When Steve Jobs discovered the ‘mouse’ and ‘GUI’ in 1979, he immediately called upon a team of experts working at Apple to work under his leadership, as he realized his vision of world’s first Macintosh. The excellent collaboration and execution of the expert team led to the creation of PCs and changed the history of computing.
The Mac team had become a technology Center of Excellence for Apple.
As per the software engineering institute of Carnegie Mellon University, a technology center of excellence is defined as “A premier organization providing an exceptional product or service in an assigned sphere of expertise and within a specific field of technology, business, or government, consistent with the unique requirements and capabilities of the CoE organization.”
Implementing a technology Center of Excellence (CoE) is a great way to give a specific project or initiative the attention it deserves.
A CoE creates a framework of standardized practices that teams can use for specific projects. This allows organizations to scale their efforts so that they are driven to shift across multiple disciplines together and reach goals efficiently.
Let’s explore why a technology center of excellence is critical for organizations looking to drive change and transformation in business.
Importance of building a technology center of excellence
When organizations get more complex, their teams often work in silos without sharing knowledge. In these cases, a CoE can identify the internal resources that could be pooled together and shared among groups. This allows for easier skill development and knowledge sharing within the organization.
A technology center of excellence creates a structure where members can measure progress, experiment, and drive each other to improve. By sharing resources, a CoE increases efficiency within an organization while also creating more consistent experiences for customers of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. The purpose of a CoE is to drive innovation and improvement solely.
The following use-cases showcase how technology centers of excellence serve as an important part of innovative business organizations.
Use Cases of technology center of excellence
Implementing cloud infrastructure
Any digital transformation is a major project, but one that comes with many benefits such as efficiency. However, it can be difficult and disruptive during the transition phase. A cloud Center of Excellence can help ease this process by providing your organization with a team that is responsible for moving your business to the cloud and keeping it running smoothly and securely.
Implementing and driving adoption for new technology
Even the most flexible and agile organizations can find it difficult to adopt new products, but it’s essential to do so in order to realize the ROI of any new tech investment. New technologies may fail to be adopted by teams who are resistant to change and comfortable with the status quo—even if the new tool would improve their workflows.
In this case, a technology Center of Excellence (CoE) can act as an agent of change. The holistic perspectives of the team can ensure that all viewpoints and processes are considered during implementation, which can lead to a successful adoption of the new technology.
Conducting research and gaining business intelligence
This is where a technology Center of Excellence (CoE) comes in, by gathering research and insights on competitors, customers, technologies, and best practices to help empower businesses to make decisions that can lead to transformative changes.
When building and investing in a center of excellence, it’s important to consider your organization’s needs, available resources, priorities, etc. Initially, team members may need to balance their time between their regular job duties and being part of the CoE team. However, as the business grows and changes, the core principles of a CoE will stay the same.
Final Thoughts
There are many business benefits to partnering with a technology center of excellence, including access to highly experienced talent, an advanced tech stack, external worker management, and fast delivery of a quality product.
No matter where you start on your journey to success with a CoE model or which path you take, it’s essential to have one in place to manage change, time, resources, and innovation in today’s business landscape. With a mature and formalized CoE model, you’ll be able to show executive leadership real results and outcomes from the effort put in.
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