How to Operationalise the Power Platform in a Government Organisation

The aim of the discussion

The aim of the day was to help attendees explore and understand the practical applications of the Microsoft Power Platform. Through information sharing, discussions, and demonstrations, we covered key topics such as architectural principles, organisational design, governance, and strategic adoption. This allowed both makers and professional developers to learn how to build applications of varying impact and scale—ranging from simple productivity tools to enterprise-ready solutions for the entire organisation.

Power Platform CoE use case – FCDO

We were incredibly lucky to have Naomi Jo Erny, Head of Power Platform Centre of Excellence at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), join us via Microsoft Teams from Singapore where she shared the journey that FCDO have undertaken regarding developing the Power Platform Centre of Excellence with Hitachi Solutions.   

In her 40-minute presentation, Naomi Jo discussed their journey, which began with a simple question: “What ‘other’ tools do you use?” This helped her understand which tools were being used by the user community and how they were being utilised. By identifying previously unnoticed patterns in user behaviour, Naomi Jo saw an opportunity for change.

She built a small, lean team, identified partners and allies, and secured Director-level sponsorship to validate their hypothesis. This enabled the FCDO to shift their approach from viewing the ‘secret’ adoption of the Power Platform as a Shadow IT issue to recognising it as an opportunity to embrace.

The FCDO realised that remaining in the early stages of their Power Platform journey posed operational risks and would prevent them from fully unlocking the potential of low-code/no-code solutions in accelerating their digital transformation.

4 takeaways from the FCDO & Hitachi Solutions partnership

1. Power Platform is not the problem you are solving. It is one part of your solution jigsaw to a problem you must first define. 
2. Design a service with repeatability, scalability and empathy in mind from day one. 
3. Don’t lose the essence of low-code / no-code as you define your value proposition. Keep its spirit of experimentation and exploration but make it intentional and purposeful. 
4. Digital products are just a husk – they perform critical functional, aesthetic and interactive properties but are only as valuable as the underlying architecture and the quality of the data contained in the solution allows it to be. 

The Workshop continued

In the second part of the workshop, attendees participated in three activities designed to help both them and us assess their maturity regarding the Power Platform Centre of Excellence (PP CoE) and prioritise the challenges they are facing.

These activities encouraged participants to consider the implementation of PP CoE from both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives, discussing what they hope to gain from the experience and what obstacles might be holding them back. Each organisation began at different levels of maturity, with some able to share insights based on their experiences with Power Platform so far. It quickly became apparent that many organisations faced similar struggles and the workshop quickly because an open space to discuss possible paths to a solution(s).  

Key themes that were identified

• Ownership: Who should own and be accountable for the Power Platform, it’s Centre of Excellence 

• Mindset shift: How can we win people over? Power Platform should not be seen as a “simple solution for simple problems” but should also be seen as an Enterprise platform that can solve enterprise level problems. Makers need not just be “citizen developers” but can also be ProDevs! 

• Architecture Principles: Designing, implementing, and maintaining robust application workloads using Microsoft Power Platform requires a number of key architecture principles that should be the foundations of any Power Platform Centre of Excellence 

• Governance: The various aspects of Power Platform governance were raised, specifically around Access Control, Data Loss Prevention, Lifecycle management and Education & Training. It was recognised in the discussions that having the right level of Governance is critical and needs to balance the risk of introducing so much governance that it is unusable and erodes the value of the platform entirely to being without any guardrails and risks becoming just another way of enabling “Shadow IT” 

• Business Case: How can you scale a service with limited funding? How can you demonstrate the ROI? How do you build that critical backlog of problems to solve or innovative ideas that will enable the value to be seen? 

• Enable Creativity: How can we enable makers creativity without compromising data or security principles? 

• Data: With the Dataverse being so critical to the Power Platform, how can we help our data colleagues understand how best to make use of it? 

• Career Development: With makers coming from any background or job discipline, how can we promote Power Platform as a career path within the Civil Service? 

• Cross Government standards & repeatability: What can be done to build some cross Government Standards to ensure effort if not wasted “reinventing the wheel” and creating a repository of repeatable blueprints for application types to align to the government’s re-use agenda, helping reduce time to value and costs 

Conclusion

It was a fantastic day, filled with collaboration and knowledge-sharing between civil servants from various departments and agencies, as well as teams from Microsoft and Hitachi Solutions. If you’d be interested in joining one of our future workshops, get in touch today.