Establishing a Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE)

With great power comes great responsibility. As "Citizen Development" empowers business users to create their own solutions, IT needs a framework to monitor, nurture, and secure this growth. This framework is the Center of Excellence (CoE).

1. Defining the CoE Mandate

A CoE is not just a tool; it's a team and a strategy. The primary goals should be:

• Governance: Ensuring security and compliance standards are met.
• Nurture: Training users and building a community of makers.
• Support: Providing a tier structure for application support (e.g., Enterprise apps vs. Personal productivity apps).

2. The Microsoft CoE Starter Kit

We leverage the Microsoft CoE Starter Kit—a collection of components and tools that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting and supporting Power Platform.

Key Capabilities:

• Inventory: A catalog of all apps, flows, and environments in your tenant.
• Compliance: Automated emails asking makers to justify business value or update legacy apps.
• Activity: Dashboards identifying who the top makers are and which apps see the most usage.

3. The "Community" Aspect

A technical implementation without culture change will fail. Successful CoEs host internal "Hackathons", "App-in-a-Day" training sessions, and hold regular "Office Hours" where makers can ask pro-developers for help.

4. Maturity Model

Organizations typically progress through maturity levels:

1. Initial: Ad-hoc usage, no governance.
2. Repeatable: IT is aware, basic DLP policies in place.
3. Defined: CoE established, automated pipelines used for critical apps.
4. Managed: Fusion teams of pro-devs and business users working together.
5. Optimized: AI-augmented development, full strategic alignment.

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