4 Reasons Why You Need a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence
Having the Microsoft Power Platform is one thing, but having the right people, processes, and technology in place to get the most of out it is another. With the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence, you can ensure you’ll achieve your desired business outcomes while reducing your technical debt.
In our post, The Value of the Microsoft Power Platform, we covered what the Power Platform was and the benefits it has for any organization. Today, we will go a little bit deeper into that discussion and talk about Microsoft’s Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE).
If your organization is considering or already using the Microsoft Power Platform, then you need to have a Center of Excellence in place. A CoE helps ensure your investments into any technology are successful and provide long-term value to your organization.
According to Gartner, the adoption of the Microsoft Power Platform has skyrocketed globally. And in Microsoft’s partner conference, Inspire, Power Platform growth has expanded by 50% in 2023.
As a byproduct of that, we are seeing the organic growth of citizen developers (supported by professional developers) increase at a tremendous rate across many organizations. While the adoption rate continues its upward trend, businesses need a Center of Excellence to drive best practices and guidelines in order to improve consistency, compliance, and governance throughout the enterprise.
Image courtesy of Microsoft, Inspire Keynote 2023
Let’s breakdown the elements of a successful Power Platform Center of Excellence.
1. People
Establishing a Microsoft Power Platform CoE means investing in and nurturing the organic growth of its users while maintaining governance and control. As the adoption of the Power Platform increases, so will the number of citizen developers. Therefore, organizations need to quickly achieve a level of governance that will enable them to take full advantage of this new talent.
The CoE is designed to empower business experts, drive innovation, provide improvement, and break down geographic and organizational silos. It can be a powerful way for organizations to align around business goals rather than individual department metrics.
2. Process
A key principle is to clarify why you are setting up a CoE, what you aim to accomplish, and the key business outcomes you hope to achieve. Then, get started and learn/evolve along the way. The CoE’s main functions should be to:
3. Technology
As daunting as establishing a Center of Excellence may sound, Microsoft has made it a less stressful and time-consuming effort with the release of the Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit. The CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools designed to help you develop a strategy for adopting and supporting the Microsoft Power Platform, focusing primarily on Power Apps and Power Automate.
With out-of-the-box administration, governance, and nurture components, the Starter Kit helps your internal IT team quickly implement digital guardrails, data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and adoption strategies that will not hinder organic growth, innovation, or collaboration.
4. Reduction of Technical Debt
Many organizations have already begun to suffer from growing technical debt. This is due to orphaned applications, data sets, and Azure footprint growth that came from the rise in popularity and ease of use of the Microsoft Power Platform.
Implementing the Starter Kit will allow your administrators and stakeholders to take advantage of features such as Power BI reporting dashboard templates. These will provide metrics around size, use, and ownership, so business and IT leadership can make data-driven decisions and quickly rationalize Power Apps, Power BI workspaces, and Power Automate flows.
Image courtesy of Microsoft
The Starter Kit is designed to help you understand the full range of the Microsoft Power Platform solutions, so you can build digital guardrails and compliance strategies as well as effectively manage your environments.
The centralized dashboards will help IT and business stakeholders track and analyze the status of your adoption and leverage Microsoft’s unparalleled ecosystem of partners, applications, and services to accelerate your digital transformation efforts.
Keep Reading: The Value of the Microsoft Power Platform
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