Fill the gaps with PowerApps – power to the user, accelerating digital transformation

In the age of the smartphone, you as the user are accustomed to finding and downloading an app that meets your requirements easily. It is an ‘everyday’ thing to do that people, no matter what age, have no problem doing. It’s quick and easy! Although, when we think about the challenges and needs of our businesses, it hasn’t been as easy to find the right app. The time and costs to develop an app which meets your needs has been excessive, often with a necessity to involve an experienced IT or Development team.

Enterprise apps have seriously lagged behind consumer apps in terms of ease-of-use, ease-of-development, build costs, and ‘time-to-market’ to solve the business need or challenge. This is changing and changing fast!

Our current challenging times have highlighted the need for emergency solutions to crisis management issues and to support collaboration on app solution builds. Below outlines what’s available out there for businesses, and most importantly what’s available for your users and how to get started.

Power Apps and the Power Platform

Business leaders, teams and individual innovators have traditionally taken their business solution requests to the IT departments and Developer teams and then waited a while (weeks or months) for the build – a costly and time-consuming approach taking the IT team away from other critical tasks. Businesses are ever-reliant on data to gain insights and action tangible value; and with the constantly increasing amount of data, businesses need availability and accessibility to data and insights for typical (non-techy) end users so they can innovate more quickly to meet a business challenge or need, quickly test/trial, own their solution creation and ultimately drive rapid results for the business.

Power Apps enables faster solutions to be developed by non-techies, supports sharing of ideas and collaborative solution build, and importantly the realization of ideas across your organisation, now with no cost barrier.

Not only is the app creation quick but the results are rapid – improving efficiencies and job satisfaction such as new employee induction with an onboarding app that enables a new employee to start and be ‘up and running’ by lunchtime the same day. Power Apps supports ease-of-use and simplification of often complex business processes (e.g. your ERP system) by providing a friendly interface for end users enabling digital transformation across your entire business that you wouldn’t have previously considered.

Microsoft’s Power Platform enables this data democratisation through a low code approach to fast custom app development, providing technologies (Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents) that allow staff to do more with their data themselves, without an IT background or any coding knowledge.

Power Platform enables users and organizations to analyse, easily manipulate, surface key information and automate on the data, and can be used with Office 365 and Dynamics 365 (as well as other apps such as Google Analytics).

Author: Jill Carroll – Product Marketing Manager