A Center of Excellence, or CoE, is a powerful process 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 powerhouse by design. Still, the key to realizing all its benefits is intentional planning and thoughtful architecture. Here is how to establish a CoE for improvement, growth, and transformation.

Why Establish a Center of Excellence?

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 (AI, cloud, IoT), a Center of Excellence delivers rapid access to best-in-organization expertise, regardless of physical location or business unit. It makes efficient use of shared services and organizational human capital. A CoE enables different perspectives on enterprise challenges while 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, and so on — 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. Here’s how to establish one of your own:

1.   Identify the Need

A CoE is a purpose-built team, so it’s imperative that you identify its goals at the outset. Typically, the need for a CoE falls into one of three categories:

• MAINTAIN THE ENTERPRISE: A Center of Excellence designed to maintain operations focuses on making those operations as effective and efficient as possible.
• EXPAND THE ENTERPRISE: A CoE dedicated to expansion seeks to identify and implement extension and growth strategies while ensuring quality results.
• EVOLVE THE ENTERPRISE: A CoE focused on evolution actively and aggressively identifies and implements transformative approaches to shifting the organization’s mission.

Understanding the larger purpose will then help you target more limited goals. Perhaps, to improve operations or grow your business, you need to rapidly scale the adoption of certain technologies across business units. You might establish a Technology CoE to enable efficiency and/or growth through tech solutions.

2. Tap Players

The next step is to assemble your dream team of committed internal and external players with a range of relevant expertise. For that Technology CoE dedicated to growth, for instance, you’ll need to assess whether you have all the expertise you need to identify and adopt appropriate technologies. Which stakeholders absolutely need to be involved, and what internal or external subject matter experts would bring the most value to your efforts?

Inevitably, there are enthusiastic, high-potential employees interested in your mission who could offer guidance, leadership, and implementation support, regardless of their corporate roles. A Technology CoE could be a collaboration of IT and finance professionals, field representatives, and marketers.

3.   Ensure Institutional Buy-In

All the intent and talent in the world may not be enough to move the needle if you don’t have the proper institutional buy-in to your efforts. Bottom line, your CoE needs an executive mandate and adequate funding to render it visible and worthwhile to the entire organization.

Consider which C-suite level team members and influencers you need to get on board to ensure noticeable impact. Additionally, you will want to assess which internal communications you should initiate to secure wide-scale adoption of new processes via established standards and protocols and their reinforcement.

4.   Assign Resources

In addition to appropriate funding, a successful Center of Excellence needs excellent technical support, communications tools, and other shared services to drive efficiency, growth, and transformation. These should be considered and put in place at the outset so that the team has all the necessary tools at its disposal to investigate, develop, implement, and track new business processes, protocols and strategies. Assigning proper resources should be a multidisciplinary effort involving IT, operations, marketing, budgeting, and even sales.

5.   Measure Results

Among the resources needed to bolster a successful CoE is a robust data collection framework. Data is essential to understanding how well your effort is moving forward. Automated data collection and visualization tools can be hugely beneficial to centralizing tracking and recording of your progress.

As you set standards, you will want to track their adoption and use via data mining. Baking that data collection into your standards via simple recording methods that are not onerous to new corporate users goes a long way to making sure your CoE does, in fact, serve as a Center of Excellence.

Adjust Course as Needed

Once you’ve tracked and analyzed the data generated by your CoE, as what those results are saying. Is your CoE a truly dynamic hub? Or has it stagnated into a steering committee? If you are achieving the results you’d hoped, your effort should be seen as essential to the enterprise’s success as a whole. If not, what do you need to do to attain and/or communicate impact?

A Center of Excellence needs to be fluid and adaptable, adjusting to conditions on the ground while maintaining a view of higher-level needs and plans. If yours isn’t attaining the results you’d anticipated, an outside consultant might deliver the perspective you need to get back on track.

How to Get Help Establishing Your Next Center of Excellence

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 build a world-class CoE for process improvement, growth, and enterprise transformation.