Regardless of mission, sector, or stage, we’re willing to bet you think a lot about the performance of your organization. Thriving organizations across a spectrum of industries and sectors typically share one commonality: a commitment to excelling at what it is they do. Whether yours is a legacy enterprise or an industry disruptor, a non-governmental organization (NG) or a government entity, you optimally want to accomplish your mission effectively, efficiently, and strategically. Many best-in-class organizations are meeting the imperative to excel through the use of Centers of Excellence (CoEs).

This month, we’re exploring the ins and outs of these incredibly powerful management tools. We begin today with a primer on CoEs, to get you quickly up to speed on what they are, how your organization might use one, and how to design an effective center. Welcome to Centers of Excellence 101.

Understanding Centers of Excellence

A Center of Excellence, or CoE, is an enterprise improvement tool designed to provide rapid access to critical subject matter expertise and thought leadership in maximizing performance and innovation in an organization. Bringing together thinkers and experts from multiple business units, a CoE serves as an institutional hub, offering leadership, training, and support to move a given effort forward. Sometimes called a competency center or capability center, a CoE is a strategic entity operating separately from the business unit or units it serves.

Members of the Center of Excellence collaborate on a shared mission, building business processes and maintaining them. (In this sense, a CoE differs from a task force or strategy group that might come together to tackle a problem and then disband once a solution has been developed.) Among the obligations a Center of Excellence often have relative to a specific process or improvement are:

• Codifying best practices and standards
• Driving research
• Supplying training
• Identifying and promoting supportive technologies
• Articulating metrics
• Ensuring oversight

For instance, a CoE for business intelligence might be tasked with identifying opportunities to improve the collection, visualization, and deployment of business data in service of a measurable outcome, such as boosted revenues. To do this, the CoE could rely on an intersectional team of sales representatives, marketing practitioners, software and IT experts, and finance professionals to oversee and sustain the effort. This “hive” brings all the force of its collective experience, expertise, and vision to the challenge of improving and maintaining a world-class business intelligence strategy in service of the organization’s mission.

Knowing When a CoE Might Benefit Your Enterprise

Organizations seed CoE’s for all sorts of purposes, often for incubating innovation or adopting new processes and technologies. Whether focused on sales, marketing, and accounting, business intelligence and analytics, or the deployment of exceptional technologies (Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, or the Internet of Things, for example), a Center of Excellence offers a host of benefits to the organization in which it operates, including:

• Delivering rapid access to best-in-organization expertise, regardless of physical location or business unit
• Making efficient use of shared services and organizational human capital by operating outside of standard business silos
• Enabling different perspectives on enterprise challenges via an interdisciplinary approach
• Reducing redundancies and strategic misalignment across business units

By taking a holistic look at the needs of the enterprise, not just the concerns of one particular business unit, a Center of Excellence transcends the silos into which so many business operations are naturally segmented. While those silos — research and development, production, sales, marketing, IT, finance, for example — are obviously critical to daily operations, improved performance and institutional growth depend on looking beyond the status quo. CoEs equip organizations with the long-range vision and technical capability to build and manage new processes.

Designing a Center of Excellence

The key to realizing all the benefits of a Center of Excellence is intentional planning and design of the center. We’ll delve more into the design process in a later post in this series, but it’s worth exploring briefly here. There are six basic steps to designing a CoE. Here are some questions to ask as you consider each step:

1. Identify the Need: Do you need to run your organization more effectively and efficiently? Are you looking to grow or transform your enterprise? Your business may be thriving, but are there processes that need to be developed or expanded to ward off stagnation or competition? Do you have all the expertise you need to build those processes in your particular business unit? Are there others in-house who could bring a fresh perspective or alternative capabilities to your efforts?
2. Tap Players: What internal or external subject matter experts would bring the most value to your efforts? Which stakeholders need to be involved? Are there enthusiastic, high-potential employees interested in your mission who could offer guidance, leadership, and implementation support, regardless of their corporate roles?
3. Ensure Institutional Buy-In: Are your efforts visible and considered worthwhile to the entire organization? Does your CoE have an executive mandate and adequate funding to make a noticeable impact? Whom do you need to get on board to ensure that’s the case? What communications could you initiate to secure wide-scale adoption?
4. Assign Resources: In addition to appropriate funding, what technical support do you require to make a CoE succeed? What communications tools? What shared services?
5. Measure Results: How will you know if your effort is moving forward as planned? How will you centralize tracking and recording of your progress? What standards will you apply?
6. Adjust Course as Needed: Is your CoE a truly dynamic hub? Or has it stagnated into a steering committee? Are you achieving the results you’d hoped? Is your effort seen as essential to the success of the enterprise as a whole? If not, what do you need to do to attain or communicate impact?  

Again, we’ll explore the process of creating a CoE in more depth in a later post.           

Ready to Get Centered?

The notion of a wholesale, interdisciplinary effort designed to achieve world-class results may be appealing, but it can also be daunting. If you need assistance developing a Center of Excellence to address a particular challenge or challenges in your enterprise, drop us a line. We’re ready to help you get centered.