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Power Platform – Center of Excellence

The Microsoft Power Platform is an incredible solution providing millions of people and organisations the opportunity to improve their everyday working lives. However, the platform’s freedom and agility can present challenges in terms of control and governance. The low code/no code nature of the platform naturally encourages rapid adoption. If usage is unmanaged, it can be difficult to monitor security, compliance and data, or have any clear oversight of your organisation’s digital activity. This is where a Centre of Excellence (CoE) comes into play.

The Centre of Excellence (CoE) allows for extensive collaboration at all levels of technical expertise, with those set as admins, champions and users having differing levels of responsibilities and permissions. This will help maintain governance whilst supporting active collaboration and creativity across different teams and departments. A Center of Excellence (CoE) drives innovation and improvement and brings together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success while providing standards, consistency, and governance. In practical terms, the CoE is a collection of components and tools that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.

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Overview - Define goals and expected outcomes of your CoE.

A key principle is to clarify why you’re setting up a CoE, what you aim to accomplish, and the key business outcomes you hope to achieve. For many, the CoE is the first step in fostering greater creativity and innovation across the organisation by empowering business units to digitise and automate their business processes, while maintaining the necessary level of central oversight and governance.

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Admin - Gain insights into your Microsoft Power Platform adoption.

You want visibility into how your organisation is using Power Apps and Power Automate. Insights into your adoption will help you govern and secure the platform, identify patterns, and enable you to nurture your makers to accelerate adoption. An inventory is the heart of the CoE; before embarking on your Microsoft Power Platform adoption journey, you’ll want to first understand whether you have existing apps, flows, and makers, and lay the foundation to monitor new apps and flows being created.

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Govern - Establish audit and compliance processes

The goal is for admins to have better visibility into the solutions built by their makers, and support them in making decisions. For examples, admins may decide to move highly used applications to a dedicated environment. This set of functionality allows you to detect frequently used apps and chatbots in your tenant and request their makers provide additional information about them, such as a business justification, data classification and support plan.

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Nurture - Accelerate your adoption by thriving with a community of makers

An essential part of establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) is nurturing your makers and an internal community. You’ll want to share best practices and templates, and onboard new makers. . Multiple nurture components are provided in the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit; each will require some configuration to install.

Establishing a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) means investing in and nurturing organic growth while maintaining governance and control. A CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvement, and as a central function it can break down geographic and organisational silos. A CoE can be a powerful way for an organisation to align around business goals rather than individual department metrics.

Benefits of a CoE

One single view of all Power Platform components across your organisation to reduce risk.
Consistency of use throughout functions and departments, to standardise processes and encourage re-use of ideas.
Freedom for users to fully utilise the invested tools, empowering them to think creatively when problem-solving, irrespective of technical expertise.
Knowledge sharing reduces skillset silos, encouraging collaboration.
In-depth usage monitoring, with clear oversight of what is being used and where, to track adoption and visualise the return on investment versus usage.
Simple, quick and easy administration of Power Apps, Power Automate (both Cloud and Desktop RPA) and Power Virtual Agents, giving you all the data you need to make smarter decisions

Challenges of establishing a CoE

Requires multiple permissions and environments setup and configured correctly, implementing such policies such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP).
Striking the right balance between freedom and control can be difficult.
Lack of internal CoE and Power Platform experience and knowledge can make the setup process lengthy and draw out the return on investment and value realisation.
Cultivating buy-in from users is tricky as governance is often perceived as a barrier to adoption.