Let me present another “crime mystery” to you. Looks like we’ve got too many of those around.If you like solving problems by treating them like mysteries, you are going to like this article as well.
Recently, one of my customers asked me:
“Olena, you mentioned CoE for Power Platform in the document. Isn’t it dead?!”
It made me laugh instantly. The thing is, to be dead, you need to be alive first, but with the Power Platform CoE, it’s a little bit more complicated. To save time for both of us, I responded: “CoE toolkit is deprecated, and some of the good from it you can find in the Admin Centre now. But CoE on its own is something different, and we will talk about it during the workshops”.
Power Platform CoE isn’t dead, as it’s never been fully alive.
You won’t believe how many times I heard people saying something like, “We installed Power Platform CoE”, referring to the CoE toolkit. Then claiming they set up CoE within the organisation.
So, what is a Power Platform CoE, and why is it difficult for people to understand it?
According to Microsoft,
“A Power Platform Centre of Excellence (CoE) is a team or entity within an organisation that drives innovation and improvement and provides leadership, best practices, research, support, and training for Power Platform. It brings together people with similar goals, provides standards, consistency, and governance, and helps organisations adopt Power Platform effectively.”
Then this:
“A CoE is not the CoE Starter Kit. The Starter Kit is just tooling. A real CoE requires people, processes, communication, governance, support, and enablement. “ (learn.microsoft.com)
So let me make it clear once and for all. There are two separate things.
1. Power Platform Centre of Excellence (can’t install)
The first, Power Platform CoE, one is a set of “instruments” but not in a technical sense. It’s not something you can install; it takes time to implement in the organisation – like people, processes, communication, governance, support, and enablement – to get maximum value from the platform.
2. CoE Toolkit (can install)
The second one is a CoE Toolkit itself; it is something you can install. It’s developed to assist admins and support the key platform management processes. It also contains some reporting. I always said it must be part of the platform’s admin, and now it is, partly.
The first topic is more interesting yet misunderstood. And why is that so?
Multiple contributing factors, but I would highlight one:
Microsoft marketing.
It’s always their marketing, isn’t it? The same marketing that likes renaming things.
Power Platform was marketed as an easy no-brainer thing: everyone can build automations and apps. Microsoft marketed the easy part and largely hid the operational part. I mean, who wants to talk about boring governance when the vendor wants us to focus on a “JUST BUILD IT!” vibe? Just use your credit card while IT is not looking.
For the same very reason, the Governance In A Day training never had a long life. Power Platform admin and governance became a “not for everyone” topic in the Microsoft community.
So, not surprisingly, when we come to deliver CoE workshops (and it doesn’t happen very often), we see straight away that the organisational
IT team underestimates the complexity.
That is understandable with everything said above.
When a customer finally discovers the truth during training, they obviously admit they are not prepared. They thought it was yet another admin resource to manage, but now they see it’s not that simple. Then they try to map it to something they already know:
- Infrastructure people see Azure.
- Security people see boundaries and controls.
- M365 people see tenant administration.
- Development managers see software development.
But Power Platform is inconvenient because it’s a bit of all of those and a bit of none.
If you only prep yourself to quickly install the magic toolkit, and then all of a sudden, you discover an enterprise platform that needs management, it could be a bit of a shocker. And now, where do we get budget for this?
And if it’s not enough already, there is a shortage of admin resources who understand and know Power Platform. The skills and experience required are not in the usual admin or Power Platform development areas.
All of it is just another reason the topic is very unpopular and overlooked. And nearly impossible to sell as a consulting service. But the last one is mostly because the admin is a full-time job.
So why is it changing now? Why CoE is not just dead, but finally alive?
Somehow, it’s about AI again. It changes the landscape, but not the way they push it. One of the changes we see is increased interest in Power Platform admin and governance fuelled by AI enablement. Enabling automation and AI forces customers to look at things they had avoided. And now the focus has changed. Thanks to AI, adding more complexity to platform management is justified now.
Did we break the spell at last? Not quite yet. But it shows some promising signs of improvement. Accepting the fact that things are complex brings us closer to the solution.
So what do you do to enable Power Platform, automation, and AI in your organisation?
One good approach is to get training from experts and their help in upskilling admins to understand the Power Platform. Luckily, the Technomancy team offers such training. You can start with “Power Platform Governance in A Day” to get the initial assessment and the roadmap. Then engage for the advanced workshops and train-the-trainer activities.
And you no longer need to install the CoE toolkit! (Or do you still need it?)