We are Forward Forever
Hello world! The time has come for us to launch forwardforever.com, thus starting the first chapter of our journey as a company that wants to open new doors in the world of Microsoft business applications.
Who are we?
The founding team of Forward Forever has a long history of delivering business solutions on the Microsoft technology stack. In our earlier roles as external consultants and internal solution owners we’ve built systems that run on Dynamics 365, Office 365, Power BI and the MS Data Platform.
During the course of our careers we’ve been given the chance to solve a whole variety of business problems for our customers and employers. It’s safe to say that no two projects have ever been exactly the same, as the number of possible permutations from the different requirements, tools, integrations, data sources etc. is in practice infinite.
In this line of work, you’ll find yourself constantly learning. First of all, learning the skills needed for pulling off the current project at hand, to deliver what has been requested. Second, you’ll find yourself preparing for the next thing that’s around the corner – be it the follow-up requirements and questions from the users, the new version of the tools you’re using, the problems you’ve seen your colleagues encounter, and so on. Third, you start spending more and more time envisioning not just what is requested but what would be possible. The opportunities of the technology you have access to.
We all know the pace of change in the business world just keeps on increasing, and the pace at which new information technology introduces brand new opportunities is even greater. Not everyone enjoys the thrills of this speed and the uncertainty that it brings with it, that’s quite understandable. Speed in itself isn’t a virtue, it’s something you must balance and turn into meaningful change with measurable results.
In our roles as solution architects, we very often need to be the earliest of the early adopters. This is not because the very latest products and tools would always be the greatest – often they are not. Instead, we must be able to use our knowledge, skills and experience to provide guidance on what this new technology means in the business context. To shield away unnecessary change from the broad user audience and avoid misalignment of business needs and technical capabilities. To identify where the value lies for you.
In this game you’ve got to stay a few steps ahead – and you’ve always got to move forward.
What’s “forward” for us?
In founding Forward Forever, we’ve made the decision to push ourselves into unknown territory and focus 100% on Microsoft Power Platform.
Okay, it’s not exactly like we wouldn’t have experience from the technology itself. Most of the Microsoft cloud technologies that we’ve been working with on a daily basis for the past years are either part of or closely connected with Power Platform. Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Common Data Service, Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure… No single item on the list is in itself unfamiliar.
Therein lies the catch, though. Almost every business solution that Microsoft customers are either already using today or currently in the process of building is about the Power Platform – yet surprisingly few individuals seem to understand the impact from all this. What it changes in the solution architecture, what kind of opportunities and synergies it opens up, and ultimately how organizations need to think different when it comes to taking ownership of their digital tools.
These days you don’t get very far by just “doing CRM”, “doing SharePoint” or “doing BI”. No, none of them are going away and not a single technology is standing still either. The challenge for the technical experts is not so much in being able to go deep enough on their specific domain but to see broadly enough to identify what’s happening around that domain. Increasingly the value for businesses who leverage Microsoft products is not going to be derived from the customer specific code and configuration of a particular product but from the unique combination of capabilities taken from this integrated cloud platform and applied in innovative ways to solve problems and generate new business opportunities.
How can we tackle this challenge then? The demands for a “full stack developer” in the complete Power Platform space that covers all the products under that umbrella would simply be impossible to meet by any individual. The solution is therefore not to work harder as an individual but to work smarter as a network. We need to surround ourselves with connections to a community of experts from where we can source the knowledge that’s needed to solve problems we’ve never encountered before.
This is what Forward Forever as a company is all about. Collectively, we as a team can rise to the challenge and deliver on the true potential of Microsoft Power Platform. Not because we already know it all but because of our passion to learn and to share.
Sincerely,
the founding team Jukka, Lasse, Jouko and Timo