“When a solution’s complexity determines its tier, and the tier determines who owns it and what oversight applies, the governance conversation stops being political and becomes operational.”
A city has zoning laws because a residential street and a hospital have legitimately different governance needs. Applying hospital-grade codes to every home makes homes impossible to build. Enterprise platform governance works the same way.
The Four Tiers
Tier 1 covers personal productivity tools — built by one person for their own use, accessing only non-sensitive data, requiring no integration with enterprise systems. Governance is light-touch: a developer environment, standard training, and basic naming conventions.
Tier 2 covers team solutions — built for a department, accessing internal data, requiring some integration. A named business owner, a shared managed workspace, and a standard review against the pre-approval checklist.
Tier 3 covers departmental solutions with broader impact — accessing Confidential data, integrating with enterprise systems, requiring IT involvement. Full lifecycle governance applies.
Tier 4 covers enterprise-critical solutions — business-critical processes, regulated data, broad user populations. Full application lifecycle management through Managed Pipelines, security review, and formal change management.
What Power Platform Provides
Each tier maps directly to a Power Platform environment type. Developer environments for Tier 1. Shared Managed Environments for Tier 2. Dedicated Managed Environments with calibrated Data Loss Prevention postures for Tier 3 and 4. Managed Pipelines for Tier 4 deployment governance.
The Enterprise Gap
Most organisations apply one review process to everything. A personal productivity tool and a business-critical payroll process enter the same queue. The queue becomes the bottleneck. The governance model becomes the reason makers look for alternatives.
One Action
Create a tier determination checklist — four questions a maker answers at the start of every build that determine which tier applies. Publish it. When makers self-identify their tier, the governance model scales without scaling the Centre of Enablement team.
Part 16 of 36 | #PowerPlatformAtScale
The full tier model, including the environment mapping and DLP posture guide, are in the book.