Implement the Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence starter kit
A Center of Excellence (CoE) in an organization drives innovation and improvement by bringing together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success. At the same time, a CoE provides standards, consistency, and governance to the organization.
The Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools designed to help organizations develop a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform. The focus of the starter kit is on Power Apps and Power Automate. The kit doesn't represent the entire CoE, because managing a CoE requires more than tools alone. The CoE also requires people, communication, and defined requirements and processes. The tools provided in the starter kit are just a means to get to the end goal. The CoE itself must be thoughtfully designed by each organization based on their needs and preferences.
Additional reading. For more information, see the article titled What is a Center of Excellence?
The Center of Excellence starter kit provides some automation and tooling to help teams build monitoring and automation necessary to support a CoE. The foundation of the kit is a Microsoft Dataverse data model and workflows to collect resource information across the environments in the tenant. The kit includes multiple apps and Power BI analytics to view and interact with the data that an organization collects. It also includes flows to collect data across environments and help with workflows for an organization's compliance needs. The kit also provides several templates and suggested patterns and practices for implementing CoE efforts.
Using the CoE Power BI dashboard
Enterprise administrators and Microsoft Power Platform administrators want visibility into how their organization is using Power Apps and Power Automate. Insights into their adoption will help an organization govern and secure the platform, identify patterns, and nurture its users to accelerate adoption.
The admin analytics that are part of the Microsoft Power Platform admin center provide an organization with environment-level analytics that are based on its usage for the past 28 days. As adoption grows throughout an organization, customized dashboards may be required. These dashboards can display more insights and enable the organization to apply richer filters to its data over a longer period of time.
The Power BI dashboard of the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit provides visualizations and insights into resources in an organization's Microsoft 365 tenant. These resources include environments, apps, Power Automate flows, connectors, connection references, makers, and audit logs. Data from the audit log is stored from the moment an organization sets up the CoE Starter Kit. Over time, the organization can look back and identify trends for longer than 28 days.
The dashboard provides analytics and data for the following areas:
- Monitor. With the Monitor section of the CoE Power BI dashboard, basic inventory (environments, apps, flows, makers, connectors, and audit logs) can be queried to monitor usage across an entire tenant and within each environment. These reports also support drill-downs and filtering. For example, by maker department/country or region/city, connector usage, or premium feature usage.
- Govern. An organization can use the insights it gathers to drive action. For example, it can conduct risk assessments and identify critical, orphaned, or unused resources. The pages in the Govern section of the CoE Power BI dashboard enable an organization to drive action directly from within the Power BI report through an embedded app. The app can be used to grant ownership of a resource to specific users, archive the resource, or delete it.
- Nurture. As an organization establishes its CoE, a significant part of its activity will be nurturing its maker community and enabling them to follow best practices. It will also want to work with them to identify whether they or their resources need extra support. The Nurture section of the CoE Power BI dashboard helps an organization find its "star" app and flow makers. It also enables an organization to see what connectors it's using, where they're based (department/country or region/city), and how they're adopting Microsoft Power Platform.
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