Digital Transformation: Center of Excellence - Part 1

Center of Excellence (CoE)

Part One: What is a CoE and what does it do?

Center of Excellence as defined in Wikipedia is “a team, a shared facility, or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area.” 

In the software development world, the Center of Excellence is a team or a group of knowledgeable people providing leadership, governance, best practice, research, support, and knowledge to a specific technology or focus area.

More often than not, the Center of Excellence can be misunderstood as a nice-to-have capability, or a capability only for extremely large organizations probably because of the word “Center”. Center is often associated with large institutions or structures. The word “Center” actually refers to “centralization”. When you look at a circle, the closest point to any given area in the circle is the "center". Therefore, the center of excellence is actually about the centralization of the capability so that it can reach any given element within the focus area.

A CoE is not a tool. It serves as the catalyst to change to new ways of working and the platform to instill discipline in your organization. A CoE is not dependent on size. Many are mislead to think that only large organizations require a CoE. In fact, a CoE can be structured depending on the size and requirements of any given organization. Given that expertise cannot be built overnight, you can actually start small in the beginning and gradually scale up as you grow your team, adding new CoE functions as you go along.

Digital Transformation is a necessary pain that organizations need to go through, particularly with organizations that relied heavily on legacy practices. This takes us to the topic of what a CoE can do for organizations moving towards Digital Transformation. In essence, a CoE is a capability that allows organizations to accelerate the transformation. Depending on the maturity of the organization, the CoE is called upon to provide both Technical and Non-Technical functions. These are: (not necessarily in the order of importance)

1. Governance - When mass-producing software, there will be times when you need to make sure that your strategy and plans are being followed by your organization. Just like in an orchestra, you will need to make sure that all musicians are playing the same tune, hitting the correct notes at the right time. This is the main role of this function.
2. Value and Metrics - We all want things to be fast, high quality, and lower cost. It's really not that easy to be fast and at the same time keeping very high quality. Speed is a very controversial issue, and being fast can be different among organizations. You will need a unit of measure for speed so that you can determine how fast is fast. The balance between speed and quality will be key in determining the efficiency of any given organization.
3. Reusability - Multiple teams can be developing different things but having identical components. Things like user management, audit trail, and the like. If these things are not managed, different teams can "reinvent the wheel" at the same time. Leveraging a common component can affect the efficiency of any organization in a very positive way.
4. Enablement - People come and go. There will be times when people have to move around. New things can be made available to the organization. Manual or physical enablement and self-service capabilities can play critical roles in achieving organizational efficiency.
5. Internal Marketing - in most undertakings within the organization, it will require certain efforts to sell ideas and capabilities internally in order to be widely accepted and recognized. It is the function of internal marketing to ensure that any successful story is spread within the organization (large or small) so that expansion can be achieved.
6. Internal Support - This is not just a question of having a "hotline" to call anytime when having difficulty. Solving common problems in the organization can help propel undertakings to success. This function plays a key role not just to your business users but also to your development teams to solve both common issues and difficult issues that may require external knowledge.

Each of these 6 major functions has multiple subsets covering Foundation and Operation Practices needed to accelerate Digital Transformation. It usually takes weeks to go through those subsets but will attempt to touch on some of those topics in the following series.

From the Author:

This is the first of the series that touched on one of the most talked-about topics within the circles of Low-Code users. In this first part of the series, we touched on what a CoE is and what it can do for your organization. The following next topics will touch on other popular questions like; why you need a CoE, when to build a CoE, what kind of CoE you need, and how to start a CoE.