Microsoft Power Platform: The future of app-building has arrived

As work becomes more digitized, and the information held within our organizations continues to grow exponentially, companies are fervently looking for ways to more efficiently leverage, organize and make sense of it all. For many, this effort has resulted in an influx of desktop and mobile apps.

While the purpose of these apps is to make it easier to access, collect and distribute important data, many workplaces now have apps for every line-of-business system and security product—leading to an uncoordinated digital framework. In fact, research shows that today the average information worker uses 36 different cloud services at work, creating countless sources of distraction and hours of lost productivity.

To exacerbate the issue, the demand for new apps is growing, led by a new generation of digitally-savvy employees entering the workplace. Requests are currently coming in five times faster than existing IT capacity can accommodate which, unquestionably, is putting a strain on IT resources—forcing many companies to invest in expanding their teams. Even then, they’re running into roadblocks, as 57% say the number of staff needed for software development is increasing while the cost of software development is rising (61%).

Fortunately, there is a way to both build apps that create true organizational value and achieve a coordinated digital transformation to maximize data. And for Microsoft business customers, that solution already comes with their existing license in the form of the Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Platform is a unified platform of integrated low-code tools that includes Power BI (business analytics), Power Automate (process automation), Power Virtual Agents (intelligent virtual agents or website chat bots) and Power Apps (application development). While all of these tools play a role in helping organizations coordinate their digital transformation, Power Apps is the main player in enhancing app-building and reducing the associated IT bottleneck.

This app-building solution offers a middle ground between commercial off-the-shelf offerings and customized in-house offerings built by IT. Through a streamlined, drag-and-drop platform, in-house teams simply require basic logic and preliminary coding skills to build functional apps for mobile phones, tablets or desktops. These apps can track or manage complex business processes on a desktop or be purpose-built for a specific task to be executed on a mobile device.

This shift to citizen-led development has created a whole new world of digital opportunities. With the help of Power Platform, HR departments are integrating information from Microsoft Office to create employee onboarding apps that allow new hires to access everything they need to hit the ground running—like policy guides, team member contacts and detailed job descriptions. By building apps that allow team members to quickly and easily submit claims from their phones, finance departments are streamlining time-consuming activities such as expense approvals. And in-house service teams—including IT, maintenance and HR—are able to easily triage and resolve organizational needs through service request apps.

As an added bonus, Microsoft Power Platform enables users to centralize their app-building efforts and identify opportunities for consolidation, coordination and oversight.