Much has happened since we first released the Power Platform Adoption Framework in 2019.

• The platform has continued to mature with the launch of powerful new technologies including Power Virtual Agents, AI Builder, Power Apps Portals, UI flows, and--of course--ongoing improvements to Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Common Data Service, and the Dynamics 365 first-party apps.

• The adoption framework itself has become fully-community driven with a successful move to GitHub announced at the London Power Platform User Group on 19 September 2019.

• Power Platform adoption has soared worldwide, and with it so too has grown the incredible community of practitioners. We've welcomed citizen developers and full-time Power Platform developers alike to a passionate global network whose in-person and virtual events continue to grow bigger and more technically sophisticated.

And, of course, as we write this people around the world are grappling with the COVID-19 virus and the upending changes to our way of life that the virus has wrought. Power Platform is helping us through these times as well, not just thanks to solutions like those for Crisis Communications or Emergency Response, but thanks also to the #PowerAddicts and others in the worldwide Microsoft business applications community who support one another personally and professionally every day.

So we're introducing some new ideas--and new ways of thinking about existing concepts--as we enter the Power Platform Adoption Framework's second year. As a "framework", we're committed to broadly applicable best practices for adoption at scale, not to being a technical manual. We're encouraging organizations to create playbooks (literally or figuratively) that complement our shared "framework" with organization-specific technical considerations.

Context is so important here. For example, whilst the framework's best practices will apply broadly to big enterprise banks and small / medium businesses alike, those two very different types of organizations will naturally face different drivers and constraints. That's why we try to avoid being technically prescriptive unless we feel it absolutely necessary. Likewise, some adoptions feature a significant "citizen developer" emphasis, whilst others do not. Power Platform Adoption Framework is about the ability to adopt at scale either way.

Moving forward we will continue to focus on openness with the community so that the framework can truly be a globally-inspired collection of best practices for adopting Power Platform at scale. This is reflected both in the ongoing work on GitHub, and in the publisher's de-emphasis on marketing branding in the official second edition white paper. We’ll honor this focus by featuring the world’s great Power Platform community cities on the cover of the official release white papers, beginning with London on the cover of the second edition.

Power Platform is a first-class citizen in the cloud transformation journey. Indeed, the platform exists alongside Azure and Microsoft 365 as one of Microsoft's "three clouds". We increasingly see this trend at forward-thinking organizations in some of the most complex or regulated sectors. They are realizing that Power Platform is an enterprise-grade platform for enterprise-grade workloads.

-Andrew Welch, Microsoft MVP
The Power Platform Adoption Framework team

www.PowerPlatform.AF

More and more organizations are transforming their business in the cloud. They are modernizing legacy enterprise applications with enterprise-grade capabilities such as Microsoft Dataverse (formerly the "Common Data Service" or "CDS"), and they are bringing rogue IT and quasi-apps out of the shadows. Organizations are empowering citizen developers to connect siloed data, engage customers, and drive return on investment (ROI) with robust solutions in Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Dataverse, and Dynamics 365.

Citizen Developers are the business users building components on Power Platform in service of their full-time job functions, but they're not full-time working on the platform. They don't work in IT. They use Power Platform to build apps, data components, automations, chatbots and more using no-code / low-code tools. The Power Platform Adoption Framework helps to empower business users to build solutions that replace spreadsheets, legacy databases, SharePoint lists, manual processes, and other quasi-apps within the guardrails of sound enterprise management and governance of the platform.

We’ve seen it. Today, organizations are using the platform to recruit and onboard talent, automate their marketing, streamline disaster response, simplify reporting and planning across their businesses, enable field engineers and inspectors, manage complex cost-sharing across business units, bring new insurance products to market, and more.

People around the world are using Power Platform to improve the passenger experience at airports, make government more responsive to citizens, micro-target retail customers, streamline their consulting businesses, control the cost of fuel in transportation-focused businesses, connect their employees with volunteer opportunities, keep the trains running on time, and even give massages (in airport lounges).

Mature organizations understand that rigor, discipline, and best practices are required to fully adopt the platform at scale.

Power Platform Adoption Framework is the global community-driven best practice for adopting at scale.

It helps enterprise organizations:

• Get to value quickly
• Educate, train, and grow their community of citizen developers and power users
• Create durable partnerships between business, IT, and the user group community
• Continuously improve ROI on the platform by identifying and migrating new workloads
• Blend agile app development with rigorous enterprise management and governance

We’ve studied and learned from our friends, partners, and colleagues around the world. We’ve built a long history with Power Platform’s predecessor technologies and we’ve transformed our clients’ businesses in the cloud. We’re sharing our Power Platform Adoption Framework so everyone can use it as we believe it will help foster an already vibrant and thriving community of users around this technology. As the publisher, AIS is committed to continued investment, updating, and sharing of the framework as best practices evolve. We hope you’ll join us, build with us, learn from us, and teach us better ways to do things.

The Power Platform Adoption Framework is built on the idea of scale; in other words, implementing the platform across large organizations to solve a range of business problems, small and large. Scale matters on Power Platform for three reasons.

Network Effect. The magic of the Common Data Service is in its ability to establish a single source of truth for the data stored within it, and then for app experiences to be built atop that data to address specific use cases. The more apps running on Dataverse, the more valuable that single source of truth becomes. The more users interacting with those apps and storing data in Dataverse, the richer that data source becomes.

Standardization. Once upon a time, organizations embraced the applications inside of Microsoft Office because they worked similarly and played well together. It was easier to train and support on a single platform. The same principle applies to Power Platform. Rather than leave our users’ everyday app interactions to a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, one-off databases, and third-party tools, IT organizations use Power Platform to establish a single ecosystem in which dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of workloads can live, work, and be secured.

Return on Investment. This is about the math of license costs. Workloads running on separate platforms or applications incur separate license costs. If your organization pays X amount for a Power Apps license and runs one app, the cost to license that app is X. Adding a second workload reduces that cost to X / 2. Four workloads are X / 4. By the time we’ve migrated our twentieth workload to Power Platform, we’ve reduced the license cost per app by a factor of twenty. This is important because in the world of Azure, or other similar cloud infrastructure services, we pay for consumption. In other words, our costs rise the more we consume. On Power Platform, we’re incentivized to consume more so we can increase the ROI of our license investment. Migrating workloads onto the platform also allows us to retire them (and their license and support costs) elsewhere.