1October2018

Business app development made easy

Business app development made easyEmpower every team to build rich apps with drag-and-drop simplicity

2October 2018

Business app development made easy

As a business leader, you’re probably focused on the cultural shift your company needs to make so it can adapt to the fast pace of digital innovation. The business environment is becoming ever more competitive, and organizations need to become more agile and ready to adjust their business model and core operations.

One of the most effective and low-friction ways you can help enable this cultural shift is by empowering teams to create their own business applications. Using a flexible, low-code development platform, you can extend and amplify the value you already get from your CRM and ERP systems.

Building apps isn’t just for developers anymore. Your teams are the people closest to your business challenges, so they have valuable insights on how to innovate and improve productivity. Modern tools like Microsoft PowerApps give everyone in your organization—not just developers—the power and freedom to build breakthrough business applications and solve their unique problems.

Almost four out of five of executives say they fear disruption or displacement from agile, data-driven startups, up from one out of two in 2017.¹

Introduction

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Business app development made easy

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So what’s in the way? Here’s a look at the top six obstacles to business app innovation and how your organization can beat them:

Connect business and IT

Streamline complex and manual business processes

Manage technology debt

Work across platforms

Maintain security and control

02Do more within budget, time, and resource constraints

4October2018

Business app development made easy

In an increasingly fast-paced business world, it doesn’t make business sense to have IT try to deliver on every demand. Empowering users with self-service capabilities to solve challenges can ease the burden and accelerate innovation.

A modern tool like PowerApps can help your team bypass this obstacle and take the lead in addressing business challenges without waiting for IT—with no coding experience required. By enabling business users to develop apps, they can reduce the burden on IT and make the most of their specialized domain knowledge and experience.

PowerApps empowers teams to create apps that improve efficiency and collaboration within your business, while also staying secure and compliant.

There’s been 60% growth in technology skills required for non-IT roles over the past four years.²60%

See how Samit went from working as a security officer to building apps using PowerApps—and teaching others how to do the same.

Connect business and IT01

5October2018

Business app development made easy

If you can make the development process cheaper, faster, and less labor-intensive, however, many more scenarios become feasible. When workers can act on insights and build apps themselves, even niche use cases can become worthwhile and extremely valuable, even for just a few users.

PowerApps enables you to build apps fast with a large selection of templates, real-time connections to business data, and easy-to-configure logic using Excel-like expressions.

The Forrester Total Economic Impact study for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, commissioned by Microsoft, concluded that organizations that adopt PowerApps and Flow realize an ROI of 362%, reduce development costs by 70%, increase business process efficiency by 15%, and recoup their investment in only three months. Learn more about this study here.

02 Do more within budget, time, and resource constraints

Organizations have limited resources to spend on applications, especially with costly traditional development methods. Even when a use case clearly generates an ROI, it might not rise to the level of urgency.

Demand for enterprise app development services is growing 5x faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver them.³

6October 2018

Business app development made easy

On average, only 50% of business processes are digitized.⁴

Critical business processes can be resistant to digital transformation due to the risk of change. This can make app development costlier and more complex, because more customization is required to accommodate the process.

If you adopt an application-creation solution that’s designed to work closely with the core apps you already use, it’s much easier to rapidly translate specific processes into new digital channels and capabilities.

03 Streamline complex and manual business processes

50%

PowerApps is designed to be deeply interoperable with Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Office 365. Plus, with more than 200 connectors for many popular cloud services, from Dropbox to Salesforce to Slack—and the ability to create custom connectors with open APIs—PowerApps makes it easy to get your data into your apps.

7October2018

Business app development made easy

70% of C-level executives say technology debt reduces their ability to innovate.⁵

Companies need to make the most out of the technology they have while reducing the complexity of managing existing systems, some of which may not be built for an agile world. “Technology debt” is a way of thinking about this aging technology, as well as legacy applications, and how business leaders face almost constant (and often costly) trade-offs between maintenance and new development.

04 Manage technology debt

PowerApps makes it easy to incrementally move functionality to a modern application framework and works with a wide range of data types.

PowerApps also supports developer extensibility, for when you’re ready to take a self-service app even further.

If you can simplify application creation and data connections, your organization can make these choices easier. You can extract new value from core systems, while retiring complex custom apps in favor of documented, standards-based, integrated apps.

8October2018

Business app development made easy

A survey found that 71% of U.S. knowledge workers said mobile apps give them peace of mind by keeping them up to date on work projects.⁶

05 Work across platforms

Most workers want to be able to use applications anywhere, on any device, but building multi-device, cross-platform experiences from scratch can be a challenge. The rewards are significant, though: if you can translate your organization’s business processes into engaging web and mobile experiences, letting users access information the way they want, you can drive both adoption and value.

With PowerApps, you can build both web and mobile apps fast using a point-and-click approach to design. You can then easily publish those apps to the web, iOS, Android, and Windows 10.

71%

9October 2018

Business app development made easy

06 Maintain security and control

Nothing can squash an application concept quicker than security or data governance concerns, especially in industries with stringent compliance requirements. Using an app creation solution that has security and manageability built in can help overcome these hurdles.

With PowerApps, all identity is managed through Azure Active Directory, enabling rich policies and multi-factor authentication in your apps. In addition, Admin Center provides full audit logs, usage analytics, data loss prevention, and security and data management.

Learn more about PowerApps Deployment and Governance.68% of CEOs believe that a cyberattack is a matter of when and not if. 92% feel prepared in terms of their ability to identify new cyberthreats, but only 41% consider themselves very well prepared.⁷

68%

92%

41%

10October 2018

Business app development made easy

There are many obstacles to developing custom line-of-business applications the old-fashioned way. But innovation tools like PowerApps can help overcome these challenges, greatly reducing the barriers to connecting people, data, and applications to enable new business scenarios.

PowerApps opens up a world of possibilities so you can solve business problems quickly, with self-service apps that are easy to use and adopt. What new ideas can PowerApps jump-start in your organization?

1 NVP Big Data Executive Surveyz Gartner3 Gartner

⁴ McKinsey

5 Accenture6 Tech Republic 7 KPMG

Learn more about PowerApps

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