Power Platform | Business Technologists in value chain

The next Power Platform 24 Conference is close and a little more than six month ago me and Chris Huntingford had the pleasure to talk about the rise of the Business Technologists. So what has changed after half a year talking about those employees who build technology or analytics capabilities for internal and external business use, but act outside of IT departments?

Talking about Business Technologists, there´s no way yours not talking about Fusion (development) teams. Gartner talked about them back in February, 2022 – providing guidance to Distributed Fusion Teams. But it´s no longer analysts talking about this topic. Business Technologists can be found everywhere. They started taking a deeper look into Low Code tools, such as Power Platform to upskill individually, maybe transform their career, but in general drive and accelerate digital transformation by supporting IT and Code-first developers on this journey.

CIOs, CDOs and IT departments considering how to best integrate low code to their toolbelt came up with different concepts to implement Fusion teams and Citizen development. Above visual shows an example which considered Business Technologists rapidly extending and therefore helping Code-first or Pro Developers to transform workforce and joint forces to act on driving digital transformation together. They designed principles of asset creation and came up with possible task flows like this given example:

Showing a process flow matrix of a maker, a developer and an IT pro working together as a Fusion team creating new assets and working on an idea together. Each of them using a tool of their choice to act rapidly and support the process in general. Enabling companies in general to lower development costs around 45% as recently assessed in a Forrester TEI study. Furthermore, ensuring up to 55% higher innovation according to McKinsey Developer Velocity research. Using their low code toolbelt to not only overcome developer shortage predicted, instead transforming business operations using data and AI to optimize business flows or even unleash new businesses.

Business Technologists driving Citizen Development, ensuring nurturing and adoption of low code platform, such as Power Platform. Acting as community champions onboarding new low code creators or helping them to finish on their ideas, while creating new business tools. When Chris and I talked about their rise, obviously we could only partially take an outlook on the importance Business Technologists would have in maturing low code tools. Such as Power Apps for instance, making it a market leader in low code / no code tools with nearly 15 million monthly active users, up more than 50 percent compared to a year ago, according to Microsoft´s recent FY23 Q1 earnings report.

Business Technologists supported IT departments rapidly assessing company´s adoption using above maturity model. They helped identifying gaps, adjusted KPI measurements and helped IT DevOps to find the right service delivery model for Power Platform. They internally collaborated with IT to promote and flurish the low code toolbelt in conjunction with previously already existing pro code tools. They helped transforming the access layer to data sources, as it is shown in this customer success story. Democratizing AI to collect and gather more information from various data sources.

Business Technologists according to McKinsey & Company acting in three paths contributing to value creation. Augmenting existing applications, such as Workday, Slack, Zoom, SAP, Oracle and many others. Prototyping new ideas that afterwards could be easily picked up by Fusion teams and brought to production or co-build applications together with pro- or code-first developers.

Compared to my speech with Chris, let me wrap-up by sharing one more visual that allows – and I recommend you to compare on your own – for estimating the changes Business Technologists had influence on over these last +six months.

Thanks for being a contributor to this journey. It ain´t over yet. Until then,…