Microsoft Power Platform and the Future of Business Application

MICROSOFT’S POWER PLATFORM AND THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS APPLICATION SOFTWARE …WE’RE WAY PAST CRM. OVERVIEW The business intelligence, automation, and enterprise application landscape is changing dramatically. In the previous incarnation of enterprise technology, line-of-business owners were forced to choose between pre-baked commercial off the shelf (COTS) software that was difficult to customize and often did not truly meet A generation of business the business’s unique needs, versus custom solutions that – though applications whose time flexible and often tailor made to the business needs of the moment was up. – cost more and were far riskier to develop and deploy. Furthermore, certain classes of applications do not have a COTS answer, nor do Only so many needs could be met with COTS applications, but... they justify the cost of custom software development. In the chasm between the two arose a generation of quasi-apps, the homegrown Custom software development Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, Google docs, and all manner was time consuming and costly of other back-of-the-napkin “systems” that end users developed to Critical functions were run using fill the gap between the big software IT provided and what the users “quasi–apps” actually needed to do their jobs. Lack of enterprise–level control We’ve all been there: The massive spreadsheet that tracked a increased risk decade’s worth of employee travel but was always one accidental Evolving requirements and click away from oblivion, the quirky asset management database complexity were difficult to living on your office-mate’s desktop that was still named after an support employee who left the company five years ago, the SharePoint site Disparate business systems didn’t full of sensitive HR data, or the shared drive that had long been easily talk with one another shared a bit too liberally. A generation of do-it-yourself workers had grown up living on the edge of catastrophe with their quasi-apps.

Three trends have converged to shatter this paradigm, fundamentally changing the relationship between business users, technologists, and their technology.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 2 Connectivity of everything. The new generation of business applications are hyper connected to one another. They allow for connections between business functions that were previously considered siloed, unrelated, or simply not feasible or practical. Travel plans set in motion by human resources decisions, medical procedures scheduled based on a combination of lab results and provider availability, employee recruiting driven by sales and contracts.

Citizens’ uprising. Business users long settled for spreadsheets and SharePoint, but new “low-code / no- code” tools empower these “citizen creators” with the capability to build professional grade apps on their own. Airport baggage screeners are developing mobile apps that cut down on paper work, trainers and facilitators are putting interactive tools in the hands of their students, analysts and researchers are no longer dependent on developers to “pull data” and create stunning visualizations.

New ways of looking at the world (and your data). This is not just about business intelligence (BI) and data visualization tools far outpacing anything that was just recently available. It’s not even just about business users’ ability to harness and extend them. This is about the ability of tools such as Microsoft Power BI to splice together, beautifully visualize, and help users interpret data that their organizations already own, data to which you’ve connected using one of the hundreds native connectors to third party services, and data generated every second of every minute of every day from the connected devices that enable the organization’s work.

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Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 3 INTRODUCING APPLICATION PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (APAAS) AND THE MICROSOFT POWER PLATFORM While COTS and high-cost / high control custom developed applications have a place in an enterprise, both are being eclipsed by a modern, best-of-both-worlds approach known as Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS). aPaaS is a modern, cloud-based construct that allows organizations to:

• Build applications iteratively • Provision app software instantly • Scale apps on-demand • Integrate with other services

Microsoft has developed this aPaaS concept as the Microsoft Power Platform, an end-to-end business application platform that includes the Common Data Service, PowerApps, Power BI, and Flow technologies, and now underpins the Dynamics 365 applications (formerly called “CRM”) that many organizations already know. Together, these technologies fulfill the promises of aPaaS, enabling business and technology partners to:

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 4 COMMON DATA SERVICE The magic of Power Platform’s data integration is in the Common Data Service (CDS). Long-time Microsoft Dynamics / CRM developers easily recognize the potential of XRM, while users of that application no doubt recognize the seamless way that data kept in one type of Dynamics record has been available, referenceable, and usable throughout the application. CDS represents the long-awaited next generation of that capability enabling applications that extend far beyond the traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functions.

Newcomer or seasoned pro, the upshot here is that all data generated by all applications built on the platform resides in CDS. That means that data associated with an application built to track (say) training qualifications for employees at a federal government agency can be seamlessly shared that agency’s application built for (say) asset management, allowing one’s qualification on a vehicle to determine which vehicles he may check out, or one’s job position to drive which gear she is issued. An application built to collect airline passenger feedback on one flight can propagate data to a separate mobile app that gives flight attendants the insight they need to personalize each passenger’s experience.Delayed in first class last week? Have a glass of wine on the house while traveling coach this week. And thanks for choosing our airline… we’re glad you’re up here with us.

This integration of data on the platform happens natively, with no custom components required, and is controlled to a granular application, user, and field level through a suite of proven, native security controls.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 5 POWERAPPS Far beyond a tool for point-and-click development of mobile apps (though it does that, too), Microsoft PowerApps is the native environment for creating and interacting with end-user functionality on the platform. Developers and citizen creators alike use PowerApps to build applications that run natively in mobile, web, and desktop environments across any popular combination of devices and operating systems.

Where traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and CRM solutions forced users to interact with unattractive, monolithic, and often sluggish applications, PowerApps turns the paradigm on its head, allowing users to create smaller apps that are targeted for very specific use cases yet draw on the common source of business data housed in the CDS.

These apps are built using one of two constructs.

• Canvas apps allow creators to start with a blank “canvas” or template – much like creating a PowerPoint slide – and use a combination of drag-and-drop objects and simple Excel-like queries to build the app’s functionality. Just like PowerPoint, creators can run the app right in the builder as they drag, drop, and customize their way to a final product.

• Model-driven apps leverage existing data structures to rapidly build functionality logically organized around similar business processes, pulling in record types, views of data, charts and dashboards, and then displaying that functionality using Microsoft’s modern unified interface optimized for both desktop web and mobile consumption.

Because PowerApps are built atop the CDS, their data is available to other PowerApps in the same environment, subject to the granular security model, and deployable across the enterprise.

POWER BI Power Platform’s answer to rich, visually compelling data visualization and business intelligence, Power BI consumes all of the data stored by PowerApps in CDS, and then integrates with data found across hundreds of third-party services (see “Integrations with Third Party Services” below). The result are charts, dashboards, and other visualizations that are as aesthetically stunning as they are rich in content.

FLOW Microsoft Flow delivers an easy to use workflow builder for line-of-business users, allowing them to automate time-consuming tasks and processes across apps and services with Flow’s low-code builder. With Flow, enterprise organizations can move workflow creation for business solutions away from IT and closer to the day to day business. By removing IT from the picture, time to create workflows is dramatically cut down, empowering line-of-business users to create their own solutions and allowing IT professionals to focus their expertise on more advanced solutions. Flow is easily extended to more complex tasks as well, enabling enterprise organizations to weave it like a thread through their business applications, connecting and automating previously siloed activities.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 6 INTEGRATIONS WITH THIRD PARTY SERVICES Closed ecosystems are dead. Though CDS is today home to data from an incredible array of business use cases, the Power Platform bakes in the assumption that in-house data alone is insufficient to serve the customers, answer the questions, and empower the employees necessary to accomplish the mission. Microsoft has built hundreds of connectors that provide out-of-the-box integration of data not just from Microsoft services (e.g. SharePoint, Office 365, LinkedIn), but to many popular (and some obscure) third party services diverse as Twitter, Word Press, Sales Force, Todoist, Facebook, and Basecamp.

In keeping with the no-code / low-code and citizen creator philosophy that underpins the entire platform, these connectors allow users and developers alike to splice together data found in the CDS with data resident throughout the third-party ecosystem, and to then leverage that data as part of the interactive user experience through PowerApps, or to visualize and model it through Power BI. The “No Cliffs” promise applies as well, as the platform further provides the ability for developers to create custom data connectors to services for which an out-of-the-box connecter does not yet exist.

WHAT ABOUT DYNAMICS? Microsoft Dynamics 365, itself formerly known as “Microsoft CRM”, has been both folded into and extended by the Power Platform. This distinction is tricky, because Microsoft has gradually migrated application development tools out of Dynamics and re-platformed them in PowerApps. Trickier still is that Dynamics continues to exist as both a cloud offering atop the platform, and as an on-premise product independent of the platform. We’ll untangle this by tackling both cases separately.

Cloud or on-premise, it is useful to think of Dynamics as both a suite of business-focused PowerApps such as Sales and Marketing that happen to have been built by Microsoft, and as a delivery vehicle for custom model- driven apps. The latter is particularly true of on-premise Dynamics implementations where PowerApps (which is cloud native) does not exist, and in public sector applications where Sales and Marketing functions are not particularly relevant.

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Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 7 We anticipate that Microsoft will continue to evolve the distinction and the interplay between Dynamics and PowerApps in subsequent releases, but for the moment, the way one should conceptualize Dynamics depends largely on one’s point of view.

• To commercial organizations, Dynamics is a suite of business applications that provide solutions for Marketing, Sales, Field Service, Customer Service, Project Service Automation, Finance and Operations, Retail, and Talent. These solutions may be flexibly mixed, matched, and licensed to suit the organization’s needs.

• To government organizations for whom those business solutions are not particularly relevant, Dynamics is a delivery vehicle for model-driven apps developed by you and your partners, or licensed from a third-party. Government entities have for years used Dynamics to meet a wide range of business needs in case management, correspondence and task management, call centers, grants, service / help desk, process and project management, emergency management, event planning, procurement and contracting, field inspections, FOIA, Congressional inquiry, knowledge base and FAQ, recruiting and workforce management, and national defense.

• In on-premise deployments, public sector or commercial, Dynamics is the platform upon which its own business-focused modules and custom model-driven apps are deployed.

THE SHAREPOINT CONUNDRUM First among equals in the world of quasi-apps, SharePoint has for years been the go-to solution for no-code / low-code “application” development in the enterprise and smaller organizations alike. AIS developed this expertise very early in SharePoint’s life, and has been an industry leader in SharePoint development for over a decade. It’s therefor quite natural that we’d be asked again and again about the use cases in which we’d recommend SharePoint, and the different use cases in which we’d advocate strongly for aPaaS in general and the Power Platform specifically.

The answer is simple:

• SharePoint is about documents, files, and content. Use it to collaborate and store your work.

• Power Platform is about data, business process automation, app development, business intelligence and visualization. Use it to run your business.

Happily, Microsoft is developing the technologies in increasingly complementary ways, establishing strong links between the two and with Office 365 services such as Microsoft Teams. Because all are now running on Azure, the possibilities to extend each into each other are boundless. AIS’s CRM and Automation, Portals and Collaboration, User Experience, and Cloud Infrastructure practices working together have made us Microsoft’s foremost partner solving business challenges in a holistic way.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 8 AIS’S APAAS ADOPTION FRAMEWORK Applied Information Sciences has led subsequent waves of advancement in Microsoft’s business technologies. From SharePoint To Azure, we’ve spent decades working with commercial and government organizations around the world as one of Microsoft’s go-to delivery partners. This expertise born of dedication, deep understanding, and long history since the Power Platform’s inception have resulted in the AIS aPaaS Adoption Framework, which we continue to refine as Microsoft invests in and improves the platform over time. AIS APPROACH How do organizations harness the platform at enterprise scale? A lot of this has to do with business architecture, how together we see and model the interplay of business cases, processes, app technology, and data. The AIS approach is constructed around four pillars:

• Leveraging the Power Platform to solve actual commercial and public sector business problems.

• Rapidly implementing flexibleno-code / low-code solutions at scale.

• Extending our experience in Azure, DevOps, UX, and emerging capabilities to solve challenges that no-code / low-code can’t.

• Providing managed services solutions for continual operations and maintenance, development, modernization, and governance.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 9 FRAMEWORK Our framework provides a base upon which the customer organization’s Power Platform adoption, implementation, or expansion journey is built. Inherent in this philosophy is the notion of framework as guide, not as a recipe for rigidity. Too many technology projects are led by those who allow doctrine to get in the way of common sense. AIS’s aPaaS Adoption Framework favors guideposts so that nothing is missed, versus lines that cannot be crossed.

Embracing an agile implementation methodology alongside the benefits that accrue from rigorous discovery and deliberate transition to long-term sustainment, AIS divides the journey to aPaaS adoption into three phases:

1. Discovery 2. Agile Design – Build – Launch 3. Transition

We ascribe a series of project activities to each phase. These project activities are the process DNA of any project, our key elements of success. We use them to ensure that we’ve accounted for everything necessary to make the adoption successful; they provide our basis of estimate for time and budget, they form our project schedules, and they offer those critical guideposts necessary to ensure that nothing is missed.

The phases and high-level project activities that form AIS’s aPaaS Adoption Framework are shown below. It’s important to remember that not all adoptions will call for all activities; remember, this is a framework, not a box.

Discovery Agile Design-Build-Launch Transition

Stakeholder Workshops Design Collaboration Multi-faceted Training Solution Overview Training Joint Prototyping Full Operating Capability Application Analysis Custom Data and Fields Ongoing Support + Training Infrastructure Assessment Custom Business Processes Tuning and Optimization User Experience (UX) BI and Data Visualization Managed Services Data Analysis Application Development Training Analysis Data Source Integration Cloud, On-Premises, and Hybrid Ongoing Training Infrastructure Continual Testing Life Cycle Transition Planning

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 10 Let’s dwell on the User Experience activity for a moment. There’s often a misconception that enterprise applications don’t need the same amount of effort or attention directed to the user’s experience because they don’t have rich, highly designed interfaces like consumer-facing products.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Business tools are filled with complex rules and processes, creating the need for interactions centered around design patterns like forms and data grids. These design patterns, and the interactions that support them, are historically the most error-prone and difficult to for users to understand and engage with.

Even in a basic web form, hopes for productivity gains can be lost if the form is clunky and difficult to maneuver. A sound user experience looks beyond aesthetics to ensure that labels and language are appropriate and relatable; that information is grouped logically and easy to navigate; that formatting rules are communicated and provide examples; that help is clear and present; and that error messaging is simple and effective, allowing users to quickly rebound and complete their tasks.

All these steps are done to reduce friction between the system and the user, allowing for smooth interactions and realized returns on the investment in reduced training & support costs, and measurable gains in efficiency and productivity.

Beyond the interface, the User Experience activities also provide an opportunity to understand the perceptions, motivations and behaviors of the end users. Understanding this information and how to act on it is critical to change management, and making sure the new applications are adopted and put into use. The risk of replacing quasi-apps built on top of tools like Excel is that the original “system” doesn’t go away. That creates an opportunity for users to resist change, and revert to using the tooling that they are comfortable and familiar with.

Activities are only half the story when the real goal is to leave something behind that truly empowers the business. The specific application functionality and business capability that comes from adopting this technology is driven by the organization’s particular mission, so the framework demands that we build these expected outcomes by considering several deliverables:

• aPaaS Infrastructure • Application Functionality / User Experience • Security Roles and Auditing • Views and Visualizations • Data Integrations

The AIS team cross references our chosen deliverables to our chosen activities, accounts for business needs and user experience desired, and builds a backlog of work that is then executed in an agile fashion.

Finally, we believe that it’s important to embrace the technology that we evangelize, so we track, manage, and make progress transparent to the client organization using PowerApps. Some might call it eating our own dog food, but we prefer to think of it is as drinking our own Champagne.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 11 MANAGED (SERVICES) FOR THE LONG TERM The long-term success of the best executed implementation requires a proper transition to continual operations and maintenance, development, modernization, and governance.

AIS has developed best practices around a full suite of proactive and reactive managed services in an aPaaS environment. Organizations with large aPaaS implementations should consider transitioning ongoing support to a managed services model for several reasons:

• Predict support costs for the next 3-5 years • Allow staff to focus on more strategic initiatives • Provide staff with time to properly train on this new technology • AIS bring a high level of service for a cost much lower than hiring your own staff

The transition phase of the aPaaS framework is crucial to moving into an ongoing operations and maintenance phase of your system, regardless of whether you plan to maintain the application yourself or offload that work to AIS. AIS embeds managed services operations and support staff into the aPaaS Adoption Framework during the transition phase to streamline and reduce the cost of transition while providing the ideal level of post- launch continuity. The transition phase establishes documented minimum viable standard operating procedures tailored to each organization’s support needs, not only to maintain system(s) but also to provide insight for continuous improvement.

Proactive services are designed to shift the burden away from reactive support, allowing IT support organizations to focus on higher quality problems or strategic initiatives while reducing costs. Typical proactive activities include:

• Reporting • Update recommendations • Monitoring • Alerting • Backup / Restore • Cost Optimization

Even the most stable systems sometimes go bump in the night. AIS organizes managed services around quick recoveries so that IT staffs can take back their evenings, weekends, and holidays while AIS monitors your systems and alerts you only if/when you want to know. Additionally, if you have launched with a wish list of new features and enhancements, AIS offers product backlog management and aPaaS application development services. Managed Services are offered both CONUS-only and with blended onshore/offshore staffing for up to 24x7x365 support, all at a fixed price.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 12 POWER PLATFORM IN ACTION This is a platform that grows around your organization, not a single purpose application that knows only one trick. So in closing, we’ll explore ways that AIS is helping customers (and ourselves) embrace the no-code / low-code paradigm, grow beyond custom application development, and leave quasi-apps behind.

NFL PLAYERS ASSOCIATION (NFLPA) The National Football League Players Association, or NFLPA, is the labor organization representing the professional American football players in the National Football League (NFL). The NFLPA, along with two partner organizations, provide lifelong assistance to the NFL’s nearly 2,200 active players and 3,200 former players. They desired to combine three isolated legacy player management systems, reengineer the isolated business processes, and ultimately better serve their members.

These three organizations also desired to put processes in place to ensure data for players is valid and current, enabling the staff to more effectively communicate with members across many channels. Through a detailed discovery process AIS also learned there were several outdated methods for collecting financial data which impacts the NFLPA and its members bottom line.

AIS’ discovery and research process targeted each of the organizations’ sub components. Meeting with each component allowed for AIS and the NFLPA to better understand the many job functions and processes present in the organization. By doing this, AIS was able to map out the overall organizational business process and determine greatest possible benefits to the NFLPA and their members.

AIS determined that a centralized player management system would most effectively benefit each of the organizations. This approach would decrease communication overlap, centralize data, and allow for improved business processes to be implemented without significant impact to staff.

Central to this effort was the implementation of a highly customized Dynamics 365 solution accessible to the NFLPA and two partner organizations. The solution consolidates and replaces the primary line of business applications previously employed by the three organizations and leverages Dynamics 365 features and capabilities to streamline and improve these organizations’ business processes. In addition to using out-of-the- box entities and business processes, the new Dynamics 365 solution employs hundreds of custom entities, plug-ins, workflows, and business process flows which holistically enabled the Dynamics 365 instance to fully replace and extend the data stores and features employed within the three legacy systems.

With a centralized set of data, improved business process, and the tools applied, the NFLPA can now better focus on the mission of the NFLPA, serving its members. Staff can now confidently gain access to information and act using efficient business process that a stable and maintainable platform supports.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 13 UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE Elements within the Department of Defense (DoD) – the federal government agency responsible for most of America’s military – have used Microsoft CRM and later Microsoft Dynamics for years. AIS has long been a partner in adopting that technology, but we’re now working with organizations here who are adopting the platform to streamline and automate their recruiting of new personnel. The use case is excellent for its holistic embrace of so much that makes the platform compelling:

• Provide a compelling user experience for customers (in this case, potential recruits) via an externally facing portal connecting to a back-office recruit management system;

• Enable workers to evaluate, visualize, and process recruits using an app developed using the platform’s no-code / low-code tools;

• Connect to external data sources, in this case to a legacy human resources system into which personnel data is pushed when a recruit is accepted to the organization.

AIS has employed the aPaaS Adoption Framework to guide this effort, working with very active stakeholders, subject matter experts, and key users within the organization to turn business process theory into software enabled business automation enabled by the Microsoft Power Platform. The result is an end to the paper and quasi-apps on which recruiting was previously run, at a fraction of the cost and time-to-operation that would have been possible through custom software development.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 14 APPLIED INFORMATION SCIENCES It’s often said that companies neglect what it is they’re best at when serving their own employees. The Power Platform is helping AIS break that mold, though, as we transform ourselves into an organization – again – drinks its own Champagne.

AIS has harnessed technology across the entire platform to establish end-to-end integration of our business from initial lead inception during the sales process all the way through project closeout when a particular piece of work has concluded. Along the way we’ve retired legacy SharePoint applications by integrating them into the business life cycle now managed on the Power Platform, automated rote tasks and freed our smart people to focus on more complex challenges, and reduced risk to the business by using Power BI and the business intelligence / visualization tools resident in Dynamics 365 to expose data so that everyone from front-line employees to our most senior management can see and take action on delivery risks before they become issues. Specifically:

• Sales prospecting, lead qualifying, responses to opportunities were migrated from SharePoint applications to Microsoft’s unified interface on the platform. • Delivery data including projects, deliverables, project activities, work items, risks, status reports, staffing, and change requests were consolidated and linked to the opportunities that inspired them. • Automation was established to improve efficiency, cut down on time spent on routine tasks, and provide consistent work products across the business.

This was, of course, theoretically possible before the Power Platform, but achieving this level of end-to-end visibility in our business would have required cumbersome ERP that would have likely driven our own users to embrace quasi-apps to get their work done. Our achievement has been made possible by (1) getting all of our data into the Common Data Service, and (2) tailoring specific PowerApps to individual work functions and user experiences.

Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Application Software Pg. 15 CONCLUSION We’re looking to the future with Microsoft’s Power Platform and its no-code / low-code application development tools. It’s an extraordinarily robust platform in which AIS, Microsoft, and an entire ecosystem of partners are investing heavily because it allows us to:

• Rapidly create custom, containerized, no-code / low-code applications that meet different business and user group needs; • Integrate all data natively on the platform – no custom components required – and make that data available to any other application; • Employ “No Cliffs” development with tools that are easily extensible by professional developers and readily integrated with Azure cloud services. • We’re partnering with customers to get them out of the risky quasi-app malaise, beyond the costly custom app development paradigm, and into fully integrated user experiences that are as beautiful to use as they are rich in the data that drives them.

Our aPaaS Adoption Framework provides the roadmap. Your mission provides the destination. Our established success serving customers in the commercial and public sectors – as well as ourselves – bode well for the future of the technology in service to your business.

Where are we going with you next?

Learn More at www.appliedis.com