Power Platform – A contest of automation

I´ve been recently part of a design thinking workshop series around process automation. A slide that caught my attention was this:

As this number of routine work was pretty impressive, we accepted the challenge inside design thinking and tried to figure out a current state on automation with the business user and developers attending the workshop series. And in fact many automation projects didn´t kick-off or got stuck in IT backlog systems due to business being limited in terms of using automation tools. Automation tools remained subject to professional developers only.

That again caught my attention as Automation is a Team sport and if you take a look into traditional methods to uncover process problems, it always involved a team, a room and a lot of Post-It sticky notes. What a surprise that this reminded me of Design Thinking. So wouldn´t it be great to democratize automation and making it easier to uncover process automation on all levels?

Microsoft seems to address it two folded way:
a) Introducing Process Advisor as a new capability for Power Automate to allow for process mining
b) Supporting more pre-trained AI Builder models to simplify process automation, such as invoice processing.

Regarding #1: I couldn´t resist sharing this short anecdote from another workshop with you.

Sounds familiar to you? Guess what I was shared with as well?

Unfortunately, the story around Business- and IT departments aligning on a combined low-code strategy and vision is still ongoing. Some already being in the leaders quadrant here as they started early and now evolving it. Maybe keeping it with Charles Darwin here: „It is not the strongest or most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.“

Until then, …