One Year Forward
Time for a little celebration, Forward Forever is now one-year-old, and wow – that year went fast! Here’s a little update on what we’ve been doing so far and what’s ahead for us for our second year.
Some examples of our key figures for our first year:
- We have collaborated with a total of 47 customers
- We have customers in 5 different countries
- We have collaborated with many partners. In our Teams, we have currently 14 partner channels
The past year, as we all know, has sped up the digitalization a lot. Organizations have taken huge steps in a very brief time, which has also meant that the demand for low-code solutions has increased.
We are extremely happy and humble that many organizations found us from the very first weeks and have asked us to help with Power Platform. Organizations have noticed that Power Platform is here to stay and look for the best practices for Power Platform enablement within their organizations and also technical how-to guidance on building the solutions.
The number one highlight for me from the first year of operations has been to be able to show our clients how fast and easy it is to get things done with Power Platform. The joy is visible when people are able to build useful stuff themselves without a line of code.
Second highlight, I’d like to mention, is Arrow ECS Finland Oy’s Less Code (Vähemmän koodia) partner program, in which we are mentoring other partner companies to get started with Power Platform. Compared to year ago, we felt like we are the only ones focusing on Power Platform. Now that seems to be changing. And that’s actually really good as we, genuinely, believe in collaborating with others. We see that Power Platform and other low-code solutions are changing how IT-projects will be done. No more massive implementation projects done by one supplier. Instead, we believe in development in small chunks and that there will be multiple companies working for one organization. We have seen that many organizations have already realized this inevitable change.
On our company level, I’m pleased that since day one, we do not have used emails for our internal communications. We try to keep it minimal with clients, too. No more email-related stress – that’s a bonus! As Power Platform advisory is one the things we do, and we as a team try to keep up with all the changes, we also strive to find better and better solutions for information management. My special thanks go to Mr. Niiranen for making our Teams a vast database of Power Platform -related information in a nicely structured format. One of our goals for this year is to build solution for our clients that they could easily access the information that’s relevant to their IT development roadmap.
I’m grateful that I have this superb team around me. It is quite nice that I’m able to ask help in almost anything PP-related and will get an answer.
Where do we go?
We get asked quite often our opinions about Power Platform and where do we see it going.
A typical situation with Power Platform for most companies is:
- Experiments have been done and most often something is already in production use
- Building a real Power Platform Center of Excellence is not yet a thing – and we aim to change this
- Power BI is an everyday tool
- Power Platform and low-code is seen as a game-changer
Many people have wondered how we dared to start this company in such a niche market. We see this the other way around. There’s a lot larger market for low-code solutions than – saying it out loud – for old-fashioned CRM-projects.
There’s a significant change happening. As anyone who has worked in any IT-related business, you might have had this feeling how on earth any company can afford these IT projects and seen how badly they sometimes go. We want to do stuff smarter way.
This year, we’ll focus on two areas. We have created quite many low-code solutions. This year, we aim to deliver these apps so that more organizations could utilize the work already done. As a little teaser, we already have a couple of larger “apps” already in our mind that we plan to build and share this year. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we have the early versions to present.
Another focus area is Power Platform governance and especially its enablement. Now we’ve established good ground for the technical setup for Power Platform, so as a natural next step, we will help organizations in building a Center of Excellence that supports the citizen development in a safe-manner.
Hope to see you soon!
There’s definitely some momentum for Power Platform, and we want to ramp it up. Our clients have requested that could you please organize some forum where we customer organizations could share experiences with other organizations about Power Platform. I’m happy to say that this will be one of my promises for this year – we’ll come up with a customer forum in some format. Just drop me a message on LinkedIn if you want to be included in our client community. It does not matter if we have worked together already, anyone is welcome to join. Naturally, we will also keep you posted in our social media channels.
And what’s a blog post not mentioning that we are hiring. Yes, we are continuously looking for new talents, so just let us know if you are available ?
Cheers,
Lasse