Empowering Enterprise Teams with Automated Power Platform Governance

Background

A Fortune 500 company and global leader in risk management solutions sought to harness the full potential of Microsoft’s Power Platform to drive innovation and streamline operations across its diverse teams. With a workforce of over 13,000 employees serving 300 million customers in 21 countries, the company faced a unique challenge: enabling teams to build low-code solutions while maintaining robust security and governance. The organization partnered with IntelliTect to develop an automated, scalable, and secure governance framework that would empower team-led development while adhering to stringent corporate standards.

Challenge

The rapid adoption of Microsoft Power Platform created an environment where individual teams could easily build solutions tailored to their needs. However, this growth outpaced the development of consistent security and governance practices, resulting in possible data leakage and reduced productivity amongst Power Platform Makers. Standardized environment provisioning and application lifecycle management was manually intensive and inconsistent, creating another development and administrative bottleneck. Additionally, ensuring a consistent approach to Power Platform governance was vital for enabling effective use of the platform by internal teams, given its relatively new adoption within the organization. Finally, managing collaboration across multiple internal teams required a coordinated effort to align various stakeholders and ensure seamless integration of the new governance framework.

Solution

IntelliTect provided a comprehensive solution that combined technical expertise and strategic planning:

• Automated Governance Framework: IntelliTect designed and implemented an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solution using Azure DevOps, Terraform Cloud, and GitHub. This approach automated environment provisioning and enforced governance policies.
• Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): A CI/CD pipeline was established to streamline the movement of Power Platform solutions through development, model, and production environments. IntelliTect developed two distinct ALM workflows:
  • GitHub Actions Workflow: Exported solutions into source control as human-readable code bases for fine-grain development control and deployment across environments.
  • Power Platform Pipelines: Enabled seamless and user-friendly promotion of unmanaged and managed solutions from development to production environments.
• Discovery and Documentation: The team conducted a thorough discovery phase to refine the project scope and provided detailed documentation to support future engagements.
• Team Enablement: IntelliTect collaborated with internal teams, offering hands-on guidance and training. This effort enhanced the organization’s understanding of Power Platform’s unique capabilities, enabling them to take full advantage of the platform while ensuring long-term sustainability.
• Scalable Architecture: By following IaC and CI/CD paradigms, IntelliTect ensured that initial investments in time and knowledge translated into scalable and maintainable solutions.

Outcome

The engagement resulted in a robust governance framework and streamlined ALM processes that enabled teams to build and deploy solutions securely and efficiently. IntelliTect’s collaboration helped to develop a culture around a deeper understanding of Power Platform governance, empowering the organization to manage future growth with confidence. IntelliTect’s tailored approach will support the initiative to innovate securely and effectively, positioning the company as a leader in leveraging low-code solutions at an enterprise scale. By supercharging development teams, fostering long-term self-sufficiency, and providing a scalable governance structure, IntelliTect helped lay the foundation for continued growth and technological advancement.