Power Platform is easy to adopt — sometimes too easy. Any employee with a Microsoft 365 license can create a Power Automate flow or basic Power App without asking anyone for permission. That's a huge advantage for productivity and a huge risk if no one supervises what's being built.
What happens when no one manages the platform
I've seen this scenario in several companies: a motivated employee starts creating apps and flows. Solves real problems and the company benefits. But no one documents what they did, no one reviews the security, and everything runs under their personal account with their personal connections. When that employee moves departments or leaves the company, their flows keep working... until one day they don't. And no one knows how to fix them because no one knows how they were built or what connections they use.
It's not a hypothetical scenario. It's what I find in most mid-sized companies that have had Power Platform for over a year without governance.
What does a Power Platform administrator do?
It's not the same as a developer. A Power Platform administrator is responsible for the platform itself, not building individual apps. Their work includes: managing environments (development, test, production), configuring and maintaining DLP (Data Loss Prevention) policies to control which connectors can be used where, supervising what apps and flows exist in the tenant, managing the solution lifecycle (ALM), ensuring that critical connections don't depend on personal accounts, and being the contact point when something breaks or when someone needs something that policies don't allow.
They also review the apps that citizen developers create before they go to production, train new users, and decide when a need requires a professional developer instead of a citizen developer.
The problem of personal connections
This is probably the most concrete and least visible operational risk. In Power Platform, Power Automate flows use connections — credentials that link the flow to a service (Outlook, SharePoint, Dataverse, an external system). By default, those connections are created with the account of the user who built the flow.
If that user leaves the company and their account is deactivated, all associated connections stop working. And with them, all flows that used them. If those flows were critical to operations — sending notifications, processing orders, syncing data — the impact is immediate.
An administrator prevents this by using service accounts for critical connections, configuring connection references in solutions, and maintaining a record of what connections the important flows use.
Do you need a dedicated team?
Not necessarily. In smaller companies with light Power Platform usage (under 20 apps and flows), one person can manage both administration and development. But as you scale — more apps, more users, more integrations — you need dedicated administration.
The cost of not having administration is higher than it seems. Lost productivity from broken flows, security incidents from unmonitored connections, cloud licenses being paid for unused apps, and the cascade of problems that come from having no governance.