We often talk about automation for HR, finance, and other business units, and those are important. But a smarter way to scale automation across the organization is to start with IT.
Why? The IT department owns identity, security, integrations, and platform architecture. Automating IT processes enables you to build repeatable patterns, governance controls, and monitoring that other departments can safely adopt.
Start with IT, prove value with repeatable wins (such as onboarding, incident orchestration, and license reclamation), then expand those patterns to HR, finance, facilities, and beyond. This post follows that IT-first path: how Power Platform helps IT teams build reliable automations, real-world IT use cases, tips and tricks, common bottlenecks, and how Elantis helps you scale from pilot to enterprise.
What Power Platform brings to IT
Power Platform is a suite of low-code tools: Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI, Copilot Agents (Power Virtual Agents), and Dataverse, that can empower IT to automate workflows, build user-friendly apps, visualize data, and create chatbots. For IT teams, this means:
• Faster automation of approvals and notifications.
• Reliable integrations across cloud and on-premise systems via connectors and gateways.
• Better visibility into operations through dashboards and alerts.
• The ability to empower non-developers while maintaining control with governance.
High-impact IT automation use cases
Here are some of the use cases that our clients love. They address “low hanging fruit”, giving quick wins and long-term ROI:
1. Incident and ticket orchestration
Automatically create tickets in your ITSM like ServiceNow, Jira, or Dynamics, when monitoring alerts get triggered, enrich them with context (logs, user details, recent changes), route the ticket to the right team, and trigger post-resolution surveys. Resulting in Shorter mean time to repair (MTTR), fewer manual handoffs.
2. Onboarding & offboarding workflows
Automate account creation, license assignment, group membership, access to file shares, and provisioning of standard tools. Reverse those steps reliably when an employee leaves the organization.
Value: Secure, consistent onboarding; reduced human error.
3. Software/license provisioning and cost control
A Power Automate flow can check available licenses, request approvals, assign licenses, and update finance trackers. Combine with Power BI to spot idle or over-provisioned licenses.
Value: Lower licensing waste and faster provisioning.
4. Change approvals and audit trails
Use approval flows in your change advisory board (CAB) with enforced metadata, automated change calendar updates, and retention of approvals for compliance reviews.
Value: Transparent, auditable change processes.
5. CMDB and asset updates
Automate discovery results ingestion, scheduled reconciliation jobs, and lifecycle updates into your configuration management database (CMDB) or Dataverse table.
Value: Cleaner asset data and fewer missed renewals.
6. Patch/update reminders and deployment triggers
Trigger patch deployments or reminders to stakeholders, aggregate results, and automatically escalate failures.
Value: Better security posture through consistent patching.
7. Self-service IT via Power Apps + Copilot Agents
Let employees request common services (VPN, software installs, password resets) through a Copilot Agent or a simple Power App. Use Power Automate flows to automate fulfillment or create tickets when manual approval is required.
Value: Fewer helpdesk tickets and happier users.
8. Automated reporting and compliance checks
Schedule data pulls, create curated datasets in Dataverse, and push automated summaries to stakeholders with Power BI snapshots or emailed reports.
Value: Reliable, scheduled insights with less manual work.
Practical Tips & Tricks
Ready to get started? Here are our top tips for automating processes:
• Start with discovery, not tools. Map the current process, pain points, and success metrics before building.
• Triage automations by ROI. Tackle high-volume, high-pain tasks first (e.g., onboarding, password resets, license reclaiming).
• Use templates & connectors. Power Automate has many starter templates for IT scenarios, so you can adapt rather than build from scratch.
• Adopt environment strategies early. Use Dev/Test/Prod environments and solutions to manage the application lifecycle effectively and reduce downtime.
• Modularize flows. Use child flows (reusable components) for repeated sub-processes (e.g., create user, assign license).
• Guard against throttling. Batch operations, use pagination, and add exponential backoff for retries when calling external APIs.
• Implement logging & error handling. Add structured logging (to Dataverse or Azure Log Analytics) and notify owners on failures with detailed context.
• Use Dataverse for relational data. When you need structured, auditable records, use Dataverse instead of spreadsheets.
• Secure connectors and secrets. Store credentials in Azure Key Vault where possible and avoid hard-coded secrets.
• Leverage Power BI for ops dashboards. Combine flow run metrics, ticket data, and asset inventories into single-pane dashboards.
Common Bottlenecks, and How to Fix Them
Along the way, it’s normal to run into some challenges. If you are implementing automation, look out for:
– Licensing surprises
Some Power Platform connectors and features require premium licensing; costs can escalate when many users run flows. Map which automations need premium features and build a licensing forecast. Consolidate high-volume tasks on service accounts or use batch APIs.
– App sprawl & governance
Citizen developers create many quick automations without visibility, causing shadow IT and maintenance headaches. Implement a Center of Excellence (CoE) governance model: environment policies, standard naming, owner metadata, and an approval gate for production.
– Performance & throttling
External APIs or connectors throttle requests; large datasets time out. Use chunking/batching, store intermediate results in Dataverse, and schedule long-running jobs off-hours.
– On-premise and legacy integrations
On-prem systems may require gateways or custom connectors and can add complexity. Use the On-Premises Data Gateway, build robust retry logic, and plan fallbacks for gateway outages.
– Error handling and observability
When flows fail silently or provide minimal context, troubleshooting is slow. Standardize error messages, capture context into logs, and create an automated incident flow that includes screenshots, payloads, and user details.
– User adoption & change management
Without training and change management, users resist change or bypass new flows. Communicate early, make self-service easy, provide training and FAQs, and gather feedback quickly with short surveys.
Operational checklist before you flip the switch
1. Document the current vs future state and success metrics.
2. Build in lower environments and run test cases.
3. Define run-books and rollback procedures.
4. Configure monitoring and alerts for failures.
5. Ensure licensing and security reviews are completed.
6. Train the support team and publish a simple troubleshooting guide.
How Elantis helps
At Elantis, we help IT teams move from brittle, manual processes to reliable, governed automation that scales.
Our typical engagement includes:
• Process discovery and prioritization through collaborative workshops.
• A proof-of-concept for the highest-impact automation.
• Governance and Center of Excellence (CoE) playbook tailored to your organization.
• Environment & Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) setup (e.g., Dev/Test/Prod, solutions, source control, etc.)
• Iterative, agile implementation to stay aligned with your needs.
• Support and knowledge transfer.
Ready to reduce toil and improve reliability? Book a free 1-hour Microsoft 365 & Power Platform automation assessment with Elantis. We’ll identify three quick wins you can implement in 30 days and produce a practical roadmap for the next 6–12 months.
Book an assessment with us!
