Centres of Excellence as a Tactic for Ecosystem Enablement

Published 02/06/23 under:

The need for business change is easy to communicate company-wide. Rarely, however, does that change manifest from individual actions alone. When it comes to tangible advancements that will transform your business, it’s vital to drive collaboration between your teams.

A centre of excellence (or CoE as we’ll continue to refer to it) is a method of bringing together a team or group of individuals around a common purpose, whether that’s a digital transformation project or any other shared objective.

So how can a Centre of Excellence help drive digital transformation within your organisation?

The Blueprint

While the historical context of a CoE can be hard to pin down, it is most closely linked to academia. Within universities, Centres of Excellence have served as focal points for research and development, as well as providing guidance and support to other departments or teams.

Those same foundational elements can apply very easily to business too. A CoE is designed to foster innovation and improvement, and it can also cross bridges that may exist geographically or organizationally, offering a powerful way to align around overall goals rather than individual department metrics.

More recently, the concept of a CoE has found its way into the software world. For example, the Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. These tools and the ecosystem they provide are pivotal to how your business will be able to grow in the future.

The Foundations

For many, setting up a CoE is the first step in cultivating greater creativity and productivity across the organization by empowering different sections to work collaboratively and share best practice, while maintaining the necessary level of central oversight and governance.

A key principle is to clarify why you’re setting up a CoE and what you aim to accomplish. For example, a CoE’s remit may be to digitize and automate their business processes.

Making sure you know your place along the journey is key. Once you have this knowledge then it will be easier to learn and evolve along the way.

The Building Blocks

In practice, your CoE will be driven by the existing capabilities within your business, as well as their ambitions. Many businesses have fantastic examples of best practice within individual teams, but no way of sharing these between siloed departments. With a CoE, you’ll be able to showcase good practice company-wide by pulling together resources and experts from across different teams, promote best practices and ensure the adoption of these best practices company-wide.

You’ll also provide creative team members with the time and opportunity to come up with new solutions, or to see existing challenges from a different perspective by comparing notes with other teams.

Watch the Webinar

Centres of Excellence are just one tactic in the process of ecosystem enablement – a strategic approach focussed on empowering employees to streamline operations and drive innovation.

If you want to learn more, then our ecoystem enablement webinar is exactly where you need to be! Follow this link to register your place and discover how to deliver results, alongside ensuring proper governance and security, while fostering the adoption of innovative new technologies and approaches.