The following is the second in a series of blogs about how a center of excellence can help you unlock the potential of your people and Power Platform.
In our last blog, we examined what Power Platform is and a little bit about the history of the maker movement. In this blog, we will examine how exactly Power Platform aids makers.
For a bit of a summary, “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. Power Platform can help them bring these ideas to life.
How Makers Can Leverage Power Platform
It’s vital to understand that Power Platform isn’t a single tool. Instead, it’s a suite of tools operating on a single platform.
- Power Apps – Build and launch low-code applications with pre-built templates and simple, quick deployment.
- Power Automate – Create workflows that automate both individual tasks and large-scale systems.
- Power BI – Enable anybody in the organization to view analytics in real time in order to gain meaningful insights, with AI built into the system.
- Power Virtual Agents – Create intelligent chatbots to serve internal and external customers using a guided, no-code graphical interface.
The beauty of all of these tools is the simplicity with which they can be used by non-developers. In the case of makers, this is especially useful, with Power Apps and Power Automate enabling them to not just build applications, but also to automate time-consuming processes and improve business operations.
That’s not to say IT can’t also utilize Power Platform to create crucial applications, but the simplicity of the platform clears the bottleneck that’s often created by mission-critical applications consuming the development team’s time.
As Forrester’s “Total Economic Impact Study of Power Apps and Power Automate” reported, leveraging Power Platform reduced the costs of developing an application by an average of 70%, eliminated outside vendor costs, increased process automation and efficiencies, improved decision making, and — through greater access to information and improved business outcomes — increased employee satisfaction.
However, just because more people can build and deploy applications doesn’t mean that they necessarily should. There needs to be an element of control to keep direction for the business – and that’s where a center of excellence comes in.
Get the Most Out of Power Platform With a Center of Excellence
In our next blog, we will examine what exactly a COE is and when you might need a COE to get the most out of Power Platform.
Learn More
To learn more about how a Power Platform COE can drive innovation in your business, follow this link and download the guide.
