Unpacking a Year of Power Platform Insights: Accelerating Productivity and Organizational Maturity
5 minute read
As head of the rapid solution delivery (RSD) team at Hitachi Solutions, I spend most of my time helping customers solve business challenges with low-code innovations. I live and breathe Microsoft’s Power Platform — hosting webinars, presenting to customers, and speaking at industry events.
From this vantage point, I’ve observed a rapid rise in the popularity of low-code development over the last few years. This is why we created Power Platform INSIGHTS, our monthly newsletter on all-things Power Platform. And as a regular contributor, I’ve been able to pass on to readers what I’ve learned about creating value through low-code business solutions, building out a low-code toolbox and capabilities, and scaling low-code efforts enterprise-wide.
In an interview, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Charles Lamanna says Power Platform is now a $2B business with over 7M monthly active users and that it is also experiencing 72% growth year-over-year by revenues.
The newsletter has been a great vehicle to help prospects and customers gain a better understanding of low-code strategies, capabilities, and tools. At the same time, it’s also been a way for us to engage and learn from them as well.
It’s been a year since we launched Power Platform INSIGHTS and in that time, we’ve uncovered emerging trends and key findings from customers around how they are using low code and what they want to get out of it. I wanted to share a few of these observations, so below are a few highlights from our “Year of Power Platform INSIGHTS.”
Doing More with Less
One thing that really stood out to me was how many people are searching for technology to help them be more productive with the resources they already have. Time and again, we hear from prospects and customers that budgets are tight, systems and processes are time-consuming, and good workers are hard to find. They are desperate for ways to help the employees they have work smarter and faster.
This is why the appeal of Microsoft Power Platform and citizen development is so strong and why Hitachi Solutions created its tech hub of Power Platform experts.
Facing huge backlogs, IT departments are under water. They do not have the time to create the apps and automations that business users need to be more efficient. If they do focus on the departments, then strategic enterprise initiatives tend to suffer.
The ability for business users to simplify, streamline, and automate the tasks they need to do their jobs themselves, without coding or IT experience, is a real game changer. Power Platform provides the easy to learn and use tools to do this. And our team of Power Platform experts can guide companies on when and how to use low code to solve their biggest business challenges.
Discover more about Power Platform, citizen development, and accelerating low-code value in our latest EXCHANGES podcast, Maximize Low Code for Your Enterprise, and past editions of Power Platform INSIGHTS.
Organizational Maturity
Another key theme we learned throughout the year of publishing our Power Platform INSIGHTS newsletter is that to speed innovation and realize the full benefit of low code, you must be ready organizationally. That is, cultivating a healthy, successful low-code culture is more than just using the technology. It also involves preparing your people and processes for a new way of working.
So how do you ensure low-code readiness? Through experience working with many customers in many different industries, Hitachi Solutions has developed maturity models for benchmarking low-code adoption around:
- Governance
- Makers
- Technology & Applications
- Business Processes
Knowing where you are in the maturity process will help baseline your makers, environment, security readiness, and identify strengths and weaknesses. You don’t have to be perfect in all areas, but understanding where you are helps you get a handle on your readiness — so you can really take the training wheels off and let people innovate faster.
In our eBook, A Year of Power Platform Insights, you can learn more details about the maturity models and how you measure up. We can help you determine your levels and build a roadmap for you to improve performance and speed time to value. We also offer a free Power Platform Discovery session in which our experts will collaborate with you to jump-start your low-code efforts.
The Right Low-code Partner
Most companies have the desire to leverage low-code tools and capabilities to be more productive and innovative but can be unsure of the best path forward to ensure quality and security. Working with a partner like Hitachi Solutions is the answer.
As a strategic Microsoft partner for nearly 20 years, we bring deep industry, technology, and advisory expertise to create integrated solutions leveraging Microsoft Power Platform, Teams, Dynamics 365, Azure, and more. We work closely with our customers to help them achieve Power Platform success. From building complex applications and automations to collaboratively up-skilling of makers to advisory services around platform governance, we meet you where you are and fast-track your success and user adoption of low-code tools.
Contact us to chat with me or one of our Power Platform experts.
