I spoke at ITU Copenhagen: Power Platform for Process Innovation (2023)

Invited to guest-lecture for Process Innovation at IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) on March 14, 2023. I walked the students through how the digital process innovation theory from their syllabus shows up in practice on Microsoft Power Platform.

Thanks to Daniel Fürstenau (Associate Professor) for the invite, and to Stine Høiberg Rasmussen and Eduardo Rodriguez for running a course that draws this kind of engaged classroom. The students asked sharper questions than half the customer rooms I present in.

For anyone in the room (or reading this later) who wants to keep going, the best single starting point is Saurabh Pant’s roundup: Microsoft PowerApps Learning Resources. It collects the Microsoft Learn paths, the free Community Plan for hands-on practice, the Power Apps community forum, the YouTube channel, and the docs in one place.

The Learn paths I pointed at specifically:

• Introduction to developing with Microsoft Power Platform: Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI as one toolkit.
• Extending Microsoft Power Platform with Microsoft Dataverse: how to store and model data for your apps.
• Bring AI to your business with AI Builder: adding AI capabilities without writing model code.

Slides from the lecture below.

Why Power Platform process innovation is a useful classroom case

The Process Innovation course at ITU teaches the digital process innovation literature: representational gaps, sociomateriality, the way IT artefacts both enable and constrain how work gets redesigned. Power Platform is a useful case for that course because the artefacts are tangible. A canvas app, a cloud flow, a Dataverse table: students can see how a small change to the artefact shifts the work, and they can build one in a single afternoon.

Power Platform process innovation in 3 layers I walked through

1. Sense layer (data in): Dataverse for structured business data, Power Automate triggers for events from Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and 1,000+ connectors. The point of this layer is to remove the “we cannot see the process” problem.
2. Decide layer (logic): Power Fx for declarative rules, AI Builder for the parts that need a model, and Dataverse business rules for guardrails. Students can model an approval policy in 20 minutes here.
3. Act layer (work back into systems): cloud flows writing back to ERP or HR systems, Power Apps as the human-in-the-loop interface, Power BI for the after-the-fact view. This is the layer where Power Platform process innovation either sticks or stalls.

7 best Power Platform process innovation starter projects for students

1. Inbox triage flow: classify incoming email and route it.
2. Approval app: replace one email-thread approval with a Teams adaptive card.
3. Form processing: extract data from PDF invoices with AI Builder.
4. Field service checklist app: offline-capable Power App, syncs when online.
5. Onboarding bot: Copilot Studio agent answering new-hire FAQs.
6. RPA bot: Power Automate Desktop unattended flow against a legacy GUI.
7. BI dashboard: Power BI on the Dataverse data from any of the above.

Related lectures and talks

• ITU Power Platform 2024: the follow-up lecture a year later, focused on Copilot.
• GPPB 2023 Denmark: adoption vs governance: the practitioner version of the same Power Platform process innovation conversation.
• Power Platform Partner Day 2022: where fusion development first showed up in my talks.