How Does Power Platform Speed up Enterprise IT Modernization and Transformation?

In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a change in the company’s strategy with the tagline “Doing more with less: More speed. More productivity. More time to focus on what matters.” Several announcements were also made about changes to Power Platform, OpenAI & Copilot to help companies with their digitization efforts. Power Platform is part of this strategy to make the most of time, IT and development costs, and ROIs so that more can be done with less.

What is Power Platform?

In response to ever-growing business needs and IT projects, Microsoft released Power Platform. This software suite that makes it quick and easy to build applications and automate tasks without the need for specific development.

Power Platform combines several tools:

• Power BI: a data analysis and visualization solution
• Power Apps: for web & mobile application development
• Power Pages: for website development
• Power Automate: for process automation
• Power Virtual Agents: an intelligent virtual agent (chatbot)

Why Do Companies Invest in Power Platform?

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), operating expenses (OPEX), and Return on Investment (ROI) are the primary considerations for companies before making investment and strategy decisions.
Power Platform can lower the TCO of applications by empowering business decision-makers to build their own apps and respond to their own use cases using a simplified development interface that requires minimal or no development knowledge. This initiative controls the time and cost of developing an application, from need determination to maintenance and support.
Power Platform’s capabilities are only a fraction of the investment options available to businesses looking to reduce IT costs in the short term. The platform’s combination of tools allows firms to redefine the boundaries of development, automation, and data visualization to best suit their needs, maximizing the commercial value delivered by the tools.

Empowering Citizen Developers

A citizen developer has no specific coding knowledge but can design tools that are valuable to the company using tools such as those provided by Power Platform.

In addition, by empowering citizen developers, businesses can move closer to solution-based design thinking: Proof of Concept, Most Valuable Product, etc., and the investments required to design, develop and maintain the created applications. Microsoft Copilot is the personal assistant built into all Microsoft 365 apps. It allows you to create an app by describing what you want to do using natural language.

There are also other tools (template or image-based design assistance, support and guidance throughout the design process, etc.) that can help users become better skilled faster. Citizen developers use their skills and business expertise to help tackle the application backlog.

Power Platform: A Wide Range of Applications

Power Platform has a wide range of capabilities. Its suite of solutions can be used to automate repetitive tasks (using templates available in the app portals of the Power Platform solutions) or to manage the redesign or creation of a business-critical legacy application in collaboration with developers and IT teams. Power Platform can be used in many ways, and citizen devs now have a lot of freedom to build tools that are perfect for their needs without the problems that some IT projects involving development can have (implementation time, a product that is not well-suited to the specified need, familiarization difficulties, etc.)

Understanding Power Platform License Costs

Using Power Platform obviously requires licenses. Understanding license fees is crucial for promoting usage by establishing the governance and assistance structures required for tool uptake and support.

We recommend reading the following Microsoft documentation to learn more about Power Platform licenses: “Licensing overview for Microsoft Power Platform.”

Modernization Integration Capability

Power Platform’s integration capability depends on the speed and ease of access to business data. Teams can achieve this by using over 10,000 connectors to connect flows directly to Power Platform applications.

With connectors, users can interact with the APIs without knowing how to code or having in-depth knowledge of the APIs needed. The connectors also make it easier to authenticate to APIs without adding specific code.

Custom connectors can be created to connect to internal APIs or third-party systems, and the API management service can be used to publish the APIs.

Finally, Dataverse makes it easier and more secure to use data by allowing data from different sources to be combined into a single storage space. This data can then be used in Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents.

The numerous architectural possibilities give us the freedom to rethink how we design solutions. In addition to accessing the organization’s data, whether hosted in the cloud or not, combining Power Platform with Azure integration patterns enables the connection of the low-code ecosystem to IoT tools or the power of machine learning, etc.

Low code also gives you design and architecture patterns that you can use to avoid resilience, performance, and scalability problems. Supporting designers in their architectural choices is crucial for avoiding potential consequences. In addition, the proper governance foundation must be implemented based on the company’s maturity level. This includes management of environments, roles, and responsibilities, data loss prevention (DLP), deployment, supervision & maintenance.

Power Platform as an Application Modernization Accelerator

In conclusion, Power Platform is not just for business applications used internally by a few people. It is a true accelerator for enterprise transformation and modernization.

By implementing the fusion team, a multidisciplinary team of users and developers, it is possible to combine business, development, and architecture skills with the goal of bringing applications to market faster.

Hence, it is possible and recommended to work together to update legacy applications requiring both strong business and IT skills.

Do you need help with your Power Platform projects? Contact us!