Let me tell you something that happened recently. A company called me because "Power Automate stopped working." They'd had flows for months processing orders, sending client notifications, and syncing data with their ERP. Overnight, everything stopped. The reason? The person who'd created the flows left the company. IT deactivated their account. And since every flow ran on that person's personal connections... everything shut off at once.
It's not a rare case. It's what I find in most companies that have had Power Platform for over a year with nobody administering it.
The underlying problem: adoption without control
Power Platform is too easy to adopt. Anyone with a Microsoft 365 license can create a flow or an app without asking permission. And that's fantastic for productivity — until it isn't. Because when every department creates their own solutions without documentation, without security review, without separate environments, without anyone knowing what exists in the tenant... you're building a time bomb.
I've audited tenants with over 200 flows where nobody knew who'd created half of them or what they did. Some had been silently failing for months — with nobody noticing because there was no monitoring.
Administrator ≠ developer
A Power Platform administrator doesn't build apps. They make sure the platform works well for those who do. They manage environments (development, test, production — because yes, you need separate environments). Configure DLP policies so nobody connects Dataverse to their personal Gmail. Monitor what apps and flows exist. Make sure critical connections use service accounts, not Bob from accounting's personal login. And they're the one people call when something breaks.
They're also the one who decides when something a "citizen developer" built needs a professional to review it before going to production. Not everything that works in dev is ready for production — and someone needs to make that call.
Personal connections: the silent bomb
This deserves its own section because it's the most concrete risk and the one fewest companies see coming. Power Automate flows use connections — credentials linking the flow to Outlook, SharePoint, Dataverse, whatever. By default, they're created with the account of whoever built the flow. If that person leaves and their account gets deactivated, the connections die. And with them, the flows.
The fix is obvious once you know it: service accounts for critical connections, connection references in solutions, and a registry of what connections the important flows use. But someone has to do it and maintain it. That someone is the administrator.
Do you need a dedicated team?
If you have under 20 apps and flows, probably not. One person doing both admin and development can handle it. But beyond that, admin work grows fast. And the cost of not doing it is steep: broken flows that halt operations, licenses you're paying for apps nobody uses, security incidents because nobody reviews connectors, and the certainty that someday something critical will fail and nobody will know why.
Administering Power Platform isn't glamorous. But it's what separates companies that use it well from companies that use it until it blows up.