The following is the first in a series of blogs about how a center of excellence can help you unlock the potential of your people and Power Platform.
How Power Platform Can Change How Your Business Operates
When businesses think of innovation, they often think of a new product that can generate new business or a new way to reach customers and facilitate relationship building. The ability to do those things is important, but it’s not all that innovation is about.
The innovation businesses need is often just the ability to do things faster and better — innovation that can come from within the business. Eliminating cumbersome, time-consuming tasks and automating where possible can drive efficiencies in an organization and create real value.
This is where Microsoft Power Platform comes in. Power Platform isn’t just a single tool – it’s a suite of tools that drives innovation. These tools include Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Automate specifically, and they can aid development in a new and simple way.
Collectively, these tools make Power Platform the low-code platform that enables more people within the business to make a difference. At a time when innovation and efficiency is crucial, you no longer have to rely on IT teams to develop all of your applications. Forrester says that Power Apps and Power Automate transform “the IT function from a blocker to an enabler” by allowing others outside of the traditional innovation centers to improve business processes while IT has other, often larger scale, focuses.”
There are, however, potential pitfalls with this approach. The ability to innovate is great, but some controls are needed to maintain consistency and move in a common direction. If you’re going to make the most out of Power Platform, you will need to implement a center of excellence (COE).
Throughout this series, we will explore why a COE is necessary to bring the most out of Power Platform by examining:
- The maker movement
- How Power Platform enables makers
- How a COE helps you make the most out of Power Platform
- When you need a COE
- COE team structure
- How to get started
In this blog, we will begin by looking at the maker movement and how Power Platform enables makers.
The Maker Movement
The IT department is no longer the sole source of innovation.
This transition has come in phases. For a long time, IT was seen simply as the function that kept the lights on. More recently, however, IT has become the driver of innovation as businesses seek ways to become more efficient, create new lines of business, and reach their customers wherever and whenever their customers want.
Unfortunately, IT can at times be seen as a bottleneck to innovation. Sometimes the IT department doesn’t have the time to develop system improvements or address non-critical items. This has helped to fuel what’s called the “maker movement.”
These “makers” – or “citizen developers,” as Microsoft has called them – are people throughout the business that are embedded within the work. They look different in every business, often with varying job responsibilities.
Think of these makers as horizontal IT, as opposed to a traditional vertical. The main thing makers have in common is that they don’t have the technical background to develop and deploy applications, but they do have some level of aptitude and ideas. For example, take the heavy Excel users in your organization and the work that they are able to accomplish with that tool. Power Platform can help these workers bring life to their ideas.
How Power Platform Enables the Maker Movement
In the next blog in this series, we will examine how Power Platform enables these makers – and how that benefits your business.
Learn More
To learn more about how a Power Platform COE can drive innovation in your business, follow this link and download the guide.
