Change Management | Project Planning and Management | Intelligent Information Management (IIM)
In my practice over the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of work helping clients create and manage centers of excellence (COEs), that is, a cross-functional body that brings together a group of people to focus on a single process area, business activity, or capability. Although there are lots of reasons why you might want to consider a COE, these eight are the ones I see most frequently in my day-to-day work.
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To reduce knowledge management risk.
The main knowledge management (KM) risk organizations face boils down to this: At any organization, a large percentage of critical business information lives either exclusively in employees’ heads or in locations only they know about (or can access easily).
COEs help organizations address this challenge and reduce their KM risk by fostering knowledge-sharing through the division of a responsibility for a particular process area, business activity, or capability among more than one person; they also encourage employees to document their knowledge and publish it to a wider audience in policies and procedures, process diagrams, best practices, etc.
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To improve the quality of service delivery.
Lots of factors can have a negative impact on the quality of service delivery to internal or external customers. Some key ones are the lack of a consistent process, unpredictable timeframes or costs, poor communication with customers, and lack of transparency.
COEs help to improve service delivery quality by encouraging and providing the mechanism for sharing knowledge, documentation, processes and procedures, data, resources, experience, and best practices across an organization.
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To develop a core competency around a strategic capability for the enterprise.
For all sorts of reasons, organizations find it necessary to develop or improve core competencies. New technologies; fresh competition; mergers and acquisitions; the opening, closing, or shifting of markets – all require that an organization identify gaps in its enterprise capabilities and do what it takes to close them.
COEs can help an organization develop strategic capabilities by fostering the intake of new knowledge and the sharing of that knowledge enterprise-wide, by bringing together a diverse collection of subject matter experts from different functional areas to work together, and by elevating the capability they are organized around from a collection of local, siloed, ad hoc efforts, to a coordinated, enterprise-level, strategic one.
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To foster professional growth and development among employees.
Organizations in every industry face the challenge of hiring and retaining top talent. Providing opportunities for growth is part and parcel of a successful strategy for employee retention.
COEs can contribute significantly to an employee retention strategy. They bring together employees from around the organization across functional, reporting, and geographic lines, providing the opportunity for employees from different levels to work together closely on a range of initiatives. They also provide the organization with a way to discover and nurture talented employees.
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To overcome an overly vertical or siloed organizational structure.
As organizations become increasingly complex, both in terms of sheer size and global reach, the ability to create linkages between and across functions, geographical areas, and reporting hierarchies is critical to success – and this is precisely what a well-designed COE does for an organization.
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To improve the relationship between IT and the business.
There are a number of reasons why IT may have a poor relationship with its business stakeholders, but a frequent culprit is a poor engagement model.
COEs can help improve the IT engagement model and the problems related to it first by shifting the ownership of the IT engagement model onto the wider organization. A COE provides a framework of policies, procedures, and processes that support improved interactions between all stakeholders precisely because it’s coming from a cross-functional, enterprise perspective, rather than just the IT perspective.
Second, starting a COE gives an organization the chance to “get it right” in terms of the IT engagement model – at least for the process area, business activity, or capability defined as in scope for that COE. From the first point of contact with a business customer to the release of an application to production, every step of the engagement model can be retooled to improve service delivery and customer satisfaction.
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To rationalize delivery timelines for IT solutions.
The challenge of rationalizing delivery timelines is closely related to Reason #6 because it reduces unpredictability – and unpredictability has an extremely negative impact on the relationship between IT and the business.
A COE can help IT rationalize delivery timelines in a number of ways. First, as we’ve seen, a COE helps to improve the IT engagement model, which plays a big part in delivery timelines.
Second, COEs are in a distinctive organizational position to gather and analyze data about service delivery. They can collect metrics from the supply-and-demand side of the equation and from stakeholders across the organization, and then bring it all together as an independent body, representing a larger perspective than simply IT or an individual business. This cross-functional perspective, combined with its focus on a narrow set of products and services, allows a COE to predict better how long it will take to deliver its products and services than would otherwise be possible.
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Because they work.
A COE can be used to address a wide range of organizational challenges, from department-specific to enterprise-wide. But in the end, perhaps the most compelling reason to consider a COE is that it gets the job done: bringing together a cross-functional group of stakeholders from all levels of an organization, giving them the space to focus their talents and expertise on a single process area, business activity, or capability. Allowing them to do so for an extended period of time is a pretty simple formula for success, no matter the organizational context. There are pitfalls, of course, but when given the right level of executive support, when its members are allowed time to work on its projects and initiatives, and when it’s been undertaken to address a valuable organizational goal, a COE can be a powerful force for organizational change.
