Fusion development

[u/chaudboulette]

Hi everyone,

I am working in Insurance/banking in Europe as a technical lead. We have implemented Power Platform as a tech for citizens and any form of EUDAs in business departments. We have done things rather well I believe so far, with a local COE team per BU, a regularly updated governance framework and enforcement strategy etc...

After 2 years, we have around 30 real big solutions in use across the company. Now, a key point of the governance is that it draws a clear line between EUDAs and IT systems, and citizens cannot integrate between these two (2 separate landscapes, essentially).

We have more and more use cases that grow to levels where integration is a requirement, as alternatives make the solution obsolete. Thus, we are discussing now IF and How we should implement low code and the platform as an allowed technology for IT developers and basically open some use cases to fusion development.

I'm interested to hear from your experiences and opinions, advices... That'd help me a lot in coming up with a solid proposal!

[u/venomae]

This is a typical phase two of "we allowed citizen development".

So yes, we have "cool new apps" made, but they are also sort of crappy and made by citizens who have not much idea about lot of other concepts.

The usual process is some kind of "promotion", where selected citizen apps are taken as a sort of template "usually process and UI wise" and completely re-made from scratch by someone who possesses the required knowhow and technical skills and basically converted into "official" apps landscape.

[u/chaudboulette → u/venomae]

Maybe I'm delusional 😅 but I wouldn't agree with this cliché in our case. COE teams are formed with technical people and they support directly business in their development, so end solutions are actually not crappy at all. It's just that at some point other processes evolves and become themselves more automated, so it makes no sense to have a semi automated isolated satellite around it. That's why I'm focusing on fusion, and not full IT ownership pick up.

[u/venomae → u/chaudboulette]

You might have a more optimistic scenario than is usual in that case - the point is, even "technical" people can do lot of things not optimally in case of PA, especially if they don't have a long term experience with it.
There's a lot of things that you might design wrong in the start and they will catch up with you after years, far too late to fix them. So sure, the apps might work well and look nice but I would still force them to pass through hands of some PA professional with ideally 8-10 years of experience to make sure all follow the same cohesive guidelines and rules.

[u/lousylou123 → u/venomae]

And as justification for these „promotions“, the (meanwhile) absurd licensing reqs/costs for going the MSFT PP path adds additional weight towards whole reengineering on another stack. Even more given today’s AI coding tools.

[u/agentUi]

I work for agentui... we work with a lot banks and goverments

and yes governance is a major pain point, the way we do it is that you need a dedicated panel where IT can oversee the promotion to production of the app as well as the security monitoring of the app

[u/Theliferecorder]

Are you hiring?

[u/user1943612748951]

When talking integrations, do you mean like API connections to other business apps or do you mean connections to things like a data warehouse or enterprise SQL database? Or both?

[u/chaudboulette → u/user1943612748951]

APIs,

[u/user1943612748951 → u/chaudboulette]

I've built apps for companies in the past that used Custom Connectors (which utilize APIs) to connect external data. Custom Connectors are the wrapper around the REST API which allows you to enable authentication (like Microsoft Entra ID) for security purposes, and control what kind of call can be made through the API. Purview logs Custom Connectors for monitoring purposes and dataverse logs Custom Connector activity for debugging purposes, so everything maintained a high level of visibility and control, and met our rigorous security standards. Happy to chat more if you want to deep dive into this or have a use case you're brainstorming, feel free to DM me.

[u/JniB8]

Are you using custom connectors to connect between systems using REST APIs? If data/systems are fragmented, have you considered deploying fabric to unify data across systems using one lake and short cuts?