Power Automate: How It Works

• Power Automate is a low-code workflow platform that lets business experts automate processes while minimizing IT and developer involvement.
• The platform will especially benefit tasks in roles, business units, and regions that are currently done by slower and less accurate manual methods.
• Connectors to hundreds of production data sources and services help processes orchestrate tasks, but they bring risk of improper usage.
• Organizations must establish policies and processes for Power Automate development and administration.

Power Automate enables line-of-business (LOB) process experts to write simple workflows. The workflows (called flows in Power Automate) can access and modify organizational data and run tasks in internal and external services to perform processes that are not addressed by solutions provided by internal IT teams or third parties. However, Power Automate development requires an understanding of general software development concepts, such as logic flow, error handling, and code expressions. So-called citizen developers, or makers, who do not have this mindset will likely produce low-quality flows that are not robust while being difficult to maintain. Furthermore, administrator oversight and management are required to prevent security breaches, data loss, or improper task execution due to poorly designed flows.