What is a Centre of Excellence?

•Centre of Excellence (CoE) as, known as the “competency centre” or “capability centre,” is a group of people with specialized skills and expertise whose job is to provide leadership and purposely disseminate knowledge within your organization

•This group brings together people from different disciplines, divisions, and shared facilities to provide resources, leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area.

•They concentrate on existing expertise and resources within divisions to attain and sustain a high-level performance and value

•CoE allows division's to combine their resources and materials where will it provides an oversight around specific areas, this will:

•The following functions fall under the CoE Team:

COE would focus on providing training, best practices, and resources for all of these teams while also gathering the data and learnings from all of the teams to create a positive feedback loop. 

• A center of excellence may also be aimed at revitalizing stalled initiatives

• Establishment of a core foundation that provides the tooling, people, and processes you need to drive lasting business value for employees and residents. Creation of an environment well-suited for the successful adoption of enterprise solutions. This means investing in an organizational construct such as a business technology Center of Excellence (CoE).

The focus area is on technology (Maximo), a business support needs (Participating Divisions), a skill (consultation, technical implementation and support services) or a broad scope of the study (Work Management).

Why create a Centre of Excellence and the benefits:

•Implementing the CoE will help eliminate the gap between strategic planning and decision making by addressing and transitioning the common issue of deployment through to adoption

•CoE will guide the efficient use of resources and allow teams to share their knowledge which will eliminate teams in silos

•By centralizing high-demand capabilities, knowledge, skills and experience CoE’s can widen the reach of those capabilities and streamline their access across the organization

•CoE’s can eliminate bottlenecks by streamlining access to critical capabilities, which in turn increases the speed of delivery, development and maintenance of critical business solutions

•COEs enable members to identify these areas (division and support teams) and bring together internal resources to be shared among groups

•COEs bring more organizational efficiencies and create a more consistent service experience across the organization, benefiting clients by creating value, innovation, operations, cost reduction and product improvements

•It also creates an organizational structure that encourages the different members to measure, experiment, and push each other forward

•Eliminate inefficient practices and by, streamlining processes, creating reusable assets and reducing redundancy along with cutting implementation time for new skills and technologies

•Promotes more transparency and more shared results

•A powerful way for the organization to align business goals rather than individual divisional metrics

Best Practices for Effective Centre of Excellence:

1. Executive buy-in: To function well, COEs first need buy-in from the top management. Executives can be resistant to changes, therefore incorporating their concerns will provide helpful information for CoE plans 

2. Cross-discipline team members: COEs also need to bring together cross-discipline people whose experience touches the core area in multiple ways. 

3. Change Management & Adoption:  Stewardship of change management processes, tools and methodology; such functions can include training, coaching, mentoring, support, research, assessments and centralizing information regarding the state and success of organizational changes. Developing a plan to manage all the change initiatives and evaluating and planning for risks to the business.

4. Consistency and Governance: A consistent governance plan is another crucial element of an effective COE. Establish decision making groups and processes to maximize the input of these diverse perspectives. Clearly outline meeting schedules, roles and responsibilities across CoEs to ensure the project stays on track and to build a model that is consistent, repeatable and successful

5. Shared resources: An essential logistical consideration, COEs must have a shared resource system which builds and maintains accessible templates, tools, calendars and folders and establishes expectations on how to use those resources.

Creating a EWMS Centre of Excellence:

Here are seven steps to rolling out a COE: 

1. Best Practices, Industry Trends & Innovation Awareness –

•Workshops with IBM – topics to be confirmed

•IBM Partner – Presentation on Adoption and Change Management, OCWA

•City Representatives on User Groups within IBM Community

•CoE Knowledge Library to store information