In the past year, we’ve worked with a number of clients that are establishing Centers of Excellence (COEs) as a way of providing a centralized source of standardized solutions, best practices, and expertise for deploying a wide variety of applications – from enterprise content management (ECM), to business process management (BPM), collaboration and document composition. There are plenty of good reasons why the COE model is gaining traction in these content- and process-centric solution domains. In general, organizations turn to such models to help them:

• Consolidate their technology footprints where possible and minimize redundancy
• Get better leverage out of a smaller portfolio of technology investments (enterprise standards)
• Evolve to more efficient solution delivery and support models
• Increase adoption and decrease the unit costs of these systems
• Reduce risk by ensuring consistency of usage in line with organizational policies
• Proactively evaluate demand and share knowledge to ensure a more strategic approach to evolution of the key platforms and solutions under the COE’s direction.

It’s easy to see where such a model is attractive, given the historic evolution of content- and process-centric technology deployments in most large organizations. For example, we see many clients that continue to implement and support multiple ECM solutions throughout various departments and/or lines of business across their enterprises. Many different technologies (as many as 14) fall under the ECM umbrella, but in reality organizations are looking to ECM to address a fairly small set of usage patterns. Thus the vast majority of implementations are actually variations on the same combinations of components: imaging/workflow, for instance, or document management/web content management/digital asset management, etc.

A coordinated, centralized entity can help address a number of the challenges brought about by years of fragmented decision making, investment, and support structures for content- and process-related technologies. In such environments there’s a clear need for standards and repeatability in multiple areas, including the core platforms on which any solutions should be based; the “packaging” or bundling approach for creating and rolling out solutions based on these platforms; the solution design, delivery, and support structure and resources for the platform and resulting solutions; establishing and communicating the policies and usage guidelines associated with these solutions; and evaluating and prioritizing business demand and evolving the standard platform and solutions appropriately.

For all these reasons, the COE concept makes a lot of sense. So what does it take to establish and implement a COE? Based on our consulting with organizations in a wide range of industries, the key steps we consider critical to forming an effective COE are to:

1. Define a charter for the COE
2. Determine the overall scope and general areas of responsibility
3. Identify sponsors and likely participants
4. Determine the working structure between the COE and business units 
5. Define roles and responsibilities
6. Define the key metrics to communicate the value proposition and accountability
7. Develop a communications plan

1. Define a Charter for the COE
Define and authorize the establishment of the COE by drawing up a charter as a reference of authority for the future COE, ensuring a common understanding of its goals among all stakeholders.

The charter for a COE typically includes a vision statement, a summary of the business drivers, a set of guiding principles, the organizational objectives the technology is expected to help address, a statement of the COE’s intended scope, and an organizational structure for the program the COE will oversee (see steps 2, 3, and 4, below). Finally, the charter should also identify any high-level risks that could potentially arise, and outline a near-term roadmap for the program. Following is a sample vision statement for a BPM COE charter.

Vision Statement: BPM Center of Excellence
The company’s COE is responsible for all business process management (BPM) technology enterprise strategy and planning as well as coordinating and assisting in the development, implementation, and support services to the degree required for each BPM project. The COE’s objective is to provide guidance and direction for the BPM technology and process automation needs for all areas of the company. The mission of the COE is as follows:

• To provide initial project intake and implementation prioritization for all BPM projects
• To work closely with business and IT staff in all BPM projects to promote sharing of resources and common components
• To provide cross-business BPM technology and application knowledge, enabling automation of key business processes across the company
• To provide guidance on BPM architecture for the company
• To provide long-range BPM systems and application planning toward achievement of business goals, including selection and procurement of new technology as needed

2. Determine the Overall scope for the COE.
In some organizations, the scope of the COE is strictly knowledge-sharing focused on best practices; in others the group also provides strategy input for use by the group that owns solution delivery and infrastructure. In general, we see three different types of COEs:

• Knowledge-sharing focus 
• Strategy/guidance focus
• Strategy/guidance focus with implementation/ support focus The following table lists a description of each of these three approaches to the COE concept, along with the tradeoffs and the types of organizations for which each approach is best suited.

3. Identify Key Sponsors and Likely Participants in the COE.
Early on, line up executive-level sponsorship for the COE initiative to champion and evangelize the value of the COE and to provide executive leadership support and strategic guidance for the overall program. The executive sponsor is uniquely positioned to look beyond the interests of a single line of business so that the overall value of the COE is recognized and communicated to stakeholders throughout the organization, ensuring that a COE initiative has the confidence of IT and business management teams.

Also identify key stakeholders as participants in the COE. When you consider that a COE involves multiple functions (and potentially multiple lines of business) across an organization, it’s clear why this level of support is critical. It takes the active involvement of senior management to keep everyone in sync and aligned with the company’s strategic goals, particularly as the COE is being put in place. The figure below shows the key participants for an ECM COE with a strategy/ guidance and implementation/ support focus.

4. Determine the Working Structure between the COE and the Business Units.
A COE is typically staffed by a combination of permanent members, virtual team members, and potentially some supplemental resources from external firms, such as integrators and other third parties. The COE must work closely with the organization’s IT function (whether that function is itself centralized or distributed among lines of business), as well as representatives from business and corporate entities such as legal /compliance functions, as it delivers services to the business.

The figure below shows the relationships of the COE to various constituencies across an organization – both business and IT.

Define the structure and the procedures by which the COE and these entities will interact – both during the “ramp-up” of the COE and once the COE is operational. Given the approach selected for the COE (see Step 2), how will the center provide its services? For instance, how will the COE work with IT to define enterprise standards and methodologies? How will technology needs be identified, how will initiatives be prioritized, and how will the roadmap be developed? And how will the COE incorporate feedback and learning from deployments to streamline the development lifecycle and related processes?

This definition of structure and procedures is an undertaking that should take into consideration the organizational culture. Rolling out this structure and its associated procedures will likely require communications to ensure all participants understand its purpose and the expected benefits of the COE structure (see Step 7, Communications Plan, below).

5. Define Roles and Responsibilities.
Typically, COE roles and responsibilities are distributed among several key stakeholder groups, including representatives from IT, business areas, and governance areas (e.g. Legal, Compliance, and Audit functions), and involve a combination of virtual and dedicated resources. In general, the three main areas of responsibility within the COE are as follows:

• Executive Leadership: Responsible for overall strategy and direction of the COE, communication with business counterparts, governance, and enforcement.
• Program Management: Responsible for the overall methodologies, approaches, and best practices; delivering solutions and supporting solutions. These are the key elements required to deliver on the technology strategy established by COE leadership.
• Solution Delivery and Support: Responsible for implementation consultation and for the execution of tactics required to develop and maintain the infrastructure and deliver solutions. For ECM, this group would also be responsible for developing taxonomies under the direction of COE leadership. For BPM, this group would also be responsible for application testing and monitoring.

How broad should the COE responsibilities be? Doculabs recommends centralizing the strategic and program management components of the program, while still allowing autonomy and flexibility at the tactical delivery levels of the COE operation. Factors to consider include the size and geographic distribution of your organization, and whether some services are provided by an external party or via a hosted service, in which case we recommend the COE retain strategy and oversight responsibilities.

6. Define the Key Metrics to Communicate the Value Proposition and Accountability.
To ensure the COE’s continued success, establish the base metrics by which you’ll measure success. These metrics will serve as key performance indicators that can be used for monitoring, reporting, and oversight of the program and to measure its impact on the organization.

We recommend defining metrics in two categories:

• Program Metrics – measure the success and progress of the overall program throughout the organization and the quality of the services provided, and measure and compare the actual results of the costs and benefits for the program rollout vs. the original business case and projections. Metrics in this category include the number of concurrent projects, costs of the program, solution adoption, user adoption, demand pipeline, and implementation time.
• Operational Metrics – measure the availability, stability, and responsiveness of the deployed systems; the quality of the system services; and the capabilities deployed to business units and the adherence to established service level agreements (SLAs). Metrics in this category include uptime, access and content retrieval performance, capacity utilization, transaction volumes and performance, and customer satisfaction.

Metrics will provide the historical data you need to develop cost/benefit analyses for future application design and implementations. Performance metrics can be used to evaluate alternatives for business process optimization, while customer satisfaction metrics can be used as input for continued improvement.

7. Develop a Communications Plan for the COE.
A communications plan serves a number of purposes. First, it outlines the actions to be taken to keep executive leaders on the governance team informed on a regular basis. It also prescribes the tools to be used to advance the vision and mission of the COE and create awareness at the executive level and throughout the organization, including announcing new services and publicizing COE successes.

The plan should specify recommendations for the specific mechanism and frequency of ongoing communications, which may include executive reviews, operational reviews, project reviews, and vendor reviews. Internal customer communications, in the form of scheduled briefings or internal newsletters, should be scheduled at specific junctures of a deployment, with the goal of keeping all members of the future user community informed as to changes they can expect in their environment and/or their processes.

Over the long term, effective communications help to increase not only user awareness, but user adoption. They also help keep sponsors and stakeholders involved and on board, making it easier to roll out applications throughout the organization and to leverage them on an ongoing basis.

So there you have it: the seven steps to establishing a highly successful COE. If you’re looking to optimize your applications and to improve delivery of applications and services, it’s an approach to consider.

Jeetu Patel and Linda Andrews are consultants with Doculabs, an independent consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations with their ECM strategies. Contact them at 312-433-7793, www.doculabs.com, or info@doculabs.com.