Enterprise management and governance are keys to scaling Power Platform
I’ve returned recently from the Power Platform Summit in Amsterdam, where I spent some time with a small group of other business applications leaders from around the world, with whom together we’re thinking hard about how organizations should go about adopting the Microsoft Power Platform at scale.
This is a work in progress, because I know that we’ll continue to mature the model as the technology and its concordant best practices mature themselves.
In other words, how do we get beyond individuals or pockets of people doing great things with the technology (PowerApps, Power BI, Flow, Common Data Service, Dynamics) and rather spread the benefits of the technology across the entire business so that everyone, every department and office in the organization benefits from Power Platform’s incredible capability? How do organizations adopt Power Platform at scale?
Several months ago I wrote that, “The more you leverage the platform, the higher the return on investment and the lower the marginal costs of those [PowerApps] licenses become.” I went on, “This is a journey of migrating legacy systems onto the platform, retiring legacy licensing and O&M costs, and empowering workers to make the platform even more valuable.”
Mature organizations realize that rigor, discipline, and best practices are needed. We’ll call it Enterprise Management. Virgin Atlantic — the British airline — is one of the big companies that’s really doing this well (if you’re not following Manuela Pichler, leader in the effort there, you are missing out). Others are doing the same.
When I talk with folks about Enterprise Management, I like to conceptualize the idea as an amalgam of best practices, patterns, processes, tools, and infrastructure spread across five core areas:
Program Management
Enterprise Architecture
Application Lifecycle Management
Mature Security Model
User Support Measures
But who owns this thing? Someone inside of the organization must, and we’re often seeing the platform be very successful when the driving force behind it is the business (rather than IT). I’m working with clients who are calling this their Power Platform Center of Excellence (COE). Virgin Atlantic (not a client of mine, sadly) cleverly calls theirs “IT Lite”. Regardless, it’s important that this band of Power Platform ninjas within your organization be possessed of a few key characteristics. They must:
Build out quick wins, proofs of concept, and more complex solutions in partnership with…
Business owners, IT, and the organization’s community of citizen developers; and
Dogmatically focus on being a high-performing and high-trust team
Ultimately this group is both the glue that holds all the moving parts together, and the energy that drives the platform forward, continually increasing its ROI within the organization. Success adopting Power Platform at scale depends on these “owners” — whatever they are called and wherever they are placed within the organization — building durable partnerships between IT, the business, and the citizen developer community.
Let us dwell on the idea of durable partnerships for a moment, emphasis on durable. I choose this word carefully to suggest a big departure from the old bad habit amongst software types of involving business and IT stakeholders in a merely pro forma way. All must be a part of the adoption (and subsequent PowerApps / Power BI development) journey from start to finish. The promise of the citizens’ uprising just doesn’t come to fruition otherwise.
I’ll discuss the idea of durable partnerships, as well as the Power Platform’ app development life cycle when properly adopted, in future posts. As always, I love hearing your thoughts about how you’re going about adopting Power Platform at scale in your organizations. Please share?
