#MVPbuzzChat with Sonia Cuff

In Episode 14 of #MVPbuzzChat, I caught up with fellow Office Servers & Services MVP Sonia Cuff (@Cuff_S), virtual-CIO and co-founder of The Missing Chair, and based in Brisbane, Australia, while the two of us attended the annual MVP Summit held each year on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington.

In this video, captured outside of Building 92 at Microsoft on a typical Puget Sound overcast day, Sonia and I chatted a bit about the summit, and then quickly jumped into her work with small to medium-sized businesses, and the need to constantly “translate” what we learn as MVPs and provide guidance for customers and end users on how to take advantage of these latest features — and help people understand use cases and scenarios that can help them to be more productive. That’s always the danger of chasing technology, without ever taking the time to understand what your business (or project, or workload) actually requires. Sonia makes a great point about how sometimes you’re not aware of all of the features, and might be using a technology incorrectly, and other times you’re trying to force-fit a technology when what you actually need is something very different. I’ve said for years that every project or initiative begins as a business analyst activity: you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish before moving forward. People rely too much on software marketing, and fail to understand the myriad of ways that their business might be different from those ideal scenarios.

Toward the end of the discussion, we also touched on one aspect of the future of enterprise collaboration: the Graph, and the ability to delve (pun intended) into the analytics of your personal activities, and better understand how you’re using your time. Wish we had had more time to expand on that topic.

However, if you’d like to connect directly with Sonia, she can be found on the Microsoft Tech Community, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or you can visit her website at https://soniacuff.com/