Power Platform | Rise of the (evil) community developer

It was broad to my attention an interesting article regarding today´s topic the other day by Serge Luca (aka #doctorFlow) and obviously a headline like „lots of solutions or lots of problems“ caused me reading through this. I felt reminded of many of my Power Platform related Governance Design Thinking workshops and sessions and thought why not share some key learnings with you.

Those rembering my style of „simplification“ from previous articles – I was brought back to the mid- to end
90´s and the famous Pinky and the Brain episodes which I enjoyed watching. I thought them could be a perfect ice-breaker when starting any of my sessions regarding Governance, Security and Compliance concerns as it could outline the ongoing between IT and business folks when it comes up to low-code platforms these days. It also adds an aspect of business seen as „evil“ part by IT here. Why?

Because of „Shadow-IT“ and many more. Well, let´s take a look at the list of the risks listed in above article to better understand the „many more“ aspect here:

1. Integration risk: This risk involves exposing data that shouldn’t be exposed.

I would say #2 famous raised concern regarding Power Plaform when it comes up to the +400 offered out of the box connectors and the fact of them seen as „uncontrolable“.

2. Transformation risk: This risk involves bugs or miscalculations in the app that lead to bad business decisions

From my experience #3 to #4 on the list of concerns regarding Power Platform being not enterprise ready or not offering the toolset needed to monitor „low-code“ of a citizen developer; allowing for proper ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) or vulnarability checks. In addition the article talks about risks introduced by community developers outlined with an example them training a machine learning model.

I am not saying ignore those risks or they are non-existing, but I remind my session attendees pretty often, that low-code is a team sport. Nothing more, nothing less. And fusion of development teams, such as pro developers supporting the community developers in a way of not only offering them a secured and monitored low-code eco-system – in fact offering them supportive pro-code extensions and pre-trained AI- or Machine Learning models is a way to look at a successful implementation and low-code strategy to digital transform.

Same as the article wraps up the story as „Managing the risk of low-code platforms“ is key to success, I´d like to point out that Governance, Security and Compliance management is key to an easy digital transformation journey with the Power Platform. I outlined a possible way to kick-start your journey with a visual that can be found inside this article. Additionally, Microsoft offers a pretty good overview to familiarize yourself with activities and actions needed. Yes, it is a lot to read through when doing it on your own. But there´re thousands of consultants and partners out there, who are happy to help you with that.

Got questions? Leave a comment or send a Tweet. Until then,…