Elevating Enterprises: The Six Pillars of Value in Microsoft’s Power Platform

January 1, 2024Steve DarkEric Ramos

Introduction: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities

According to a Gartner Research survey, organizations are struggling in their digital initiatives.

59% of CIOs say digital initiatives take too long to complete.
52% of CIOs say digital initiatives take too long to realize value.
56% of CIOs agree that limited scale of tools is a challenge.

In the digital age, agility is critical to thrive. As companies grapple with an ever-widening 'app gap' - the chasm between the demand for applications and the availability of skilled developers - Microsoft's Power Platform provides tremendous value. The platform is designed to put the power of development into the hands of those closest to business challenges, turning them into opportunities. This article is an essential read for forward-thinking leaders and IT professionals who seek to leverage low-code solutions for high-impact results. Here, we'll explore six fundamental ways the Power Platform is unlocking unprecedented value for organizations and how the integration of AI is setting the stage for a smarter future.

1: Empower Professional Developers

The Power Platform enables developers to build complex solutions faster with low code by providing an advanced set of tools that streamline both front-end and back-end development. The platform incorporates drag-and-drop technologies that simplify the creation of custom solutions, reducing the time and effort typically required. Additionally, Microsoft has enriched the Power Platform with the capability to extend its functionalities using custom development technologies like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. This ensures that developers can build more tailored solutions that precisely meet their organization's needs at scale.

Accelerate Time-to-Value: Power Platform empowers developers with low-code tools, slashing the time traditionally spent on custom solutions. This translates into a 24% reduction in development costs and a faster return on investment, making it a financially sound decision for businesses.
Extend and Integrate: Developers can extend the Power Platform with familiar developer tools and Azure services, harmonizing the old with the new, and ensuring that solutions can scale with organizational needs.
Maintain governance and control at scale: The built-in administration and security tools work across all your solutions.

2: Modernize Legacy Systems

Historically organizations had two choices to modernize legacy systems, lift-and-shift applications to the cloud or replace with a new solution. The Power Platform enables you to build a net-new solution by pulling data from the current legacy systems database and building a new solution in weeks on top of that data.

The Power Platform could modernize up to 75% of legacy apps in a typical organization's application portfolio.
Develop solutions at scale to free up limited professional developer resources and enable them to work faster on mission critical solutions.
Trusted by leaders as about 87% of CIOs and IT professionals acknowledge low-code as a pivotal tool for modernizing legacy applications, a testament to its effectiveness and reliability.

3: Enable Departments to Innovate

The Power Platform empowers departments within organizations to tackle business challenges by enabling them to build automated, efficient, and integrated solutions. The platform helps alleviate the strain on IT departments and professional developers created by the app gap challenge. This gap arises from the increasing demand for efficiency, where frontline and knowledge workers are expected to deliver more with less. Using low-code tools, the Power Platform allows these knowledge workers to become 'citizen developers,' dramatically reducing the time to market for new solutions. This empowers departments to drive innovation across the organization at scale.

Accelerate developers and empower business users to develop solutions faster and at scale with safeguards in place.
Build solutions with less effort with next generation AI Copilot to quickly go from idea to solutions with natural language.
Keep IT in full control and reduce the risk of shadow IT with centralized administration and governance.

4: Extend Line-of-Business Systems

The Power Platform enables organizations to extend their line of business systems by improving and building upon core systems, thanks to its integrative capabilities and low-code environment. The Power Platform’s ability to connect with third-party systems and automate workflows end-to-end is what empowers organizations to not only enhance but also extend the capabilities of their core business systems, leading to improved efficiency and streamlined operations.

Improve processes and user experience across your company’s core systems like SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce.
Extend your core systems with apps, flows, external websites, chatbots and dashboards to fill gaps and deliver flexibility.
Get more out of your existing investments with a modern solution that keeps the user experience seamless and extends the life of your core systems.

5: Enhance the Employee Experience

The Power Platform enhances employee experiences by streamlining access to tools and information, which in turn boosts engagement and productivity. Organizations can increase employee efficiency by building automated solutions that serve as a single source of truth and reside within the environments employees already use, such as Microsoft Teams. This integration allows employees to work more effectively by minimizing the need for repetitive manual inputs and navigating across disparate systems. The enhanced efficiency and empowerment provided by the Power Platform's low-code environment allow knowledge workers to become citizen developers, further reducing time to market for new solutions. This empowerment is crucial for departments looking to innovate and solve business challenges proactively, leading to a more engaged and productive workforce. In fact, the use of no-code or low-code platforms or apps is shown to have led to an 83% positive impact on work satisfaction.

Connect your internal and external data sources and give employees information they need to decide and act fast.
Improve communication, focus, and collaboration with apps, workflows, and bots available in the flow of work through Teams and Microsoft 365.
Simplify work with applications and automations that streamline activities and experiences both in the office and on the front line.

6: Optimize with Hyperautomation

The Power Platform enables organizations to optimize operations through hyperautomation, a strategy that extends automation to all business areas, making the resolution of challenges faster and more efficient. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple components of automation, integration with core systems, and application of advanced technologies like AI to automate tasks that were previously beyond the scope of traditional automation.

End-to-end automation and process modernization with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Digital Process Automation (DPA), embedded AI, chatbots, and process mining.
Build a culture of automation and digital transformation with the full Power Platform solution.

Efficiently scale automation and give IT controls they need to drive a secure and compliant organization.

The AI Paradigm Shift

Artificial Intelligence (AI) adds significant value to the Power Platform by empowering citizen developers to have an innovative impact at scale. Generative AI, integrated within the Power Platform, facilitates the development process, allowing users to build complex solutions like apps, workflows, and web pages with unprecedented ease and speed.

Empowering innovation with Generative AI enables citizen developers to build applications, workflows, and web pages quickly and intuitively.
Natural language processing allows the use of conversational language to direct the development process, eliminating the need for in-depth coding knowledge, and dramatically accelerating the upskilling process on the platform.
IT can maintain oversight with built-in governance and administration capabilities, despite the ease of use provided by AI, ensuring solutions adhere to organizational policies and security standards.

Conclusion: The Future is Low-Code

The Microsoft Power Platform is a transformative force, a catalyst that converts everyday business challenges into opportunities for growth and innovation. By utilizing the platform to generate value in the ways discussed in this post, from empowering developers to harnessing the power of AI, organizations can not only close the app gap but also pave the way for a future where every stakeholder has the tools to innovate.

Want Help on Your Journey?

Here's three ways we can help:

If your organization is just starting with the Power Platform - schedule a free Power Platform briefing to discuss how to set your organization up for success with the Power Platform.
If your organization has been using the Power Platform for a while and is looking to get more value - schedule a free Power Platform briefing to discuss how to enhance and scale your low-code program to drive innovation at scale.
If you need help in building a specific solution, contact us to schedule a call to discuss further.

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