Are you struggling to realize big value with Power Platform? How to accelerate innovation with Low Code

A little more than a year ago I put forth a vision for the “Cloud Application Platform” as the next generation approach to Cloud technology. A vision, I argued, best achieved through the use of the Microsoft Cloud specifically. And though I think we’re well far along—over a decade in—on the infrastructure and productivity components of this vision, I speak with very few enterprise CIOs or their teams that have achieved maximum value from their work in the apps and data components generally and Power Platform specifically.

Now of course, in the early days (way back in 2019) there was a popular line of quasi-acceptable thinking that the technology was unproven and skipping an investment in application platform technology (of which Power Platform is a part) all together was reasonable. That was untrue then—when I was helping a Fortune 100 financial services firm run $2b USD per year through Power Platform solutions—and it is certainly untrue now. Technically speaking, Power Platform has matured to the point where it is essentially a collection of Azure services with a marketing wrapper. And from a business value perspective, well, don’t take it from me. Take it from Forrester, instead, who in August 2022 published The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Power Platform Premium Capabilities.

First, Forrester interviewed and analyzed the experience of IT decision makers across a collection of organizations. My sense is that this was a good sample because industry representation is quite varied, including professional services (15% of the sample), public sector and related (15%), retail (12%), financial services (12%), and manufacturing (3%). To be clear, we’re talking about enterprise-scale organizations here.

The findings are tremendous, both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the percentage of IT decision makers in the study who agreed their organization had derived a series of benefits such as “improved IT governance” or “improved compliance for external audit and regulations”.

I’ve worked with a lot of IT and business decision makers throughout my career, and I struggle to think of many circumstances in which such significant positive results could be delivered to an organization via technology adoption… and where such claims were supported by independent research.

That is to say: I know of no other move that IT decision makers in organizations across the economy and around the world can make that is likely to achieve results of this magnitude by—in effect—doing more with less. It is an opportunity that absolutely must be seized, and a can’t-afford-not-to-situation when your peers inevitably do. As such, it’s a transformation on which IT decision makers must lead from the front.

But these benefits are often dampened by three big, non-technical reasons that I see so many organizations failing or underperforming in their scaled, enterprise Power Platform adoption:

• Use Case Death Spiral where fixation on workload number forty-two impedes development of workloads one, two, and three;
• IT Tower of Babel where IT teams siloed by specific technologies and lacking common language prevent platform-first approaches;
• Tyranny of the Deliverable under which budgets tied to baskets of requirements are inflexible, difficult to scale, and limiting to continuous innovation

Which is why straight away in a discussion with one of those leaders I want to understand where they stand on the million (or $14.25 million) dollar question:

Are you committed to undertaking a program of cloud transformation using this technology?

I cannot possibly overstate how important it is for IT leaders, their teams, their partners and consultants, and everyone else in your ecosystem to have a really clear, executive-driven answer to this question. The value that Forrester found in successful organizations didn’t just happen. It is not spontaneous, and it is not easy. It’s the product of commitment to and sustained effort towards achieving that value.

So… Fantastic if you are! I’ve spent a great deal of time on these challenges, seeing some organizations succeed, and others fail. So I’ve also put great effort into re-imagining specifics of the journey that organizations ought to be taking as they get started.

For now I will leave you with this: I get it. This is a challenging road. Forrester’s study was built around a three-year time horizon, so consider the benefits that IT can drive for the broader organization if you really do commit. That’s why I always want to understand where a CIO stands early in our work together. More importantly, you should understand it in yourself, for your own organization. The outcomes available to you are tremendous.