Over a vast number of years, technology has gone through significant changes, which have transformed how society perceives it and its impact on our work and home lives.

Ultimately, innovation is going to happen regardless of what your perspective is on it or what you think. We have seen it in many, many different forms throughout history: cars, bicycles, food, drinks, medical advancements. Humans are naturally curious and want to optimize the way we do things, sometimes regardless of the impact, which could be either good or bad. To understand the digital evolution and transformative change of low code in general, and specifically, Power Platform, we need to explore what “innovation” really means and why it is important.

An example of innovation

One of my favorite analogies to help understand the shift in innovation as we see it today is the simple concept of farming. We all eat food, we all need food… farming is one of our primary sources of food, so it’s extremely important.

Many years ago, and in some places still today, farmers would plant crops and then walk to a water source to collect water in buckets, then walk to where their crops were planted and manually water the crops.

This worked perfectly for a long time. However, further innovation was applied, and a less labor-intensive method for crop watering was applied. Horse-drawn carts were used to carry more loads of water to the fields. Crop plantations got larger because more water could be dispersed.

As progression continued, farmers realized that they could bring the water to the crops in an even more innovative manner by digging channels for the water to simply run through the fields. Instead of people carrying buckets or loading the horse and cart, they planned the flow of water and dug channels.

As time passed, the concept of water diversion became even more sophisticated, with farmers finding even better mechanisms to direct water. The planning took more time and irrigation experts were required to lay pipes, understand pressure, and equally disperse water.

Even larger fields of crops were planted because of this method of crop maintenance, and more people with many different skill sets needed to be employed to maintain and manage these fields.

The more we learn, the more we innovate, the faster we find smarter ways of making our more manual jobs a lot easier. In the future, there will be even more ingenious methods where farmers can maintain and manage their crops to feed the world.

The fact of AI-managed matter is that innovation is happening whether we like it or not. People will always find ways to do things smarter to save time and avoid manual work.

In this scenario, as time progressed, the people doing the work here: carrying buckets of water, leading a horse-drawn cart, watering crops, digging channels in fields, laying pipes, figuring out the pressure, programming computers to manage the flow of water; they all needed to learn. We aren’t born with the understanding of how to carry a bucket or write code, we learn!

As time progressed, we learned how to innovate.

“Hey, maybe instead of carrying one big bucket, I could carry two medium-sized ones, which actually allows me to carry more water without spilling any.” This has been happening for centuries and, of course, in the digital world as well.

Shift up to digital – the start

digital transformation is a young concept that has morphed rapidly over time. If we dial back the clocks to around 1990, when the first web browser was released, and around 1998, when Google was released to the public, there was a fundamental shift in the way people thought about developing easy-to-use solutions.

There was panic because many people thought that the concept of the World Wide Web search would ultimately take their jobs. Imagine what was going on in the minds of people who collated dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Another interesting example is that of when Excel was first released. There is a fantastic video that Microsoft released in 1990 that shows a few people in an elevator. One chap is holding what appears to be a large doorstop-sized laptop and is prepping his spreadsheet for a business presentation as the elevator reaches the top floor of a building. He seamlessly uses basic drag-and-drop functionality to generate a budget that looks “great.”

You can watch the advert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckr2mLXDw3A.

Fine, I understand the advert is slightly tongue-in-cheek; however, imagine what would have been going through accountants’ minds at this point.

The main thing to understand here is that encyclopedias still exist in hard, soft, and digital copies. People use search every day to help them, and Excel is still the world’s most widely used accountancy tool. All we did was find ways to adapt to the technical changes that were happening.

In fact, 1990 to 2000 was a really important time, so much so that there was a lot of insecurity and fearmongering about job loss and technical revolution. The greatest example of this is the “fear of the clock”. What would happen if clocks ticked over from 1999 to 2000? Would all the computers break? What about our data? Ultimately, we were all fine, the computers didn’t break, and we are still progressing perfectly up the innovation ladder.

Enter digital transformation

In around 1990, a person by the name of Mark McDonald, group vice president at Gartner, coined the term digital transformation. This was incredibly timely considering all the changes taking place in the 1990s. As the clocks ticked over, digital transformation started to solidify itself as one of the most widely used buzz phrases of the 20th century. Hundreds of organizations established digital transformation practices, rightly advising others to transform their operations by moving from manual practices to more streamlined digital processes.

This involved many facets, ranging from movement to cloud-based computing to process optimization and away from file and paper-based processes. The movement was and is huge and has become increasingly important as the era of enablement takes hold, and AI becomes more prominent in organizations.

Over a period of around 15 years, between 2000 and 2015, many solutions were created, a huge number of processes were optimized, and an extraordinary number of organizations understood that keeping up with technical and digital innovation was hugely important to their strategy and their growth, so much so, that the demands on IT became even more excessive. Organizations’ IT teams were and still are not able to keep up with the demands made by the organizations themselves. In a nutshell, the challenges faced far outweighed the number of people who could solve them. This is known as The Great Developer Shortage.

Some organizations had and still have years and years of archaic processes to unpick, papers and files to digitize, and attitudes to change. There just aren’t enough people and organizations around to help with this in such a short time. There are cases where nearly 100 years of history need to be unpicked, and this does not and cannot happen overnight. Cloud-based computing was already a huge cliff to climb, but completely digitizing an organization’s landscape is an entirely new problem to solve. The reason for this is it’s not just about technology; it requires the ability to redesign processes, understand people, and map these processes and people to a set of technologies that best addresses the challenge.

Enter low code

In around 2014, many of the leading research and development organizations started to spot the trend of there being a skills gap and a supply and demand challenge based on the number of organizations needing to transform. It is speculated that Forrester coined the term low code around 2014.

Essentially, the concept exists where vendors such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and many others made changes to their platforms that allowed people to build and extend solutions without needing to write code. Previously to this, if you faced a business challenge and wished to solve it using technology, you could do the following:

• Buy an off-the-shelf solution
• Build a solution from scratch
• Extend these solutions through basic configuration and/or custom development

Now there are hundreds of software development and low-code platforms to speak of which allow people to create solutions rapidly. Figure 1.1 shows a brief summary of some of the platforms available.

Figure 1.1: A collection of low-code platforms

Turnkey solutions

Turnkey solutions, such as out-of-the-box customer relationship management solutions, were a great start but didn’t always fit the organization’s requirements. Not every company in the world is the same. These solutions need to be extended and configured to cater to a specific requirement. Not every business requirement has a turnkey solution. The skills required to build and extend became hugely in demand and hard to find.

The vendors started working more and more on their base products, making them far easier to extend than before. The ability to configure or customize solutions without writing code became more commonplace. Tools such as Dynamics CRM and SalesForce allow field, table view, form, and dashboard configuration without the need to write any complex logic. This allowed many businesses the ability to configure base vendor-based solutions for their needs and ONLY extend through custom code where necessary.

Essentially, the more widely the vendor-based product could be configured without complex logic, the better. In fact, these products became so configurable that the term xRM was coined by several organizations that were delivering configured solutions, with the X representative of the X in algebra, where X could be anything. So, instead of Customer Relationship Management, organizations embraced Anything Relationship Management and, effectively, were extending and configuring their various tool sets a lot more than originally anticipated.

Solutions built from scratch

There are many other low-code development platforms to speak of; however, the most notable are as follows:

• Mendix
• OutSystems

Both organizations recognized the need for Rapid Application Development (RAD) based on the lack of development skills in the market, so both focused on providing tools to developers so that software solutions could be created and placed into production at a rapid pace.

Gartner releases a report each year talking about the trends and strategies companies who provide low-code platforms are employing. This report contains a growth indicator called the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which splits the platform providers into four categories: Niche Players, Challengers, Visionaries and Leaders. The Leaders quadrant being the top right and representative of the leading vendors. Both providers are found in the top-right quadrant of the Gartner reports, and both are extremely popular within organizations. It is very common to find a mixture of about three low-code platforms within an organization, and even more common that Mendix or Outsystems will be one of them.

Power Platform

Microsoft Power Platform is a set of low-code tools that enables makers of varying technical skill levels to create useful solutions that answer business challenges of varying complexity. Power Platform is Microsoft’s ever-growing answer to RAD.

Power Platform was not created from the ground up. It was born from the Microsoft cloud and is a combination of various technologies that have been democratized in a manner that makes rapid application development available to anyone willing to learn.

Makers can manipulate, automate, analyze, and visualize data through multiple tools in the platform. As Microsoft evolves, so does Power Platform. There is a constant drive for innovation at Microsoft, and the more innovation takes place, the better the tools in Power Platform become. This makes it much easier to achieve results and reach the desired outcome with fewer clicks. The more instantly gratified we are, the better. Figure 1.2 shows a summary of Power Platform components and how they relate to one another.

Figure 1.2: Summary overview of the Microsoft Power Platform

Often, when looking at the Microsoft Cloud stack, we can identify where various Power Platform products originated from and then have been expanded and grown to work with many of the other areas and products. Figure 1.3 shows how Power Platform components actually have come from existing areas in the Microsoft stack.

Figure 1.3: A summary overview of the Microsoft Cloud and how Power Platform fits in

As an example, Power BI originated from Microsoft Excel and from a product called Power Pivot. Excel had the ability to generate visualizations on top of data for several years. In order to drive a centralization of data into the cloud, this functionality was democratized into a cloud based visualization tool – Power BI.

Dataverse is a democratized data storage and governance facility and acts as the base for many of the Dynamics 365 products. Previously, this layer was known as xRM within the customer and partner community.

Ultimately, Power Platform works within Microsoft’s integrated cloud and product stack, which is one of the main reasons it has such high adoption rates.

The world around us is changing rapidly, and this is evident in the technology trends we have seen in the past and the trends we are currently seeing. We need to learn to change with these trends and to learn. We now understand that there is a huge opportunity for all of us to learn and change the way we do things and start using low code as a mechanism to work faster. We have all been using low-code tools a lot longer than we probably realize. In the past, having the ability to use Microsoft tools such as Office, Azure, and Dynamics 365 has equipped many people with the tools to build useful solutions with Microsoft Power Platform. In the next section, we will take a look at the economic dynamics of digital transformation and how they have influenced various aspects of society.

There are hundreds of economic dynamics of digital transformation and with the introduction of low-code platforms and AI, the drive towards transforming digitally even more quickly has become a real focus across all organizations. Organizations that established a digital transformation strategy early on and actually allocated budgets to changing the way they work are forging ahead of many others and establishing a more dominant position in the market. Organizations that have not seen digital transformation as a priority may suffer from a productivity and growth perspective.

The output is relatively simple; organizations that are digitally equipped will serve their customers faster and more accurately with less need for process and manual work. The classic example is that instead of manually building a document, have your CRM system do it for you and auto-share it with your customer. That may eliminate 30 minutes of work from a specific individual each time. If we took it to the metric of money, how much money do we save by doing X? It is possible to work this out.

But what about my job?

The hyper progression of technology and its place in society can be quite tough to consume because the person building the documents may be at risk as they will be outperformed by the person who understands the CRM system that is making the documents.

This is going to be similar for people using AI. AI will not take someone’s job; the person who understands AI might take someone’s job.

Companies at the forefront of innovation will have more time to transform their ways of working and train their teams to use the tools, be more productive, and quite simply outperform other organizations.

As mentioned in the analogy of the person watering the crops, there will need to be a lot of learning that takes place and, most importantly, space for learning. Organizations will need to assign learning time to people and ensure that there are metrics in place that cater to this. Reskilling and upskilling are important.

Digital inequality

The fact of the matter is that the more the organizations who are in front spend time in front, the worse off it will be for people in other organizations. They will ultimately earn less money, spend more time doing things they don’t want to do, and will feel the effect of digital inequality.

This happens when there is no clear visibility of the future and disengagement at a leadership level from a technology and business perspective. It will lead to things such as Silent Quitting and The Great Resignation, where people ultimately shift gear to move roles to places where they will be more effective and ultimately get paid more.

This mass shift is not good for organizations that are less innovative as they will struggle to hire and provide their services.

Who fixes the machines?

In any scenario where there is innovation, there is not always job loss, but often there is job creation. In a world of innovation, new skills need to be acquired. The analogy of a toothpaste factory comes to mind.

Person X works at the toothpaste factory screwing on toothpaste caps. A machine is implemented to screw on toothpaste caps at double the speed of the humans. The machine breaks. Who fixes the machine?

Well, of course, the human who was screwing on the toothpaste caps understands how the caps need to be screwed on and what the machine needs to do; they just need to learn how the machine works.

The concept is common across society and is a primary focus on the economic dynamics of digital transformation. Growth in transformation requirements across organizations will require new skills, transferable skills, and upskilling.

In the world of low code, we see the likes of bus drivers, windscreen repairers, safety administrators, and pro developers learning how to use Power Platform to upskill and help their businesses by building business solutions to solve problems that previously were managed manually and were not optimized.

The rules

This is a fundamental shift in thinking because there is absolute surety that as the digital landscape changes, so do the rules and laws around the security of data and how we govern this data. Data is the digital footprint of ourselves and our company and processes. If data is disrespected, it can be used for nefarious purposes.

Organizations will need to take a new approach to how security and governance are perceived and, again, think of how to drive their current workforce into a more well-structured compliance machine. This will become far more relevant as AI starts moving into organizations and acts as a loud hailer for terrible data and security. Compliance managers will need to become digital compliance managers. Health and safety managers will now have a significant digital tone to their roles. When laws are made, they will require some level of digital literacy.

Look at the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a law that took effect in around 2018 that legislated how data needs to be treated when any organization is dealing with data from an organization within the European Union.

There was a lot of preparation done by organizations and many organizations employed a Chief Data Officer and a data team to ensure that the rules were respected. This led to an entirely new set of transformative offerings and processes that organizations needed to implement.

It’s the right time all the time

It’s important to understand that, often, innovation and transformation happen to us rather than for us. We are shifting tones now into an era of enablement, where we are far more in control of how we innovate and transform! It is very important to understand that waiting is not an option in this scenario! The waves between changes in the digital world are getting smaller and smaller and more rapidly, so if you are thinking about the right time to do anything, it’s now, so just do it and get on board.

Those that prioritize digital transformation allocate budgets, and establish a strategy will have a competitive advantage. digital transformation allows organizations to serve their customers faster and more accurately, with less manual work. However, those who do not prioritize will suffer from a productivity and growth perspective. The importance of upskilling and reskilling employees to keep up with the digital changes needs to become an area of investment for all companies. Organizations must take a new approach to security and governance and prioritize compliance and digital literacy. We cannot ignore innovation and growth, and this must become a significant area of focus within businesses that want to grow and succeed. In the next section, we will take a look at how Microsoft helps us drive transformation and innovation forward in an inclusive manner.

What has become incredibly clear is that Microsoft has become one of the primary leaders within the low-code space. Typically, they can be seen in the Gartner top-right quadrant with the following:

• Mendix
• Outsystems
• ServiceNow
• Salesforce
• Appian

The six leading vendors typically shuffle around a fair amount, depending on their ability to execute the creation and implementation of solutions and their completeness of vision.

There are a few things that make Microsoft a clear leader, but one of the main things that makes Microsoft a front-runner is how Power Platform has been positioned alongside the rest of its products. When many of the Microsoft Cloud products are purchased, such as M365, Dynamics 365, and Azure Services, Power Platform comes as part of the package as a seeded license.

When Dynamics 365 is purchased, it is effectively a collection of complex Power Apps (Model-Driven App), which includes Power Automate Cloud Flows as the workflow and process automation engine.

When an organization purchases Office 365 E5, there are levels of Power Apps and Power Automate that are included with the license, so makers could make Power Apps and Power Automate Flows part of their day-to-day business productivity processes.

There are 1.2 billion users of Microsoft Office around the globe, and that implies there are 1.2 billion Power Apps and Automate users of varying levels. Power Platform products are extremely popular with the Microsoft Office community because they add to the business and personal productivity landscape of products.

Ultimately, in a lot of scenarios, when talking to an organization about Power Platform, the toolset already exists in varying ways and, because of its deep integration within the Microsoft Cloud stack, there is no need to do additional reviews or security analysis as it has already been taken through the relevant process as part of the existing Microsoft products.

This approach does not exist for most of the other low-code vendors because the choice to use the product needs to be a conscious decision, rather than a natural evolution of what’s already in place.

Maker types

Since the inception of RAD across the world, many organizations have adopted varying sets of low-code tools. Some organizations simply keep low-code tools within their IT departments and deliver as a central unit, and others open these tools up to their wider business communities and allow them to build as needed. Power Platform products are extremely broad from a maker (developer) adoption perspective. There is a lot of tools and content for people to adopt, and what is evident is that makers of varying skill levels and from various walks of life have used tools within Power Platform to resolve varying challenges.

In the low-code community, there are typically two types of developers:

• Citizen developers: People outside of the IT department making solutions
• Professional developers: People within the IT department making solutions

There are varying levels of agreement regarding the terminology here; however, not all makers (developers) can be treated the same way. Typically, citizen developers require more training and guidance than professional developers when creating a solution.

To drive utilization of the Power Platform, it’s important to understand that not everyone early on in their career as a maker is going to be proficient and, therefore, the tools need to feel familiar and easy to use. However, this is a double-edged sword; the tools also need to allow for highly complex scenarios and extremely experienced professional developers. This is a very tough tightrope to walk as there is a propensity to lean too much on one side and, therefore, lose one very important element of the maker community.

Ease of adoption

In any organization, when exploring new technologies and ultimately adopting them, the adoption process can be relatively complicated. It is important to understand that driving adoption is mostly reliant on people, rather than technology. The manner in which a wider set of people are communicated with and the manner in which knowledge is shared is incredibly important.

Getting started

The tools in Power Platform allow developers of all types to create useful solutions, and the barrier to entry for people who know how to use regular Microsoft Office tools such as Excel and PowerPoint is not high. As an example, the Power Apps Canvas App maker experience is very similar to that of PowerPoint and Excel.

Figure 1.4: Power App Canvas App maker experience

This barrier to entry is similar across the toolset, where makers can easily access the set of tools they require (providing they have the relevant licensing and security access) and start creating useful solutions.

Figure 1.5: Power Automate Cloud Flow maker experience

The Power Automate Cloud Flow designer is incredibly simple to follow and drives a high level of adoption for all maker types.

For those already equipped

For those makers who are already in the know and already understand how areas within the Power Platform function, there are layers they may dig into to start interacting with the platform at a deeper level. Tools such as Visual Studio Code and Power Platform Tools, shown in Figure 1.6, can be used to drive professional development within Power Platform.

Figure 1.6: Visual Studio Code with Power Platform Tools

Tools such as Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio Code may be added and used to dive a lot deeper into the solutions and extend and build more complex layers of functionality, should this be required. As makers progress through their learning, the wider toolset becomes more and more important from an adoption perspective.

Solution sizing

There can be a perception that Power Platform is only for solving simple problems by creating simple solutions. The ultimate response to this is that it is untrue. There are many organizations out there that run extremely important and critical parts of their businesses on Power Platform.

Figure 1.7: Overview of the types of solutions that are regularly created with Power Platform technologies

The fact of the matter is the solution size and type will completely depend on the type of problem the maker is trying to solve. Solutions that are of high criticality often require very stringent rules around data, security, and uptime and, therefore, will be built on very reliable structures such as Dataverse and will therefore come at a different cost to solutions that are not as critical and can be built on top of less governed structures.

Low code does not mean low complexity! The solutions that can and are built using the tools in Power Platform are often intensely complicated and highly integrated.

As an example, the Dynamics 365 Sales, Service, and Marketing suite of products is built on top of Dataverse and is a set of extremely well-thought-out, robust model-driven applications using multiple custom components and plugins. Model-driven apps are digital building blocks of Power Platform.

In review, Power Platform allows makers of varying skill types to build solutions of varying complexity in a secure and robust manner, within a framework that is highly flexible and, often, already approved within an organization. The fact that Power Platform is one of the most widely adopted technologies within the low-code space can be credited to these points.

We’ve taken a look at Microsoft’s dominance in the low-code app and automation development market. Microsoft is one of the leaders in the low-code space and is positioned alongside other leading vendors, such as Mendix, Outsystems, and Salesforce. Power Platform has been positioned alongside its other products, making it a clear leader in the market. Power Platform products are extremely popular with the Microsoft Office community as they add to the business and personal productivity landscape of products. Power Platform allows developers of all types to create useful solutions, and the barrier to entry for people who know how to use regular Microsoft Office tools such as Excel and PowerPoint is not high. It is also highly flexible and often already approved within an organization, making it one of the most widely adopted technologies within the low-code space. In the next section, we will see how Microsoft has super-charged these products with generative AI in the form of AI copilot features.

Over the last few years, it has been necessary to increase the drive for the adoption of low-code platforms due to an increased demand for business productivity solutions. In the last couple of years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have appeared on the scene, especially through companies such as OpenAI and within products such as ChatGPT. LLMs are a subset of AI that perform natural language processing. Essentially, they harness natural language to perform tasks.

Microsoft announced a partnership with OpenAI and has been embedding the LLM functionality into various products, such as Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and, importantly for this area of focus, Power Platform products. These are called copilots. Specific products from Microsoft will have this embedded copilot functionality to enable the creation and extension of solutions using natural language.

This is significant for Power Platform for several reasons; the main one is that it lowers the barrier of entry to creating even lower solutions. People who can simply write in their natural language can now ask the copilot to create an app, automation, or bot in seconds.

A live example

Let’s look at an organization that needs to create a basic vehicle inspection application that is responsive and allows users to undertake swift vehicle inspections that will be used in a report at a later point. To get started, simply ask the Power Apps copilot in natural language to create the app for you.

Figure 1.8: Power Apps copilot user interface

The Power Apps copilot interprets the natural language to generate a data table in Dataverse.

Figure 1.9: Power Apps copilot user interface with data

The data is then reviewed, and a responsive Canvas App can be created directly from this data.

Figure 1.10: Power Apps Canvas App maker experience with copilot

This simple three-step process would normally have taken a maker of mid-level experience around half a day.

What does this mean for Power Platform as a whole?

There are multiple benefits of using the embedded copilot functionality within the Power Platform tools. The level of productivity this drives when creating certain sizes of solutions is amazing. The ability to build and extend solutions using natural language can and will drive a monumental shift in how makers create and manage the things that they make.

As people use the immersive natural language experience in copilot, and as feedback is shared with Microsoft, these tools will only get better and faster. We have seen this pattern already with the current product stack within Power Platform. The products have grown significantly in the last few years, and now that they are supercharged with AI, there is an expectancy that their technical foundations and functionality will skyrocket.

We can also expect rebrands of tools to map to the copilot functionality the same way we see that Power Virtual Agents has been rebranded to Copilot Studio, and the functionality within Copilot Studio has been so heavily infused with deeply embedded AI that it has taken on a life of its own. Copilot Studio is the go-to product for creating low-code custom copilots from scratch, as well as for extending Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Figure 1.11: Copilot Studio user interface

There is a high expectancy that generative AI will be further integrated into Microsoft products and into the Power Platform in varying forms. We can expect our maker’s experience to become more reliant on prompting the AI engine and configuring it in natural language rather than writing hundreds of lines of Power Fx and plugin code.

These are extremely exciting times.

We have taken a look at the recent partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI to embed LLM functionality into various Microsoft products, including Power Platform. This allows users to create solutions using natural language and lowers the barrier of entry for creating apps, automations, and bots. A live example has been provided of how Copilot can be used to create a basic vehicle inspection application in just three steps. The benefits of using Copilot and how it can drive productivity and revolutionize the way makers create and manage solutions have been discussed. We can expect further integration of generative AI into Microsoft products and Power Platform, making it more reliant on natural language input. We understand that the future is now, so in the next section, we will delve into how organizations can harness Power Platform to create strategic growth.

Power Platform is exactly what the name says… it is a platform! It is not an app. This is a continuous perspective that needs to be repositioned as many people and organizations make the assumption that the Power Platform only solves one problem rather than multiple problems. Many organizations think that buying Power Platform is about making one app or one automation. This is really and truly not the case. This perspective is the same as buying Office, but only ever sending one email or making one Excel document.

Enabling strategic transformation vision

The first step in this process is to change the perspective and culture around how Power Platform is viewed. It cannot be simply a tactical solution to solve one or two problems. Viewing this from the lens of a wider organization, the platform should be strategic and should be viewed as a way of solving many business problems.

To achieve this, a decision must be made at the very top level to invest both time and money in this approach and enable a wider ecosystem of people, processes, and technology. This needs to be a decision that has full support at all levels.

When reviewing the adoption of tools such as Microsoft Office by 1.2 billion people, most senior and exec types didn’t truly understand what was being invested in, only that the tools were important for business productivity and that most of their competitive friends were using it as well.

The dreaded ROI

Realizing Power Platform’s capabilities in the same way that Office’s capabilities are realized is important. An ROI is not generated for every email you send or each spreadsheet you create. You send these emails and create these spreadsheets because, ultimately, it is understood that they are important and a requirement.

Sure, some solutions will require an ROI calculation, but only those requiring significant time and investment. If you review the solution sizing approach again, many solutions will never take a significant amount of time to create, and the maker of the solution can ultimately own the solution.

Mechanisms and an agreement on how the platform is measured will need to be defined and agreed upon. Quantitative and qualitative metrics normally form the combination of how ROI is measured for the solutions that require it.

Who can make things?

Many organizations do not allow all people in business to create solutions, and some organizations don’t have any idea that people are already making things. There have been examples where the IT department has installed and reviewed the Microsoft Center of Excellence starter kit and found thousands and thousands of assets that makers have created.

It’s important to define who can build things in your ecosystem. You may not want citizen developers building things up front until the governance layers and data strategy have been defined correctly. If the ecosystem is overrun with assets and there is no support and operational structure in place, the platform may get a bad name as it doesn’t have the correct governance setup.

If you know who you would like to open the platform up to, you can control this by using Azure Entra ID security structures and many of the governance features in Power Platform.

What are people allowed to do?

Not all people will build complicated solutions. For the most part, citizen developers will be creating solutions that are not as complex as the ones professional developers will be creating, or they may be working with professional developers to create complicated solutions. It is extremely rare that a citizen developer will build something highly complex.

Not all solutions are deemed equal either. Not all solutions need to be placed into a state of production! Not all solutions need to be supported by IT! Not all solutions are permanent! In many organizations, there is a culture of productionizing everything; however, this is not the case with Power Platform. Solutions obey different rules depending on their size and criticality.

If you can define what each maker type will build, then the platform can be managed and governed in a manner that best drives capacity to the more critical solutions.

Where will people build things?

Once you understand what people will make and who is allowed to make it, you will be able to set up a place for them to create things. These environments are managed differently and have different rules and regulations depending on what is being built in them.

Only certain environments will receive support and guidance from IT. Not everything requires support. As an organization, you wouldn’t support every spreadsheet that gets created. Power Platform works in a similar manner. By setting up the rules up front, the governance layer can be defined.

Dare to do

There is a certain group of people within an organization who are outside of the IT department but are relatively technical. We refer to this specific group of people as Business Technologists. These employees are more experienced than just citizen developers and use technology actively to solve business problems. It is highly likely that you will find many people in your business who are already using tech to solve problems. These people should be embraced and have Power Platform shared with them as an approved set of tools for them to build. The idea is that in this scenario, at least there is a level of governance that can be applied to this digital ecosystem, and the right help can be given to people who need it.

Power Platform cannot be viewed as tactical. It must be considered as strategic for it to be widely adopted and for your business to truly harness the full value of the platform.

Note

Power Platform is not just an app, but a strategic platform for solving multiple business problems. To fully realize its capabilities, organizations need to change the perspective and culture around the platform and invest time and money in it. ROI should not be the only metric used to measure the success of the platform, and organizations need to define who can build solutions, what they can build, and where they can build them. By embracing Business Technologists and treating the platform as a strategic investment, businesses can fully harness its potential.

As we conclude this chapter, we are left with a profound understanding of Power Platform’s impact on digital evolution. Power Platform has emerged as a powerful catalyst for transformative change, enabling businesses to navigate the digital landscape with agility and efficiency. We have explored the economics surrounding digital transformation and Microsoft’s market share in the low-code app and automation development market, highlighting Power Platform’s leading role in empowering organizations.

Furthermore, we have examined the latest advancements in Power Platform, including the copilot features developed in collaboration with OpenAI. These cutting-edge capabilities use the power of AI to revolutionize the low-code development experience, enabling users to create applications and automate processes with remarkable ease and speed.

This chapter has equipped you with valuable insights and guidance for harnessing Power Platform as a strategic tool to drive digital innovation, unleash transformation, and achieve sustainable growth. Power Platform has truly transformed the digital landscape, and its potential for transformative change is only just beginning to be realized.

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