HEATHER NEWMAN: Hello everyone. Here we are again for another Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts who bring a light to our world. I am very excited to be here at a ESPC19 in Prague and I am sitting here with the awesome Elaine Van Bergen. Hello.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Hello. I think I want you to be my hype woman. That's awesome!
HEATHER NEWMAN: No problem. Happy, happy to do so. So, you know, we're here at another Microsoft conference. Um, well it's, it's a third party conference, but there's a lot of Microsoft folks here, including yourself. Um, do you, uh, tell everybody where you're from and uh, your, your wonderful job.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, so I am from Melbourne, Australia, so down the bottom of Australia and I'm all the way over here in Prague, so long way to come. Um, and I work in the Commercial Software Engineering team at Microsoft. So that's the team that goes around and codes with organizations that are trying to do some stuff with, you know, machine learning, AI, kind of cutting edge things and we help them do that. And I specialize in the health space. So that keeps me super busy.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. So health space meaning healthcare?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Healthcare, yes.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. Got it. Oh wow. So you're going in and is it mostly hospitals or is it bigger conglomerates or what's the?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, well, it's a bit of a bit of a range because, um, healthcare is different all over in different countries. So, um, one of the projects I've just done was with a very large government department in Australia called new South Wales Health. And they're a bit unique because they actually have a part of the organization that runs all the pathology centers in the entire state. So they have that kind of mandate where they can then do projects with, with that kind of scale. Whereas a lot of other places in Victoria where I live, there's four or five different private entities that do that same function. So it's a big range. It's so, so exciting and different wherever you go.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, that's cool. And so it's, you're based in Australia, in Melbourne and, but this, this organization that you belong to and your job is, is globally.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. So CSE is a global team. Um, and so then we have some people which are in dev crews that spend all their time coding and others of us that are specialized in industry areas. And so the healthcare team is sort of one of the, the smaller ones cause it's bit new. Um, and there's a bunch of bunch of the team in the US bunch in the UK and then a few in Europe and me on the other side of the world.
HEATHER NEWMAN: That's so cool. Have you ever been to the HIMSS conference?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: HIMSS no, I've heard fantastic things about HIMSS. Um, yeah, it's on my to do list for sure.
HEATHER NEWMAN: For everybody listening HIMSS is the largest health care show that happens in the world and it's, I think it's usually in February. I think it's in like Orlando a lot of the time.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. And they actually do regional ones as well. So they're all different ones all around the world with slightly different focuses.
HEATHER NEWMAN: And it's kind of an organization too that I think one can belong to in different ways with chapters and that kind of stuff. There's some of that too. That's super cool.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. And we are quite lucky in that at Microsoft we have, um, industry teams that are in the local subsidiaries. So in Australia there's a health care team and they have a doctor who's a member of the team, an ex-nurse as well. So as a technologist I can then partner with them and make sure that anything we're doing is, you know, ethically aligned and actually, because obviously someone can't just learn health care. Super quickly.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Boom, now I know everything.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: And now I'm a doctor!
HEATHER NEWMAN: Snap, snap, my gloves. Yeah. Yeah. That's so wild. So yeah, I guess that begs the question, like how you get to leverage these people and work with them and understand things. How much health care knowledge did you have kind of coming into this and did it, did it matter or does it, did, was it like I can learn this or?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, so I had a little bit in that I'd worked with a bunch of hospitals in my previous consulting jobs and a few other organizations. Um, but yeah, definitely not able to talk all those acronyms when I came in. And, and as we're a team that works together sort of picked up a bunch of those. Um, but also I've been learning a lot about what we should do and what we shouldn't do. You know, my first healthcare projects, it's always, um, been impressed on me that we don't want to replace clinicians, or, you know, actual medical experts.
HEATHER NEWMAN: With robots.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: With robots. That's one area where I think we differentiate at Microsoft to compared to some of the other players in the market. Um, where we talk about human plus robot can hopefully help do things. And that's, you know, there's some great scenarios where we can help give overworked clinicians more time to spend with their patients, by taking a little load off them.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, sure. That's super cool. So how did you get started in IT? Like, like where you're from, from like that origin story stuff.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, I was a natural born geek, um, type. I've always been into IT. The story my dad tells is that when I was a kid I wanted a computer and so he gave me parts of a computer and we had to build it together.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Wow, that's awesome.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, he used to work in IT, so, and I can't even remember if that's true or not, but that's his story. Right? Um, and then yeah, even at school I did IT stuff. Went into a degree which was joint electrical engineering and computer science. Um, because I thought initially I wanted to build computers and then really loved the programming stuff the most and ended up in bouncing around through a bunch of different, different companies. Doing a bit of consulting. Then landed at OBS which was the company that built Nintex. So, did a little bit of product and consulting. Eventually made my way to Microsoft.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Wow. Sure. That's a cool trajectory. I love your story about your dad. I wonder, can you guess like what computer it was potentially? I know you don't remember, but like I wonder what it was like or if you know, like a Commodore 64?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: No, it would have, we had a BBC computer at home before that, so that was, but it would have been like an x86 or you know, it was just that era.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. Wow. That's so funny. Did you feel like growing up in Australia, like the, in Melbourne as well, that you know, is tech one of those things, you've always been a geek, right? You were just saying like, is that something that's really prevalent there? You know, as far as like going after that when you were in school and then, you know, there's, I'm sure there's colleges and stuff, but is that a, is that a, is tech like something that a lot of people go into?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Uh, seem to be relatively prominent and I guess, yeah, I was lucky in that, uh, wasn't until I got to university and, and there was only one other female in the electrical engineering class that I was in that I even had any concept of perhaps not everyone goes into IT and I, I loved it. So, you know, I, it was kind of, yeah, never sort of saw or any of that, that other side of things. Um, but yeah, I mean I'm part of this organization or organization at the moment called Science and Technology Australia as one of the superstars of STEM. And the purpose of that is to get all these science and science and technologists out into the media and talking to kids at schools and stuff. Because the scary thing is in Australia, the numbers of people coming out of school and going into science and tech, particularly females is actually going down. It's lower than when I came out of school.
HEATHER NEWMAN: And you're not that old, but still.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. It was a little while ago and it should be going up.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. One would think. I wonder why that is?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, I mean that's a really hard question because um, I also balance that out with so many people I know. And the reason that was we had to kind of apply for it and it was a big competition to kind of get in. And the reason I did that was because so many people I know accidentally ended up in IT and they love it, particularly people from diverse backgrounds. They thought IT was going to be boring or they'd be locked in a basement coding or whatever. And it's not any of that stuff and they love it. So I don't know whether that's some of the reasoning. Um, I was talking to another person last week who's in kind of tertiary education and around how when people come out of school with high marks, they're told they should do medicine or law. And IT would waste their time and maybe that's part of it, but that's always been around.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Completely. I wonder if it's also about like that it's not seen as creative.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yes.
HEATHER NEWMAN: You know, like to me being a theater major, I, I thought technology was the one place that I had seen where the excitement and the passion and that creativity was on point. You know.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. Yeah. And that's why something I always make sure I talk about particularly to school students and you know, young people in the industry. Cause, I mean that's part of what I loved about it. You don't have to follow all the rules either. You know,
HEATHER NEWMAN: Right, you can break stuff.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: You can break stuff; you can try different ways. That's what it's what it's all about. I can't draw, I can't paint. People can't even read my handwriting. Um, but I can build something. So, yeah, my form of creativity is putting some code together that does something awesome.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. That's awesome. Um, so with what you're doing with healthcare and we've got, you know, Office365 and Teams and all of that stuff, what are you seeing for that space that they're really latching onto?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. Well some of it is really simple things cause particularly in the healthcare market, while it's not particularly unique, I guess they have less money than some other places and they've always got this competing kind of thing where I could buy a machine that saved someone's life or I could do an IT project. Most of the time you're going to buy the machine.
HEATHER NEWMAN: IT is not winning that. As much.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Exactly. And so, um, but those systems that they do have get really, really old. They're still awesome, but they're not great to interact with. So we're seeing a lot of popularity in putting, you know, PowerApps and Power Automate and Flow on top of things or pushing just notifications into Teams and getting the data to where people can collaborate on it. Not necessarily removing it from that awesome system, but you know, just here's a nice interface where you can enter things in. Or see a report in PowerBI and other amazing just proper reports. Um, some of the reports that I've seen coming out of health that the people are using look like 20 years ago cause that's when they were built.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes total sense. Wow. Um, and so what do you do when you're not traveling? Cause you're like, how much do you travel?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Oh, it depends. Month to month. Um, yeah. So this month I've traveled a lot cause I've had, but it's been for like four different completely unrelated things.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Work and play?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Mostly work. I went to science meets parliament to, um, where they connect technologists and scientists with politicians in Australia.
HEATHER NEWMAN: What, um, that's cool.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: That was super cool and interesting and they, you know, they'd teach us about how, how politics works and how it could potentially influence that. Um, and then this conference obviously before that we were lucky enough to have Satya visit Sydney, so had a big event for, for that.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. So when you, yeah. So when you aren't doing the travel, like getting some balance in your life. What's, what's the, what's your recipe for success there?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Well, I mean, what I love about Microsoft is how flexible it is. So, you know, sometimes particularly to get to somewhere like Prague, you have to fly on a Saturday or Sunday and so then, you know, you typically won't work a couple of days and most of the time, um, I'll spend a lot of time working from home, which is great. Like I'll Monday I'll drive my kids to school, pick them up from school. Um, and yeah, just all that kind of kind of thing. Um, chilling out at home. Yeah. Over Christmas everyone's like, Oh, you're going to go away? I'm like, Nope, I'm just going to actually be at home.
HEATHER NEWMAN: There's something to the, I don't know, recharge.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yes.
HEATHER NEWMAN: You know, and the rebalancing yourself when you've just, I travel a lot too, as you know, we see each other at these things a lot and half the time, you know, we've like, we pass each other, give each other a high five and like everybody, when we were walking up here, I was about to go to the bathroom and we were coming over to find a place to sit and I think you and I both yawned so big that we could have caught like a million flies. It was just, we were both like, okay, totally. Okay. Yeah. Well, okay, we're going to get this done in and, but, but you know what I mean it is.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: It gets exhausting. Yeah. And so the last thing I want to do over a holiday period is then go on holiday when everyone else is on holiday.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Well yeah, right? I mean, yes, NO. Yeah.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: I'll go when it's nice and quiet. And again, the work flexibility is great for that.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Absolutely. And how long have you been at Microsoft then?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Almost three years. Flies really fast.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, no kidding. That's a blink. And you were, you said you were a consultant before. What were you doing then?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, so I had an interesting career trajectory in that I've worked at a bunch of different places and I kept, um, ending up managing teams of people. So.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Not Microsoft Teams, but teams "of people", actual humans. Okay.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Um, which, which I liked, but I really love technical stuff. And so I've sort of, you know, at one stage I was managing a team of 80 people for example. That's a lot of people and obviously that wasn't all 80 reporting to me that would be crazy.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Is it the same thing as they say with kids, like if you have three, you can just have four and it's fine. And so like if you have 50 and there's another 30, it's totally cool.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Not if you want to do it well. I like to say that people shouldn't manage directly anyway more than about five people cause you just don't have time. So, um, yeah, with that many people, you have all kinds of managers below you that manage their teams and report up. But yeah, I don't mind managing people. I thought it was fun, but no one ever came to me and said, Hey, you're the best manager I've ever met. Um, while I do get compliments some of the technical stuff, Hey, I need you to answer this question. And that's what I love about Microsoft. There's roles where you don't have to manage people to move up in the hierarchy where most everywhere else you hit that ceiling and you have to manage people whether you like it or not or want to or not.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there's an art to it as well. And you know, not everybody is a manager.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yup. Yeah. I mean, I did, I've done an MBA and a bunch of other courses and you know, I think I was a good manager, but it wasn't my passion. It wasn't my passion. Tech stuff's my passion and I don't mind roles where I do a lot of tech and still manage some people. But when you get to that stage of having a large team where you're spending all your time managing people and KPIs and budgets and all that kind of thing, that that's not my thing. And it's other people love it. They should do that.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Have you ever, uh, owned your own business and maybe that's a no, because of all that stuff you were like, Oh, that's a big uh-uh for me?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Not for me. Yeah.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Any desire?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: No, no, not at this stage in my career. Who knows? Maybe later. Um, I mean I'm, I'm divorced and got two kids and the stability of having a job where I know everything that's happening, it's not going up and down is what I'm after.
HEATHER NEWMAN: You can't see the smile on her face about that, but it's a pretty big one. It is an interesting thing because it's like you, I don't know, I think we, we, we all look at that. You know, whether to be a consultant and you were consultant for a while. Yeah. And the ebb and flow. How was that for you? I mean, did you really feel like the roller coaster of being a consultant of getting jobs in and not and things going away and stuff?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, and luckily, um, when I worked at OBS, um, Brian Culkin and Brett the managers there.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Cause that's when I met you. Cause we've known each other a long time, way back right? Yeah, because I have known you forever.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, and they had great ways where they'd explain a lot of that to, to the team and to the employees. So we always knew like, you know, how much, how you make money in consulting. And I always knew that pretty much a month before financial year ends every year I want to quit because you do, it's just so busy. But I guess when you get taught and you know, learn about how the business actually works, it's, I think that's a lot, lot easier to cope with. I, yeah, I didn't mind the, the pressure. I quite liked that, that piece of it for consulting. But I do with startup stuff, I live vicariously through, um, some things that I do like, um, SheEO, which is, um, an organization where, where they preach radical generosity to, um, to start ups. So essentially what you do as a activator, which is what I am, is we give, um, $1,100 a year and it's not like an investment. You just give the money and then you get to vote from a bunch of female led startups that are all trying to change the world to work on the world's to do list and you vote for who's going to be the winners of that. And then the people that get through the final, they, they get together, the women running the businesses and they decide how to divide up what's a five year loan. Um, and yeah, it's been running in Canada for quite a few years.
HEATHER NEWMAN: What's it called again?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: She-E-O. And so it's super cool cause you just meet so many amazing women running businesses and all the things they're solving and all that kind of thing. And then you can still, you know, obviously even if they're not finalists, you get connected with all these people, see what they're doing, their businesses. It's amazing. Um, and so far everyone's paid back the money over those five year terms and then it becomes in Canada cause it's been running long enough, essentially a perpetual fund now. In Australia, it's only been running for, this is its second year.
HEATHER NEWMAN: That's so cool. Um, with, with the healthcare stuff, do you find that, are you working mostly with like the IT admin or are you, you know, you said you work with a bunch of different people, but is there like sort of one scenario that sticks out to you most?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: If we were working purely with it, I would flag it as an issue.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Fair enough. Right?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. Yeah. And that, yeah, there's always, I mean, you do have to be very careful about, um, we were doing something recently where some ER surgeons were involved and they're pretty busy people. They've got really important lives to save. So you know, they're not going to turn up to every meeting and you have to be very careful with their time. But typically there's always some actual what you'd call business users, involved. Particularly anything, you know, it's changing management 101 with AI, machine learning, those kinds of things. You have to get people involved early, make sure they understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and they have a big say in the design because we're building it for, for them.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, absolutely. I was recently at the doctor and I was um, for some routine stuff, and I always, you know, I'm sure you do this too, whenever you're anywhere, you always like peek around to see what version of like the cash register, or you know, the monitor in your doctor's office or whatever. And I'm, I'm, and that was something with HIMSS too, in a way that I felt like, you know, with healthcare, because I worked doing some cybersecurity stuff for a bit and that's why I went to HIMSS and like it, it seemed to me that healthcare, financial services, utilities, those three were seemingly to me, my own personal opinion, a little bit more behind.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Absolutely. Yeah. There's so much that happens in healthcare still with paper even. Um, and that's why some, some scenarios where we're doing amazing things with data and analyzing it or looking at x-rays or whatever. But then, yeah, a lot of those, hey, just provide a PowerApps form where someone can actually type a reading. Um, say for example, the recent project we did was around collecting point of care testing and getting it into Azure and then doing some results off it. Because what often happens is someone will go and take a patient's test results, write it on a bit of paper, then go over type it into the machine that it goes into. Sometimes they are direct connected, but sometimes they're not. And in this case, we've just, um, you know, sort of hooked up these five point of care testing devices to a particular IOT hub that then can communicate securely. But that also means not only the results actually going into, there's no typing errors or writing errors, but then in, in this case, we're using it to help predict the risk of sepsis for that patient. And then we can send a notification through to the clinician to say if the patient is medium or high likelihood that they should then run a bunch of other tests. Whereas in the past, you kind of, the doctor would have to go and check a screen for some of that. And that's a fairly simple scenario, right. Um, but you know, it's just gone into seven pathology centers in, in new South Wales, and then hopefully it will roll out further and could end up saving lives. Which is an amazing scenario.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder, will they, will they sort of pilot that and that'll become the standard way to do whatever's going to be next.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. Yeah. So it started with sepsis because it's a relatively easy model, so it doesn't require a huge amount of computation. And you know, is a nice scenario because it is also the leading killer of most people. So yeah, it's a really impactful one, but not hugely technically complex. And now they've, they've piloted in these pathology centers, you can ramp up to a whole bunch more so that, yeah, that was sort of part of Satya's, um, keynote presentation when he was in Australia.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, I just, I find the health care industry super fascinating and like I, I was again, the doctor thing I did, uh, um, I'm with, uh, I won't say any actual names of healthcare providers, but I have one that I pay for and um, thank you Affordable Care Act, um, in the United States and I, uh, there's, uh, around the West coast, that particular provider is in Washington state, Oregon, California and Hawaii. And great. Well, I'm in Southern California dealio, I used to live in Northern California, so I have a Southern California number, medical ID, I have an NorCal ID number. I went up to Washington and I had to deal with this molar that I got pulled out of my face and, and I've got a Washington state number and when I lived in Hawaii, I have a Hawaiian number. Now my medical records do not.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. They're not synced between all of that.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. What the heck?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, it's very common. And um, yeah, and you know, of course it doesn't matter when you're young and really healthy, but, but.
HEATHER NEWMAN: When you don't care and you're like, where were the, who was the doctor anyway, right? Yeah.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. There's a lot of things that get, get missed not through any fault of the clinicians, but where somebody's had maybe an allergy to a medication at one place. And because those records aren't synced, they've got no idea. And if they can't tell people, it can cause real, real issues. So, yeah, creating a unified electronical medical records very, very popular. And even just, I mean your experience was probably also a lot of waiting, right? Like how much time did you actually spend waiting or on the phone or booking appointments versus the actual medical care?
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, no, I mean there was, when I'm in my area, I can use my app. I can do my, you know, prescription, all that kind of jazz. But they have this visiting thing that's kind of cool. You know, if you're on assignment or whatever, you can use it, but you have to call, you have to figure out if you can get, you know, labs moved over there or you have to go get a new doctor and you know, if you have routine labs. It was just, it's just fascinating to me that like we're so we can save lives and are wonderful at that kind of thing. But just like literally tracking, you know, that like I've, I've gotten the rubella immunization or whatever, you know, and keeping, like I literally, I took a picture of my medical records in two different places and I brought him to the new doctor and like, cause I was just like, Oh my God! This is bananas. Right.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Do you find that, uh, when you're working, you know, with the hospitals, like, do you ever, like, are you going to them or is it all on like your mostly stuff online or,
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, well, yeah, it, it, it depends. Um, yeah, lots of IT departments of hospitals are actually in the hospital. Usually in some poor little basement. Because they're not, patients are more important than the IT staff. Right. So um,
HEATHER NEWMAN: That's hilarious that they're down in the middle of nowhere.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. I can be, can be like that. Um, with new South Wales health pathology, they have the best location ever cause they're actually part of a government department. But they, they live in a place called Newcastle where from their office you can see and walk to the beach.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Okay. That does not stink at all.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: They have an amazing work environment.
HEATHER NEWMAN: That's awesome. What were you presenting here on?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Building better bots.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Say that again cause it's so fun listening to you say that.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Building better bots.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Better bots, that's fantastic. Okay. So talk to us about that. Tell everybody about that a little bit.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, I find with a lot of conversations I get into, people want bots and they haven't really thought through whether the bots are actually going to be useful for their users. So,
HEATHER NEWMAN: Not everybody is a techie, so tell everybody what a bot is and what that means to you.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Really, a bot is anything that you tend to chat to in an interface. And so you will have seen some of the very annoying ones when you go to the website and a little picture pops up and it says, can I help you? Those kind of thing, right. Yeah. And so part of what I talk about is that bots shouldn't pretend to be humans. They should just be a bot. Because as an end user, if you know something's a bot, you're not expecting it to respond like a human. So you tend to be a bit more forgiving if it can't do everything, which it won't be able to do everything. But also it should do something, it should do something quicker, easier, faster for a person.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's cool. And how does that, does that, how did you come up with that? Does it relate to like other bots that you're recommending for?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, well it's come up a lot, there's been a lot of conversations, um, in various customers that I've been involved with. And with bots in healthcare, there's, there's then a whole ethical part on top around should it be a bot or if it's a bot, how do we make sure that it can escalate to a human? And we do actually have responsible bot guidelines at Microsoft. So some of the talk has come from that to say if you, you know, firstly people come and say, I want to build a bot and it's going to do like patient triage or something. Like don't start there. Right. I mean, it sounds silly. We all should know this, but it's amazing how, how often people go, you know, the IT director said we need a bot. Can we do it for this human critical task? Let's walk a bit first. Let's run later.
HEATHER NEWMAN: That makes so much sense. That's so interesting. Um, so with grow, have you lived anywhere else?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: I was born in the UK, but I moved to Australia when I was five. So not that I can really remember living anywhere else for this. I’ve always been in Melbourne and it's so fantastic in Melbourne. I don't know that I'll ever live anywhere else.
HEATHER NEWMAN: It is fantastic in Melbourne. I really enjoyed it too. You know, people would do the whole Sydney, Sydney, Sydney, and you know, it's lovely and there's the opera house, but Melbourne's got a great feel to it. It's just, yeah,
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: It's just a bit more chilled and there's great food and yeah, Sydney does have the amazing tourist attractions. I always tell people they should, they should go there. Um, but yeah, I love, love Melbourne. Um, I do love visiting other places, just not where I want to live somewhere else
HEATHER NEWMAN: Completely. And do you tend to see, uh, the, the community there, so we talk a lot about our community and MVPs and you know, other, you know, all of that. Do you, uh, do you hang out with, you know, that community as well and is it pretty big in Australia there?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah, well, luckily because I was MVP for so long before I was joined Microsoft, they still let me hang out with them. They haven't shunned me for joining the blue mothership. Yeah, no, we still, it is a really nice friendly community. So, um, now there's some user groups that run. Now I don't, I don't think it's um, uh, always a good idea if Microsoft runs a user group, I think it's better if it's run by the community itself. And now instead of the user groups that I used to run, I will be the person that helps them host it at Microsoft because they need a full time employee to get the venue. That also means I get to hang out with everyone and chat and help with different events. Um, I think we've got Ignite the Tour coming up in, in February, which I'll go to and hang out with all the local folks.
HEATHER NEWMAN: That's super cool. Yeah. I love, I, every time I see you and we, when we have talked or I see you doing something, you are the epitome to me of somebody who loves what they do.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: I do.
HEATHER NEWMAN: And it's, it's, so, it's, that's not, it's rare.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Yeah. And it's not to say, you know, some people think that everyday must be awesome. I'm like, well, no, no, no, no, there are definitely some hard days. Um, yeah, I mean I went to Boston for three days. It was awesome because it was the first time I met any of my teammates in person. So I love the time I was there. But boy did the jet lag kick in when I got home. There was some hard days. Yeah. So, every day is, is not amazing. But yeah, I get to use cool technology. I get to help people learn how to do that. And occasionally some of those projects will maybe save some lives or change some lives.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Absolutely. Changing the world every day.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: It's amazing.
HEATHER NEWMAN: That's pretty cool.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: I can't believe it's a job.
HEATHER NEWMAN: I know, you always have that same look on your face. I'm always like, she loves what she does. It's so cool. So, um, last question or comment, um, I always talk to people about sparks or people and, uh, things or happenings in their lives that sort of really got you to where you are today. Is there something you can share with our listeners about that?
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: Um, uh, one of the things that really got me here was being part of that, that Nintex journey. Even though I was sort of a very small part of, um, one, some of the teams that, that built that product, but you know, like being part of a team that wrote some code and did some testing or whatever, and then we'd suddenly get calls and it's like, Oh, Boeing's using it or this massive company. And we're this little company of a few people down in Australia. But yeah, I mean that, that was amazing to see how far you could go with IT. But also the fact that the guys that run that company will always very good at sharing how it'll work. Like it wasn't magic. So you know, I still use heaps of stuff I learned from back then in my everyday cause I understand how business actually works.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, absolutely. And such good people.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: They're really good.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah. And it is, I think, I think I onboarded OBS and Nintex into the SharePoint partner ecosystem, back in the day, you know, it was one of those, cause they were a little bit later than some of the first partners.
HEATHER NEWMAN: So yeah. That's cool. And that's what got me connected with everyone that's here. Right. It just went on from, from there.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Some of those first jobs where you get to see the growth of a company from start to finish. Really do. Yeah. Stick with you. That's cool. That makes a lot of sense.
ELAINE VAN BERGEN: I mean, I've also, you know, my, my first ever manager, which was actually the job before that, um, Andy Newman is still a good mate of mine as well. So, you know, just those people that you meet and yeah, they're amazing. Amazing at what they do and inspire me.
HEATHER NEWMAN: And you lift each other up. That's awesome. I'm so happy we finally, we've been trying to do this for a little while, so I'm so happy we got to do it here. It's a delight to talk to you. And I really, every time I see you, y'all, she has this beautiful smile on her face. You look happy all the time, and I don't mean to be like, and I know we all have our moments of not happy, but I really, you're somebody that I always look at and I go, Oh, it's cool that you really love what you do. And I, and it's, and it's one of those things that I think we all can aspire to.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Thank you very much. Yeah. Always lovely to chat.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for being on the show.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Thank you very much.
HEATHER NEWMAN: Awesome. Well everybody, that was another Mavens Do It Better podcast. And you can catch us on the various places on the interwebs. And here's to another big beautiful day on this blue spinning sphere.