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Who do you put in a Centre of Excellence?
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 by admin
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen throwaway comments exhorting companies to “create a centre of excellence (CoE” (mostly, for initiatives like SOA or BPM). Vendor / pundit / analyst / journalist: “Having trouble? Establish a centre of excellence!” Customer: “Oh, that’s OK then, I’ll do that.”
But let’s take a deeper look. Quite aside from the role that one of these beasts plays (something I’ll attack in a future post), what does a best practice CoE look like?
From what I’ve seen out there in real-world implementations of SOA and BPM initiatives, I suspect that the best results come from having a good mix of responsibilities / personalities in the group. Something like an even distribution across this matrix of perspectives:
Although it’s tempting to staff a CoE with good dependable technical people that you understand, you need a good mix of business-focused types and technology-focused types, because those business-focused types will help keep expectations practical, and help keep business people from outside the CoE engaged and willing to help. And it’s vital to get a good mix of practical and visionary focus, because rolling out new concepts and approaches to delivering IT capabilities requires both “selling” and getting things done.
That’s my view. What do you think?
Posted in BPM
From a BPM CoE standpoint, you really do need to ensure that business analysts are included as well as technical people, otherwise it turns into a technical architecture group or even a coding CoE rather than a true BPM CoE.
Staffing a BPM centre of excellence requires thinking about what assistance that business units will require to get a project from zero to production, which will range from assistance in understanding “the process way” through process discovery, modelling, analysis, optimization, design, development, testing, roll-out and everything else around that. It’s not necessarily the job of the CoE to do all that work: in some cases they just advise, in others they might back-fill resources, and in others they might do the whole thing — that will depend a lot on the capabilities of the target business unit, and whether the organization wants to run the CoE as an advisory organization or as an in-house specialized systems integrator.
If you search my blog for centre of excellence, you’ll find a number of references to presentations I’ve heard from vendors, analysts and customers on who might be in a BPM CoE.
From a BPM CoE standpoint, you really do need to ensure that business analysts are included as well as technical people, otherwise it turns into a technical architecture group or even a coding CoE rather than a true BPM CoE.
Staffing a BPM centre of excellence requires thinking about what assistance that business units will require to get a project from zero to production, which will range from assistance in understanding “the process way” through process discovery, modelling, analysis, optimization, design, development, testing, roll-out and everything else around that. It’s not necessarily the job of the CoE to do all that work: in some cases they just advise, in others they might back-fill resources, and in others they might do the whole thing — that will depend a lot on the capabilities of the target business unit, and whether the organization wants to run the CoE as an advisory organization or as an in-house specialized systems integrator.
If you search my blog for centre of excellence, you’ll find a number of references to presentations I’ve heard from vendors, analysts and customers on who might be in a BPM CoE.