Governance should take center stage in any no-code/low-code deployment, and the Power Platform is no exception. Companies that do not provide strong oversight for employee-developed apps face significant risks. This article will guide you on key focus areas when introducing low-code development within your organization and how to establish robust governance practices and a Center of Excellence (CoE).
Power Platform gives a lot of power to your teams. According to Gartner, 80% of technology products and services will be built by non-tech professionals by 2024. While low-code/no-code is clearly the future and the present, this growing trend doesn’t come without challenges.
Some businesses can become hesitant when it comes to granting power to their business users (citizen developers). But interestingly, research shows that approximately 15% of a company’s workforce are likely to be early adopters of new technology.
Embracing this potential by listening to employees' ideas and transforming those who know your business best can provide both customer and employee value. For example, citizen developers can build apps in just a few days to a couple of weeks, often beating the usual timeline associated with large IT departments.
This approach shows how granting power to business users can lead to efficient outcomes while promoting innovation from inside your organization.
In other cases, governance has not kept up with the rapid rise in citizen developers within companies, leaving security holes. Governance is the practice of evaluating and directing technological investments to ensure they support an organization’s goals. It also involves aligning technology with a company’s internal policies and strategy.
A governance practice asks questions like:
When it comes to governance, companies should prioritize applications that are most critical to their businesses, and deprioritize applications that may have narrower impact, such as simpler productivity-based apps.
For example, a manager may want to remember team members’ birthdays. Instead of setting a reminder on Outlook, they may create a Power App to send an email 14 days ahead of each birthday. That has very little impact on overall business applications. On the other end of the spectrum, a Power App that’s integrated into a company’s ERP or CRM is business critical because it touches far more systems. That means that app is exchanging data with those applications and must follow important data and security standards.
In many companies, governance over business-critical citizen-developed apps has fallen through the cracks. If a company doesn’t integrate governance into its no-code/low-code development process, what do they actually risk?
Power Platform is designed to be user-friendly, especially for those who may not have extensive technical backgrounds. It integrates several Microsoft tools, including Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents, creating a unified environment that streamlines processes and allows for automation across different areas of business operations.
However, as your platform grows and more users are introduced into the system, the risks mentioned above will become more prevalent. Implementing robust governance practices is crucial to mitigating these challenges.
Our best practices for establishing governance in the Power Platform is structured into three key areas:
In addition to these considerations, it’s essential to establish strategies for effectively managing your applications and environments:
The basis of your governance enablement should be a Center of Excellence (CoE), which plays a pivotal role in ensuring the success of your governance practices. Here’s what your CoE should encompass:
Establishing all of these tasks can be quite challenging, making it beneficial to delegate them. At Columbus, we have developed a streamlined approach with two types of offerings designed to simplify the process for establishing Power Platform Governance and Center of Excellence.
As the first step, we run an initial discussion with our customers to understand your landscape, ambitions, and needs regarding the Power Platform. This involves strategizing and offering change management guidance to steer you in the right direction.
Following this stage, we direct our customers towards two service options:
This comprehensive approach helps you to focus on the core tasks while receiving ongoing support throughout the Power Platform journey.
Find out more about how we can help with Power Platform Governance by clicking on the button below.