Power Platform | Building Collaborative Applications

Yesterday at Microsoft Inspire 2021, Satya Nadella talked about breaking down the silos between collaboration, communications, and business process to help creating collaborative applications for knowledge workers and front line workers. Key part of this being components of the Microsoft Cloud stack. This might raised a question of

How am I get started creating a Collaborative application?

Citizen Developer after watching Satya Nadella´s Keynote

This is a perfect opportunity of introducing one of the ways of describing the main team goal the Global Blackbelts are following at Microsoft – we are to unleash business outcomes to our customers digital transformation journey through solution innovation, building cross-cloud & industry solutions. So how can you make use of this in your day-to-day business or in regards to above question? Well, it all starts with you, our customers and partner ecosystem.

Above visual shows a possible output of an Envisioning workshop where together we identified possible areas of building a Collaborative application, looking at room for improvements, drilled into the root cause and setup an action plan to orchestrate services as a platform to fix issues and build business value with Collaborative applications.

Of course getting to these results is possible by running a Design Thinking workshop internally on your own as well. I have been talking about running Design Thinking workshops for shaping a company´s digital transformation in the past. Collecting your ideas around a problem statement that you´ve captured in your daily business, clustering the ideas next and group them wherever possible. And it works across industries.

​Above visual shows you another example this time from Automotive industry, working on a problem statement of a better end-to-end visibility of supply chain. After clustering and grouping all the ideas you would start to categorize your clusters in a difficulty and importance matrix. From least difficulty and importance to most. This would help generating clarity around what is tactical, high value, luxury or strategic.

And the same matrix work for another example – this time from Manufacturing industry. Next you are enabled to create your Action Plan, defining the action, who takes care of and when it should be done. All of this allows you to map the outcome to technology. Which means after those 4 steps, it´s time to think about the Technology that best fits to fix the issue, improve a process or close the gap of siloed data sources. That´s where the Microsoft Cloud stack comes into play and you may figure out how easy it is to use it as a Citizen Developer, building your next Collaborative application.

Looking forward to see your next generation Collaborative applications coming to live, solving a business problem and generate business value rapidly. Until then,…