Center of Excellence Starter Kit

The Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is Microsoft's free, open-source collection of Power Platform components designed to help organisations govern, monitor, and grow citizen development at scale. It's not Microsoft's only governance tooling — many enterprise tenants supplement with custom processes and third-party tools — but it's the default starting point for any tenant serious about Power Platform governance.

What the kit provides. The CoE Starter Kit is a set of Power Apps, Power Automate flows, dashboards, and Dataverse tables that, once installed in a designated CoE environment, do the following:

• Inventory — discover every Power App, Power Automate flow, custom connector, Power BI workspace, and Power Pages site across the tenant. The inventory refreshes daily, giving the CoE team a complete map of citizen-development activity.
• Owner attribution — for each asset, identify the owner, last-modified date, environment, and shared-with count. Orphans (assets whose owners have left the organisation) surface clearly.
• Usage telemetry — for each app and flow, how often is it used? By whom? How many runs per week / month? Helps separate critical from abandoned.
• Compliance — track which assets have been reviewed for compliance, which need attention, which are flagged.
• Admin tooling — bulk-action tools for the CoE team: bulk-share apps with new users, bulk-disable orphaned flows, bulk-export inventory for analysis.
• Nurture — engagement components for the maker community: communications, training events, success stories, app showcases.

The architecture.

The kit installs into a dedicated CoE environment — typically a production-grade environment in the tenant's default region. The environment hosts:

• The CoE Starter Kit's apps and flows.
• A Dataverse database storing the inventory and telemetry data.
• A Power BI workspace with the CoE dashboards.

Tenant-wide flows in the CoE environment connect to the Power Platform Admin Center APIs (using a service principal with appropriate permissions) and pull data from every other environment.

The CoE persona. The "Center of Excellence" team is typically:

• A small group (often 2–5 people) in IT or transformation.
• Skilled in Power Platform — they themselves build apps, troubleshoot citizen developers, set governance.
• Owners of the governance vision — DLP policies, environment topology, training, communication.

The CoE Starter Kit is their daily tooling.

Core dashboards.

• Tenant overview — total apps, flows, environments, makers, monthly trend.
• Top makers — who's building the most, with engagement metrics.
• Compliance status — apps reviewed vs unreviewed.
• Risk assessment — assets flagged based on connectors, sharing, sensitivity.
• Adoption trends — which apps gaining usage, which losing.

Compliance workflows.

The kit ships with workflows like:

• App compliance review — when a new app is shared widely, prompt the maker to complete a compliance survey (data sensitivity, integration scope, business owner).
• Inactive maker handling — when a maker hasn't logged in for N days, flag their owned assets for review.
• Critical app review — high-usage apps get periodic compliance re-review.

Limits.

• Self-managed — the kit is provided as-is; Microsoft doesn't support it in the same way as licensed products. Bug fixes come through the open-source community.
• Telemetry depth — the kit relies on Power Platform admin APIs; some data points aren't available (e.g. detailed flow execution patterns require Application Insights configuration in addition).
• Customisation needed — every tenant has specific governance needs; the starter kit is a starting point, not a complete solution. Plan to customise.
• CoE team skill required — installing, configuring, and operating the kit requires real Power Platform expertise.

Operational reality.

• First month — install, configure, validate the inventory data.
• First quarter — build the governance processes around the data; train the CoE team.
• Steady state — daily review of dashboards; weekly action on flagged items; monthly leadership reporting.

The kit doesn't replace the CoE function — it equips it. Without a CoE team and governance discipline, the kit is just dashboards nobody looks at.

Updating the kit. Microsoft releases updates regularly with new features, bug fixes, and dashboards. Updates are imports of the latest version of each component; usually clean but read release notes for breaking changes.

The alternative paths. For tenants with extreme scale or specific governance needs, commercial CoE-style platforms exist (Hitachi Solutions Powr, Avanade Adopt, third-party governance tools) that supplement or replace the starter kit. The kit covers most needs for most organisations.