Digital Transformation: Center of Excellence - Part 3

Center of Excellence (CoE)

Part Three: When do you need a CoE?

Now that we know what a CoE is, the question now lies as to when it’s needed. The timing is very critical when you set up a CoE and implement it. Building a CoE is nothing short of a strategic project, requiring careful planning and execution. 

There are times when one would think a CoE will be needed from the very start of any IT undertaking. On the contrary, some believe CoE should be established later when enough resources are present. Just like software implementation, CoE implementation requires careful planning. However, one needs to understand that a CoE should not be set up through a “Big Bang” approach. It’s best to think of it as a living thing where it starts from a tiny function, growing organically over time. However, the misconception of setting up this capability before even starting any development is arguably unproductive. One would think that “standardization” of things needs to start first before anything else. This is a typical “Big Bang” approach, and it’s not just too risky, but it wastes a lot of time and effort that can eventually become useless as the CoE evolves. This is because the CoE evolves just like any other business.

When one starts a small project, initiates the necessary preparations for development, etc., the very basic foundations of CoE are being built without even knowing it. During the course of the project, one would face obstacles and come up with remedies to overcome such, resulting in some instances to divert a small part or even perhaps a larger part of the project towards a different direction. These experiences are the building blocks of the CoE. Such remedies become a part of your "best practices" that eventually become an integral component of your CoE knowledge base gathering from real experiences instead of relying on theoretical practices that may or may not be applicable in real situations. This is why it is rather useless to set up a CoE before even starting a small project. Building a CoE for the sake of having a CoE is not a smart way of doing it. It requires real experience rather than theory.

One of the key functions of a CoE is to streamline development and implementation efforts so that the results can be predictable and in tune with the company’s goals when mass producing IT solutions.

During the course of project development, one will encounter many obstacles and such obstacles are subdued by specific remedies appropriate to the organization. They can be documented and recorded for future references. It’s like building a map. Exploration and physical surveys are needed to build a map and increase its accuracy because things evolve in the field and oftentimes such changes are influenced by natural causes. The same analogy applies to build a CoE. The building blocks of any given CoE function require experience and real-life business scenarios to solidify the need for such function.

So, the answer to the timing of setting up a CoE will entirely depend on the maturity of any given IT organization. In many cases, the CoE team is built after completing one or several software development projects, and before initiating mass production of software solutions.

From the Author

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