Victoria Police designed a fusion development model for Power Platform and Power Apps so personnel across the organization could build solutions safely.
Clear guide rails, executive endorsement, and high-level transparency allow promising apps to move into dedicated environments, with help from the central team when scaling production.
Two fusion-born solutions are now progressing to enterprise, to help give members faster access to the information they need.
When Victoria Police first opened employee access to Power Platform and Power Apps during the pandemic, the agency’s leadership team noticed an immediate response. Police personnel and employees started teaching themselves how to use the low-code tools to build and share their own data-driven apps.
The change had some clear and immediate benefits. It moved developing applications away from standalone Microsoft Access databases, often invisible to the central team, to a far more transparent ecosystem. More importantly, it equipped employees with the tools to develop and use apps themselves rather than rely on a central IT team with insufficient capacity to cope with demand, which could be frustrating.
While this was a largely positive outcome, it came with considerable risk. Protecting the sensitive data of the Australian state’s principal law enforcement agency is paramount, and the leadership team knew that well-intended new solutions could create security blind spots. They had to decide whether to rein in personnel to prevent the proliferation of unauthorized ‘shadow’ applications or channel their energy into safer and more visible tools.
They chose the latter, creating a fusion development framework that allows internal experts and budding developers to build new applications with clear guide rails, executive backing, and an established path from initial innovation to enterprise adoption.
“We needed to shift our mindset, starting from within our senior leadership team,” says Efrain Tionko, Head of Digital Delivery and Transformation at Victoria Police. “We’re worried about the business doing IT, but we knew that either we control the narrative and enable our people, or risk appearing unresponsive to their needs and frustrating them.”
“We’re worried about the business doing IT, but we knew that either we control the narrative and enable our people, or risk appearing unresponsive to their needs and frustrating them.”
Efrain Tionko, Head of Digital Delivery and Transformation, Victoria Police
As employees educated themselves, they revealed an appetite for more robust capabilities beyond Power Platform’s default environment, known internally as ‘personal productivity’.
“That environment is limited to what comes with Microsoft 365, with a database based on extending those products. Our employees were using SharePoint quite a lot for their databases, but they found it quite limiting,” says Julie Browne, Victoria Police’s Product Manager for Power Platform and the architect of the fusion program.
“Victoria Police has full licensing for Power Apps Premium, so, our employees knew we were putting out model-driven enterprise apps sitting on Dataverse. They wanted access to some of that technology to make their applications more robust and flexible.”
The fusion development framework that enables this access has several layers. Browne and her team watch for innovative ideas within the default environment that gather momentum. “We see apps built in personal productivity with 300-plus users,” says Browne. “Power Platform’s visibility allowed us to say, ‘Ok, we see this app. It's obviously being used a lot. What can we do to help?’”
When a unit needs more than personal productivity, it requests a dedicated fusion environment. The request goes through an approval flow with Victoria Police’s business engagement and security teams, managed through a model-driven app in Power Platform. If it meets their requirements, a prototype can be built.
To ensure fusion apps meet required quality and security standards, prototypes are submitted to the central Power Platform team for review before being promoted to production.
Relevant leadership team members from the unit are also included for transparency and accountability. “We require business unit executives to endorse the approach and fund and support their dedicated environments should they want to be part of our fusion community,” says Tionko. “This gives us comfort and assurance that a business unit’s participation in fusion has their executive’s support.”
“Our employees knew we were putting out model-driven enterprise apps sitting on Dataverse. They wanted access to some of that technology to make their applications more robust and flexible.”
Julie Browne, Product Manager for Power Platform, Victoria Police
At its core, the framework recognizes that not every employee build warrants the full weight of a professional development governance model with overbearing restrictions. The intent is to give people space to solve problems quickly within clear boundaries, and with the oversight to scale safely when needed. It’s pragmatic governance.
“We recognized that we cannot, and should not, apply the same stringent governance in fusion if we are to hope for our customers to embrace this approach,” Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, Victoria Police Chief Digital Officer, said. “My challenge to the team was to ensure essential controls are in place to keep our environment and data safe and secure, but provide an enabling framework for our non-professional developers to be able to work and contribute to our broader community of apps.”
The framework is run by a small core team but is open to a large community within the organization. Browne and the team run a Power Platform Hub on the intranet that includes documentation, FAQs, and best practices, and they facilitate a Viva Engage channel where builders ask questions and share wins. They also run monthly community sessions featuring relevant topics like data security and live demonstrations from different business units.
“The central team doesn’t train people directly because we don’t have the capacity. We give them the tools to self-learn and forums to learn from each other, and the response has been extremely positive,” Browne says.
The program is still young, but two promising fusion-born applications, Global Whereabouts and Bail Reporting, are already being promoted to enterprise deployment.
Both have clear benefits for frontline workers. With Global Whereabouts, any police station employee can access data on the reason a person or vehicle is being sought, at the moment of need. Even if the local station is closed overnight, those records will be digital and centrally available, so members can act instead of waiting to hunt through filing cabinets.
Bail Reporting provides a universal, up-to-date view of the reporting and curfew status of people on bail, which reduces ambiguity at the police station counter and reduces the risk of missed obligations to make Victoria’s communities safer. The solution is now being consolidated into a single, supported app as it moves to enterprise, replacing parallel versions that had sprung up over time.
“Employees across our regions are actively seeking access to these applications,” says Tionko. “With enterprise use, the risk for security breaches and other incidents increases, so we need to put more controls in place.”
Tionko and his team are now carefully exploring other tools within their Microsoft suite and assessing how these could extend into fusion development, beginning with Copilot Studio trials. The near-term questions are practical, including policy and security concerns, licensing, and subscription costs.
Browne is especially interested in the progression of generative coding software that can help write the code for an app so that frontline builders can quickly progress from an idea to a working first version. She knows that the fusion framework places the organization on the front foot, creating opportunities for employees to explore.
“Once generative coding comes in, we can see that members using fusion would get so much benefit out of it,” she says. “Having fusion already in place means we’re ready to work with our team members outside our department instead of watching these tools explode with no governance, conversations, or security controls. Now we can work together.”
Discover more about Victoria Police on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, or YouTube.
“My challenge to the team was to ensure essential controls are in place to keep our environment and data safe and secure, but provide an enabling framework for our non-professional developers to be able to work and contribute to our broader community of apps.”
Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, Chief Digital Officer, Victoria Police
Follow Microsoft