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Establishing a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence

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Establishing a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) means investing in and nurturing organic growth while maintaining governance and control. For many, the CoE is the first step in fostering greater creativity and innovation across the organization by empowering business units to digitize and automate their business processes, while maintaining the necessary level of central oversight and governance.

A key principle is to clarify why you're setting up a CoE, what you aim to accomplish, and the key business outcomes you hope to achieve. Then get started and learn and evolve along the way.

A CoE is designed to drive innovation and improvement. As a central function it can break down geographic and organizational silos to bring together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success, while at the same time providing standards, consistency, and governance to the organization. In summary, a CoE can be a powerful way for an organization to align around business goals rather than individual department metrics.

Typically, the following people or departments are key drivers or stakeholders when establishing a Center of Excellence:

  • App and flow makers
  • Application lifecycle management and DevOps users
  • Central IT
  • Support and training engineers
  • Business change management

A Center of Excellence could start off quite simple with a single individual using the provided tools and best practices to get a view of their Microsoft Power Platform adoption in their organization, and might grow into a more mature investment with multiple functions and roles to manage multiple aspects of governance, training, support, and automated app deployment across the organization. We encourage you to understand where you are in your adoption journey and invest accordingly. We recommend the following strategy for getting started with your journey of establishing a CoE:

  • Secure by establishing data loss prevention policies, managing licenses and access to data sources.
  • Evangelize by providing a community space on Teams, Yammer or SharePoint, with a collection of links for people to start their learning.
  • Monitor your usage, see who is creating apps, what apps are being created, and how they are used.
  • Evolve your CoE strategy with those learnings.

Learn how Standard Bank established their Center of Excellence, including best practices, benefits and impact, and key learnings.