in their career prospects and everything. So it's something to working connected makes you think like this is something that will impact someone's life. That's something nice.

Ivo:
Yeah, definitely I agree to that. So looking at your role right now, in FourVision. You're a medior technical consultant. You know if you can explain in broad terms, what do you do? And what gets you most excited about about what you do?

Matthew:
As I mentioned before, I'm an integration specialist, so to speak so. As I said, I quite enjoy a challenge. I'm used to working with Dynamics, just working with some data and everything, but when it comes to integrating with other systems, which don't follow the same standard and concepts as Dynamics, then you have to think of how to make these things work together. And that is always branched from that, around two years into my Dynamics studies. I always wanted to continue working on that. So most of my stuff here is still integrations.

I mostly use Microsoft Azure to build integrations for customers between Dynamics and their current or new products that they're going to use. If they have some systems they want to keep and they want to integrate them into Dynamics, and our web apps as well. So if customers want to connect to web apps, so we want to include some new functionality. And so on and so forth. Even yet I'm still mostly integrations.

Ivo:
I understand. So you don't work only with the products that we provide, with the web apps; that integration of our web apps and our standard functionalities into Dynamics, but also with the other providers? So imagine that the customer has already a payroll provider. They're happy with they want to integrate that with the Microsoft Dynamics 365, and you help make that integration happen successfully?

Matthew:
That is precisely one of my roles right now. Yes, so customer has a specific payroll system and they wanted a real-time interface between Dynamics and and the system, so the change in Dynamics has to be reflected and needs nearly immediately be changed in their payroll system. So it was quite an interesting challenge. It was very fun to work with these real time things. They're also more complex, so they had their headaches. But yeah I don't just work within the FourVision Web Apps and Dynamics. Before I came here and there wasn't the FourVision Web Apps, so I had to work with many different systems.

At some point we had a crazy project. We had Dynamics and around 24 other systems surrounding it was quite a change.

Ivo:
24?! So you basically had to go into each application and see how they could connect together without having different languages between themselves?

Matthew:
Everything was completely different. You had file-based ones, who take a files once a day. We had ones that you had to do API requests automatically. You had some that would want the whole data. Some would want only the what change from last day, and so on and so forth. Everyone would have to fill formats. But at the end of the day, you still start from Dynamics, so you have to build a system that is dynamic enough to reflect all these changes without getting too complex. It was a very interesting solution that we came up with.

Ivo:
Awesome. That's a great insight, great example. It actually leads me to the next question. Of course you have a lot of experience with with Dynamics. What would you say is like the main benefit of that system? Is that is open enough that you can integrate, not everything, but a lot of things that it allows that it allows partners to come in, and build those integrations? I don't know, you tell us a bit, you know. What what do you think is the main benefit, because you have a lot of experience and clearly you like it. Otherwise I guess you would switch up to to another system because this doesn't work. What do you have to say there?

Matthew:
Well, the answer to that question depends on which Microsoft Dynamics product you are talking about. If we're talking F&O, you have much more instances. If we're talking HR, not so much. But you know, it will change in the coming months. For F&O, you have quite a lot of flexibility nowadays. You have the option to use the usual data management, so you have your big bulk files, you import thousands of records and it does the job for you. It's good for a big amount of data. It's not great for real time transactions, though. Because it's made to handle batch processes for thousands and millions of records.

For a long time, that was the most you could do, but then Microsoft included a lot of new options, more exciting options. Now we have OData which we can send single requests, and we get an instant reply: is this good, is this not. Can I react to what Dynamics is telling me, or do I have something wrong, I can fix it immediately and then try again. And that was a good addition.

Now Microsoft have added business events functionality, so you can react to stuff from happening inside Dynamics and it will be reflected outside, which is a good feature because the OData I mentioned before is just: Someone has to start the request and tell Dynamics. This is the other way around. Now someone can be working on Dynamics, and this can trigger an event outside. Which is basically what you need for real time communication. You have the options to send something as a request, and now you have the option to send something without even doing a request for it. So it allows you to build different kind of systems, which at the end of the day make more sense for the customer because they don't have to wait anymore. They see their results instantly.

For someone working in HR, you don't want to keep people waiting. You want the people to know what's going to happen as soon as possible, and you don't want your system to stop you from doing that.

Ivo:
Of course, of course. Yeah, that's very interesting. So from what you're saying, actually Microsoft worked towards making the system a bit more complex, but also a bit more open as well in flexibility, in making it available to integrate other solutions better, to make it a more complete system?

Matthew:
Correct? And of course, when we're talking about this, we must touch on Dataverse, which is obviously then the next big thing. So Microsoft have built this Dataverse concept which will link all their Dynamics systems into one pool, so all the data goes in there. F&O has has a lot of functionality to synchronize data to and from the Dataverse, you have other dynamics Products like CE and CRM which run natively on it, so updates are instant and in real time. And it's also coming up with new features.

We have the Power Platform, which is also built on Dataverse, and it allows you to even connect directly through social media. And those kind of interactions, so you can filter out and you can expose whatever you want. Even through social media and get answers there from people and and ingest them directly into Dataverse. So there's a lot of stuff that can be done through Dataverse, and now you can also get this into Dynamics. So there's a lot of possibilities.

Ivo:
Wow, now I get why you say Dataverse is like the next big thing indeed, because if allows all that... Common Data Service was before the previous name? But it was not doing the same thing? Or was it more limited?

Matthew:
It was in a sense. It just didn't have the features. I think the the goal was always for it to become like this... Hence the name Common Data Service. Microsoft wanted something to be the Common Data Service for all its products. But now it's no longer just that. There's a whole framework built on it where it will integrate with all these different devices, endpoints, social media, anything there so it can collect all the data from everywhere and then you process it in one place. It's easier when you have all the visibility in the same place, so you don't have to go through many systems to see what's going on.

Ivo:
I see. So if people don't know anything about the Dataverse, could you compare it to something like a AWS from Amazon, or something like that, or is it not really the same thing? Maybe it's a stupid question, but you're here...

Matthew:
No, I would compare AWS to Azure for example. That's the same thing. Dataverse is something which is, as the name implies, it's just data. So it's there to handle the data your systems use and to react on it. So what happens if this data changes? What happens if I get the request through Dataverse from from social media? Someone sends a message, we can pull the data from there. We know that this person has spoken to us before because we have these logs. And so on and so forth. So it's there to help you manage your data and to react efficiently to it, rather than building the complex tech services then.

Ivo:
OK, now I got it. Let's go maybe a level deeper because of course you are experienced with the integrations. You work a lot with the with that, and I also know that when you you already mentioned when you came in, there were no web apps, you were having these projects with full integrations. If you go a level deeper, how does this work in practice? What is the the potential that Microsoft has in its in its integrations and extensibility, that maybe other other tools don't have? Is it because it's not a closed loop system? Is it because it's completely flexible and allows for everyone to join in and work together with that main tool? What is your opinion about about that? What is your technical view on that?

Matthew:
So I take this example from an F&O perspective. It's a bit closed loop now, compared to what it was before. Obviously Microsoft has its reasons because it makes updates safer and easier, because you don't risk breaking clients code every time you do an update. So Microsoft obviously didn't want that.

Ivo:
Or maybe data breaches as well? Something like that or is it not the case in that in that sense?

Matthew:
That's not the case, because most of it is managed by Microsoft. So yes, I mean you could potentially put customizations on that could expose your data feed if you do something carelessly, but it can still be done, so it's up to developers to be careful when it comes to this. But even still, it's still a bit closed loop. You still have a lot of options, and as I mentioned before, the business events were a very good addition, so you can react to nearly any change in data happening inside Dynamics that you care about and you want to highlight this in your target system.

Say for example something changed, you have an employee, some of his data was changed in Dynamics and you want that to be available instantly in external systems. Without business events, this wasn't possible to do in real time. We had to wait for a batch process there to pick up here employees' data and send it across. It's a great improvement to what it was before. The connection with Dataverse allows for the same thing, so when Dynamics is, you can build the same thing in a different way.

So when Dynamics is synchronizing with Dataverse you can check to see if any data was changed and you can run triggers based off that. And the syncrhonization process happens all the time. It's constant, so it's very near real time. We're talking like a few seconds delay, maybe, which is negligible.

Ivo:
OK, would you say that other tools in the market you know that could be in the same level as Microsoft? Of course we know SAP and all that, but do you think they do the same kind of thing? Of course you mostly worked with Microsoft, but if you compare it, do you think Microsoft has a bit more flexibility or just not too big so it's simpler to do the integrations? What is your feel about that?

Matthew:
So that's I think the whole idea behind Dataverse. So Microsoft is trying to build a system where it's easier to react to this kind of data and to build integrations around it. So F&O as itself is quite a niche system. It has its own kind of development stack that and you have to learn to be able to work with it. Dataverse is much more relaxed and much more simple and intuitive to use.

Obviously Dynamics gives you more power if you know how to harness it and how to use it, but sometimes that's not always the case. Sometimes you just want to prototype something quickly and say: "OK. I have this data. Maybe if this, this and this changes, I can use this and I can give customers a better view on how their employees are handled." And yeah, sometimes doing it with Dataverse to try it is much faster than than building the whole system inside Dynamics.

Ivo:
OK, alright, well I think that was that was clear. Looking at your at your work, working in development with these types of tools, my first question regarding that is you know, what do you think are the main challenges that you face? Are they more technical indeed? They are more like codebase, because it cannot figure out exactly how - why is this breaking, why is it not? Or is like the types of requests sometimes are just out of bounds. Or something like "Oh no, the tool doesn't do this" So why are we having these requests from a customer? Because you know, it should be explained that the tool doesn't work like that. Tell me a bit about the about that about the challenges on your day to day work.

Matthew:
So yeah, I've had a couple of those in the past. Where either something was promised to a customer that didn't make technical sense when you actually look at it and try to build it. And it's quite often to be honest and. And it teaches you how to speak and how to portray things so that you don't give wrong assumptions. It's a tough challenge, especially for me, who's a developer and not used at being at the front-end. That was one of the challenges initially.

And you know, sometimes you try to work around it and you say, OK, maybe I didn't think of that, but it does make sense to try to approach it that way. Sometimes unfortunately, it's not possible and you just have to see how you're going to reject it. It doesn't happen so often here at FourVision now, because I'm mostly working on internal products. So I don't usually get this because we're working with new technologies that are changing all the time, and sometimes you read up on something, it's new, it's supposed to work this way, and it doesn't. And it just stopped because it's supposed to be good. Then you have to read more. You have to waste some time and after a lot of headaches, figure it out that you write it down so the next person doesn't run into the same problems as you.

Ivo:
Yeah no, I get it. Do you mostly work on new stuff? New functionality that we are creating? Do most of your requests come actually from customers or do they come from Microsoft? Or from our own development team. When we want to build something new, some new functionality within the app. Edward told us last week that you work with sprints and all that. Of course it's very natural in your area, but where are these requests coming from mostly? Directly from the customers or you also have it from the the Microsoft Community and that kind of stuff?

Matthew:
I'm mostly working on one client project right now and the internal stuff. So the client projects. Yes, they come from the client themselves. We have our requirements, but when you see it in practice and you start testing, you start to learn that these things. Maybe we're not as I thought they would be. So then we do some small changes here and there. But right now most of the time, the request come from the our development team themselves. So I have chats with Edward. And then he'll give me some tasks and he'll tell me like "We're doing it like this, this and this." And then I look into that.

Ivo:
OK. What do you like the most? Those internal requests or fixing some client's problem?

Matthew:
Oh no, the internal requests definitely. Yes!

Ivo:
Yeah I guess you are more of a back office back-end guy indeed. But I have to say that you know you're doing pretty well here. Maybe you should relate more to customers. I don't know. You're speaking really well. Giving giving us good insights.

Matthew:
No, it's more about that. As I said from a pure technical perspective, the stuff that we do internally is more technically engaging and exciting for me. It's not just because it's a customer project or not. That's not really all there is to it.

Ivo:
That's clear. That's clear, understood, OK, last question for you. You work in development, so you working already in functionalities and those kinds of things that are coming in the future already. So I'm not gonna say say like what are the HR trends you see like we ask a lot of people coming from this HR area. But in terms of technical opportunities, developments that you see in the Microsoft world, is there anything that picks your attention, that you're excited about, things that might come even in the near future? There are there that you think will be important for this technology for specifically for HR technology.

Matthew:
Well, yes, as I mentioned before, the the whole real-time thing is quite a big deal right now because HR for example, you're hiring candidates don't want to keep them waiting. The faster and easier to have your your data available, and you can reply to someone even if unfortunately it's a rejection. It's good to let them know and not, you know, spend weeks just because your business process is holding you back and because your system is holding you back at the end of the day.

So these kinds of real time things will allow customers to work with their data and move it across systems faster. Not how it used to be, when they had to wait overnight for the data to be updated and then can work on it the next day. You maybe forget what you were doing and you skip some things. So this will hopefully help steer in that direction. And it's something that our web apps are now starting to look towards as well, so I'm quite excited to be in.

Ivo:
Interesting. Smore speed, more power to the customer, more flexibility and more efficiency. Which is I think is the most important thing.

Matthew:
Yes, that's the most important part at the end of the day.

Ivo:
Perfect. Alright. Matthew, this was great. You shared great insights. I hope the people listening enjoyed. Did you enjoy it as well?

Matthew:
Yes, yes I did actually thank you very much.

Ivo:
Good good, that's great. Now go enjoy the sun in Malt. And for the people listening out there. Thank you so much for being here and we'll see you on the next episode.