The Microsoft Power Platform is the business application platform produced by Microsoft to drastically improve business productivity. The three key technologies in the Power Platform are Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI and while powerful together when connected to Office 365, Azure and Dynamics 365 the possibilities for process automation become almost endless.
Organisations are built on processes, but processes are implemented by people with technology.
As an organisation, you have lots of business processes, whether they are organisational wide processes, team-based processes or even individuals that create processes for themselves. With all this process several IT headaches are typically caused:
Shadow IT – IT not understanding where all the businesses applications exist, what technologies they are based on and who is creating these systems.
Management Information (MI) & Business Intelligence (BI) – With IT not understanding the location and structure of all these systems are different. No common data source, no common technology and no common development technologies all make creating MI and BI costly and difficult.
End of life IT – Technology evolves, old technology gets deprecated and support comes to an end.
Accountability – Who created that access database, did they create that access database instead of doing their day job, does the database conform to our organisational policies and regulations? These are all questions asked when IT don’t know who is creating systems or how they are implementing them.
How can the Power Platform Help?
The Power Platform can help solve many IT headaches. IT teams can become aware of what systems are being created, who are creating these systems and control what data these systems access. The Power Platform can help by:
Shadow IT – to access the Power Platform the user must log into Office 365; this means that nothing can sit underneath a desk! Everything that is created has an accountable person behind it that can be easily viewed and monitored. Also, IT can implement solutions such as the Centre of Excellence to monitor the environment.
MI & BI – turning the data that you store into opportunity by empowering decision-makers to make better decisions by having more accurate data. This can be extended to utilise Azure to provide even richer reporting experiences on large quantities of data.
End of life IT – with the Power Platform being cloud-based it is evergreen. This means that Microsoft continually works on improving the service. If the platform is missing a key item of functionality then organisations can create suggestions that Microsoft reviews and could potentially implement into the service.
Accountability – create business processes to support the technology so that employees are aware of the standards that should be adhered to when creating systems.
Getting started
The way that the Power Platform is designed is to enable users in an organisation to create their own apps and workflows. It is likely that you already have a footprint of the Power Platform in your organisation and you just aren’t aware of what that looks like. That is where helper solutions like the Centre of Excellence (CoE) starter kit can be truly eye-opening to highlight what is being created, who is creating and how to monitor the creation.
CPS can help by walking through key design principles for the Power Platform by ensuring that you have appropriate data loss prevention enabled, an environment architecture planned out and a strategy on how to roll out the technology to end-users.
To find out how you can get started, contact us today or attend one of our forthcoming Power Platform events.
Author
A solution architect and Microsoft Power Platform specialist, Jack has been the lead trainer for CPS' App in a Day events and has taught the fundamentals of Power Apps to over 1,000 people.
