Feel the power – five reasons why Power Platform is for you
Picture it. The sales person frustrated at not being able to pull off the right report from the CRM system. Or the finance team that can’t get hold of the right management information (MI) from their ERP system for their CEO. It’s a common scenario. These systems are often state of the art, but there is often a question mark over their usability. And it can cause headaches.
But help might be closer to hand than you think. Whilst organisations often end up with systems that are too inflexible for business users, work arounds and low-code solutions have evolved to help business users adapt these systems to suit their ways of working. Microsoft’s Power Platform is one such panacea. It has been developed with the purpose of helping organisations fine tune their architecture to make it more efficient and straightforward. Basically, it’s a range of low-code development tools that help users easily create custom business applications, automate workflows and visualise data. So could Power Platforms be for you? Here are five reasons why:
- Citizen developer: you don’t even have to be a developer to dream up your own applications – if you think that something works, Power Platform is easy enough to use that you can just get on and build it yourself. Low-code – and increasingly no-code – is around 40-60% faster than traditional development solutions and 50% cheaper than traditional application development. Basically, it empowers business users to get on and do it themselves. And before IT teams get hot under the collar, the control and visibility stays with them – business users can only use sanctioned apps.
- Getting rid of shadow IT: which leads us on to the issue of shadow IT, the murky underworld of business users doing it for themselves in a clandestine way. DIY reports or excel spreadsheets developed for improving workflows and work arounds will become a thing of the past with low-code. Shadow IT is problematic as only the people who use it, know about it – this means that if they leave an organisation or if they are on holiday, that knowledge is unavailable. Power Platform means there is no reason for shadow IT to exist.
- Taking the strain from IT: one of the reasons business users often resort to shadow IT is that they have to wait for too long for IT to deal with their problems as IT can’t keep pace with business demand. In this scenario, Power Platform is definitely worth a look. IT teams can use low-code effectively for business users to start helping themselves, freeing IT professionals up to deal with more complex enquiries. This means that the business can work more efficiently and with more autonomy, are happier, as they don’t have to wait for an over stretched IT team to do it for them.
- Keeping the core clean and driving down costs: low-code can also have significant cost benefits – ordinarily, changes to ERP and CRM systems should only be made by the solution provider, which can be extremely costly. If you use Power Platform for your customisations you can own the changes and avoid changing the system directly. This plays to the principle of ‘keeping the core clean’ i.e. avoid customising core systems.
- An easy lift: another key benefit of Power Platform is that it’s a Microsoft (MS) product, meaning two things. One, it’s highly likely highly you already have some sort of licence that allows you to start using some aspect of Power Platform. And two, it’s a Microsoft product so will integrate into your MS landscape with relative ease. This provides an easier entry point into Power Platform.
Low-code is the future – by 2025, 70% of new applications will use low-code or no-code, which is up from less than 20% in 2020. So the message is, the sooner your organisation adapts to this new developer environment and approach, the better. All power to you.
Want to learn more? If you would like to learn more about how Power Platform can help transform your organisation’s approach to technology, please email [email protected] and we’ll be in touch right away.
