CHAPTER 6

Centers of Excellence: The Key to Accelerate Organizational Transformation

What we have learned so far: As organizations move through each level they increase their opportunities to drive down costs, increase revenue, and improve the bottom line. However, evolving into a more insight-driven organization takes a lot of work. Reshaping the culture is critical, establishing uniform information processes is necessary, developing a strong skilled staff is equally important, and acquiring and properly using technology to develop an effective information infrastructure is vital. The past chapters have mentioned the role of a Center of Excellence (CoE) in helping organizations mature. Some organizations also use the term Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). This chapter explores that concept.

The biggest issue organizations confront when they decide to take their information and analytical maturity to a new level is how to go about it. It is a daunting task that can't be outsourced or bought. The best plan of attack should include the following steps:

No two CoEs are exactly alike, just as no two organizations have the exact same issues or maturity level. Nor are CoEs silver bullets that can solve all problems. They can, however, play a significant role in leading the organization's effort throughout its journey to a higher maturity level, and in introducing efficiency and productivity measures and best practices that can eliminate duplication of effort and improve decision quality. These benefits are essential to the success of any information strategy.

CoEs aren't static entities. They evolve as the organization evolves and should take on different roles throughout the organization's maturity journey. They might have permanent staff, or people on loan. They might work in a central location, or operate as a virtual team. The structure for a CoE should meet the needs of the organization and take into account the internal culture.

When a bank decided it wanted to increase its informational and analytical maturity to improve its business performance it built a CoE that was focused on breaking down information silos that had been formed by business units. The first order of business was to make sure each business unit was represented in the CoE organization. The bank recognized the required effort, and demonstrated its commitment to this critical initiative by establishing a permanent CoE organization dedicated to achieving this objective. The CoE was staffed with technical and banking domain experts and business intelligence and analytics staff. The goal was to improve the quality of information used for making decisions, and to enhance the information infrastructure to supply the right information at the right time, and in the right format, to decision makers. This insider/outsider approach worked perfectly for this organization. It saw substantial ROI gains from efforts to develop an enterprise-wide view of its customers and services.

A manufacturing company took a different approach. It created a CoE with the goal of routing all its high-end analytics projects through the CoE. It thought it would be a better use of resources to keep all the analytical exploration in one location. While the company has reported successes, it isn't doing much to make its internal analytics efforts more process focused. Instead, the CoE takes a very project-based mentality and has become a bottleneck. It is not doing an effective job of advancing the use of information throughout the organization. While it is an improvement on the previous method of pestering IT for information, all it has done is create another queue.

CoEs should be figuring out how to eliminate queues—not form them. Depending on an organization's maturity stage, a CoE might initially support analytical and BI requirements with the long-term objective of promoting self-service. It may also help eliminate data silos, bring together business units to discuss KPIs, or search out outstanding business unit analytic efforts to help other units benefit from those insights. At its heart, it moves the organization toward developing skills and processes that make fact-based and analytically driven decisions a part of the organization's DNA. This will require changing the organization's mentality regarding its information from a “project” approach to an ongoing “process” approach that is embedded in day-to-day activities. Successful organizations keep the following question foremost in their mission: “Are both data and analytics regarded and managed as strategic assets in our organization?”

THE 10,000-FOOT VIEW OF INFORMATION

CoEs are assigned the critical role of providing the proverbial big picture view, seeing the good and the bad. One of the main lessons Dan Ariely gleaned from the research for his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions is that “although irrationality is commonplace … once we understand when and where we make erroneous decisions, we can try to be more vigilant, force ourselves to think differently about these decisions or use technology to overcome our current shortcomings.”¹ Just as individuals have unique interpretations, biases, and cognitive blind spots, so do organizations. They often struggle to understand how mature they are in information usage and what they need to get to the next level. CoEs help organizations see where those erroneous decisions are coming from, why business units have different interpretations of the enterprise business performance, and what can be done to fix these problems. They are sort of like an on-site think tank, asking questions such as, “Are we sharing results effectively across the organization?” A CoE should be the group that can challenge “business as usual” and, most important, sponsor continuous learning and improvement. A CoE should also encourage business leaders to explore different ways to analyze their information and make decisions. The very nature of this exploration process will lead to unsuccessful attempts and false starts. Exploring the different options is a healthy practice that will ultimately lead to the best approach. Executive sponsors must grant “permission to fail” in order to help the CoE succeed.

Another key CoE role is as the “Cultural Driver” and “Change Agent” that removes the blinders, empowers the right people, and creates the information process framework that helps organizations reach the enterprise level—and beyond. Although the CoE can be virtual or permanent, it should ideally have the following characteristics:

• Supported and sponsored by executive-level management
• Funded and staffed by the organization
• Staffed by business, domain, analytical, and IT experts
• Established with well-defined focus, roles, responsibilities, and processes

A QUICK LOOK AT THE KEY RESPONSIBILITIES OF A CoE

Regardless of what drives an organization to establish a CoE, its charter should be well-defined. It needs to be able to work with any and all stakeholders, from IT and the teams responsible for collecting and storing data to the business units who use data to make decisions such as how to market products and from whom to buy supplies. A significant portion of its charter should be committed to understanding the information flow throughout the organization and improving this process so that all decision makers have valid and consistent information. This will require a close collaboration with the IT team that manages the information environment (including a data warehouse and marts). The CoE should become the link that connects business requirements to the information sources, understanding both the supply of available information and the demand for it. In many organizations, that link is not well established. Many information sources may exist that contain inconsistent and duplicate information. These are the dreaded silos that have been developed over time. Although the silos were meant to support the business, the inconsistent information embedded in them becomes one of the root causes of different interpretations of business performance. Maintaining these silos comes at a high cost in terms of duplication of data and efforts. A CoE can lead the effort to de-silo the organization, introducing efficiency, eliminating duplication, and documenting the information flow across the organization. Ultimately, a CoE helps the business identify the right source for information. If the required information is not available, or if it is available in multiple locations, the CoE will lead the effort to identify the proper information architecture.

The CoE keeps in mind that information sources need to:

• Support the business decision process and facilitate the production of business insight through the application of analytics and the use of effective performance management and business solutions.
• Be governed to ensure Master Data is managed properly and the IT architecture requirements are addressed to ensure a strong link between supply and demand.
• Be maintained by using best practices to create repeatable and efficient information acquisition and use, and to enable closed-loop learning to allow for continuous improvement.

CoEs AND THE LEVELS OF MATURITY

The nature, structure, and role of the CoE will be different for organizations at different levels of maturity. At the Individual Level, information is not viewed as a valuable asset so there really is no point to having a CoE.

For organizations at the Departmental Level, it is possible to have business unit or departmental CoEs. These efforts might not be as organized as they should be in a true CoE, but they could provide the benefit of helping departments begin to do a better job of organizing information internally. But they can only be temporary structures because, as discussed earlier in the book, Departmental Level organizations are prone to developing information silos—and information silos are anathema to becoming an insight-driven organization. View the departmental CoE only as a stepping-stone to the eventual goal of having one consistent information architecture to serve the enterprise. Do not let these departmental CoEs become bulwarks of the political and cultural resistance to enterprise-level information sharing.

CoEs can provide a significant value in helping organizations reach the Enterprise Level. Some organizations establish an enterprise CoE to specifically drive the organization to this maturity level. Other organizations will provide some of the services and benefits of a CoE in an informal or temporary fashion during the deconstruction of information silos and establishment of an enterprise information environment.

As the Optimize and the Innovate Levels are progressive maturity levels, Enterprise CoEs are likely to exist in many forms. Organizations that reach one of these levels must have addressed their information challenges. There are situations where the concept, services, and role of an enterprise CoE can be observed in an organization in some form without being recognized as a CoE organization. While these efforts are clearly beneficial, introducing the formal best practice structure of an enterprise CoE is still worthwhile. It's important to note that the focus of a CoE in an organization that operates at one of the progressive maturity levels will clearly be different than organizations at lower levels (foundational and challenged) of maturity. These CoEs have the benefits of a well-integrated enterprise information architecture that can now focus on how to leverage the clean and consistent enterprise information to further propel the organization to higher levels of competitive advantage in the market. The use of analytics to validate assumptions and strategies and predict customers' behavior and preferences are all examples of CoE focus areas at the progressive organization maturity levels.

HOW SHOULD CoEs BE ORGANIZED?

Although the CoE should include experts drawn from various disciplines throughout the organization, there is no standard and fixed structure. The appropriate structure should be based on the organization's business priorities and capabilities. Each organization has strengths and weaknesses in its ability to produce and use business insight. The CoE should be structured to address weaknesses, supplement strengths, and enable it to achieve its business objectives. The CoE members must represent business users, technical specialists, and domain experts—the people who use information insight and analytics to make decisions along with those who actually produce that insight and build the analytical models. The optimal structure is a permanent organization with well-defined roles and responsibilities and KPIs to measure their contribution and impact. The team should be visible in the organizational structure and accessible to all the business units it intends to serve. Some organizations may start with a virtual team that combines the relevant resources from various locations. Although this approach may be quick to set up, it does present challenges in commitment, focus, and work prioritization, and should be only used as a temporary step toward a permanent structure. If dual reports have to moonlight to get their CoE work done, the virtual CoE concept won't work.

ACCELERATING MATURITY—NOT CREATING DEPENDENCY

There are two interpretations of how a CoE should be structured. One interpretation sees it as an organization that acts as a change agent; the other is to consider it a shared services organization. The difference is significant, and it comes down to how organizations view the purpose and role of the CoE organization. The change agent approach is to think of a CoE as an effective tool to:

• Address inefficiencies in the current information management and analytical practices in the organization.
• Help organizations make the necessary changes to improve each organizational pillar.
• Accelerate the organization's effort to evolve to a higher maturity level as part of the broader organization's transformation roadmap.

To achieve these objectives, the business users have to be actively involved, and the CoE has to have the right resources with the required skills to act as the agent of change. Visibility, business impact, and executive support will be essential requirements for the CoE to achieve these objectives.

The other interpretation of a CoE is as an IT shared service organization that offers some type of technical service such as reporting or analytical support. Although this approach may improve how the organization responds to business requests, it reinforces a barrier between the business users and the technologies, critical thinking, and information analysis process needed to improve decision making.

IT shared service organizations encourage business units to send information and analysis requests to queue up to the organization and wait to get the results back. A shared service organization works on a project basis, handling “requests” for information and analytics, and in some cases they charge for these projects. The second example in the opening of this chapter is a “shared service” model. This model does nothing to help the business units successfully work with data and analytics on their own. Inevitably, bottlenecks evolve, and the use of analytics and information insight becomes a “project” and an undesirable burden, not a core component of the decision-making process. Frustrated with the long lines that form to get a spot on the CoE schedule (or the price), business units start patching together their own solutions, working with whatever data they've got and using whatever talent they have.

In comparison, well-functioning CoEs help business users learn to use information and develop business insight themselves—they don't do it for them. A critical requirement of a well-structured CoE is to aggressively work toward promoting self-service capabilities to enable the business users to do as much as they can on their own. The technologies available today are often designed with business users in mind.

In addition, in order to avoid being an ineffective budgetary sinkhole that does nothing to move the organization to a greater level of informational maturity, the CoE needs a close connection and integration with the various business units. At all costs the CoE should avoid being chartered only for projects. A project-only focus rarely allows these CoEs to identify the root cause of data issues such as data inconsistency, availability of master data, data quality, and integration. Consequently, they may not be able to make recommendations to address the root cause of these problems since it is not part of their project completion objectives. Actually, in some cases, IT shared service organizations, or outsourced services that perform similar functions, are measured by the volume of completed projects, which completely ignores the need to improve the information infrastructure, improve internal skills and process, and change the culture.

FINDING THE RIGHT SPOT IN THE ORG CHART

The CoE should be located in a high—and visible—spot in the org chart. It needs to be accessible to all internal stakeholders and customers. The leader of the CoE must report to an executive sponsor at the C level. Since CoEs will be making recommendations and changes to help business users make better fact-based decisions, they need the backing and support from the executive team.

MAPPING THE MINI-UNITS THAT A CoE MIGHT HOST

An effective structure for a CoE is developed only after evaluating the organization's business priorities and its capabilities to produce and use the required business insight to achieve these objectives. The assessment of current organizational pillars will reveal the organization's capabilities, weaknesses, and strengths. There is no standard structure for a CoE that will work in every environment and culture. However, there are basic information functions that provide essential information capabilities that must be evaluated. Figure 6.1 shows the basic functions that should be considered for a CoE.

Figure 6.1 illustrates enterprise CoE key functions, which correspond to key information management practices that exist in any organization. As you can imagine, different levels of organizational maturities will have an impact on how well these areas are supported. Before we start exploring these key functions, keep in mind that a CoE may not have to address all of them. The assessment of the current organizational maturity and capabilities combined with a thorough gap analysis process will identify what type of a CoE is needed and which of these key functions should be addressed by the CoE. Let's start exploring these functions.

The information infrastructure of any organization brings operational and external data in, processes the data, and should produce good quality information to deliver it to the information consumers. We can think of this as a supply and demand environment. The process of taking raw data and converting it to useful enterprise information requires quite a bit of work, including the following key functions:

• Effective data integration
• Master data management
• Business intelligence capabilities to query and report on the data
• Application and effective use of analytics to produce business insight
• Application and use of performance management capabilities and principles
• Effective information management processes
• Data stewardship and information governance

This is the information value chain, and it is the heart of this discussion. When anyone talks about an organization's capabilities, it is in reference to this value chain. An enterprise CoE will carefully monitor this process to make sure it is functioning effectively. If one of these functions is working well, then we don't necessarily have to include it as a CoE function.

Data Management

This refers to the process of extracting operational systems data and external data and bringing it into the organization's information infrastructure. The infrastructure may include staging areas, data warehouses, and marts. To effectively manage this function you need a good understanding of the operational data sources, good management of the data quality, well-documented application of enterprise business rules, and master data management. All these functions and processes will load the extracted data into the organization's information infrastructure, which must have a well-defined information model or schema (usually a data warehouse model). The data management supplies information and makes it available to the information consumers.

Information Delivery

This key function represents the consumption of information by the business side. This is the demand side. Many of the inefficiencies and challenges in managing enterprise information may be attributed to the lack of alignment between supply and demand. Organizations will obviously need to produce the appropriate information that will satisfy the demand from a business consumer. To achieve this objective organizations, with the help from a CoE, will have to pay attention to how business requirements for information are managed and satisfied. How are the information consumers using business intelligence, analytics, or performance management? How well are the information marts structured to support the business users, and the skill levels of the business users? The information delivery function manages the demand side.

Enterprise Business Analytics Program

Information management practices need to be an ongoing process versus a series of projects that may not be well connected. The enterprise business analytics program function for the CoE addresses this very important requirement. This function will finally have an owner who is empowered to manage the key projects to stop redundancies, identify best practices, leverage skills, and so on. This critical function includes reaching out to all business, IT, and domain stakeholders to get them to collaborate and communicate more effectively. Depending on the unique requirements and maturity of each organization, this function may also include coordination with other business and IT initiatives involving master data or governance.

Data Stewardship and Governance

Wouldn't it be great if your enterprise information was always clean and consistent? That is not a very common attribute. In reality, enterprise data is often not high quality. To fix these challenges, you need to figure out the root causes and in doing so ask the questions: Who owns the data? Who owns the application systems? Who owns the data sources? These are the different areas in any organization that may impact data quality. Assigning an owner (steward) who is accountable for the data stored or managed by each one of these areas is needed to control the overall data quality flowing through the enterprise. There are potentially different types of stewards. A technical steward might work on data governance issues while a business steward could work on who has a right to access the information.

Ultimately, organizations will have to identify the different types of data stewards and the different data governance decisions and decision rights they will need to effectively manage enterprise information quality. Depending on the organization's maturity, a CoE team may be asked to play a role in addressing these critical functions.

Internal Information Processes

You have already explored several key information functions. To effectively perform each of these functions, individual processes need to be defined in order to help business units interact with each other, and engage with IT. Developing a comprehensive engagement model will facilitate the implementation of new recommendations. These processes are also essential to guide how business units and the IT team will interact with the CoE organization. The CoE may have to be involved in structuring and maintaining these processes. This is key to developing and maintaining effective information architecture.

HOW THE CoE HELPS SECURE THE ORGANIZATIONAL PILLARS

People, information processes, technology, and culture are this book's mantra for understanding how to evolve to a more mature organization. With that in mind it makes sense to also look at the organizational impact of a CoE from that perspective. Let's explore how a CoE can impact each of those pillars.

Finding and Leveraging Talent

Good multidisciplinary resources are not easy to attract and retain. These leaders are usually driven by the desire to apply their knowledge to have a positive impact in their organization's business performance.

A Center of Excellence can:

• Leverage the specialized talents in various groups within the organization to get the most value of their contribution. This can be achieved by providing a method, process, and incentive for these talents to collaborate, share ideas, and develop best practices.
• Support the business units and the HR team in identifying the proper training, continuing education, and knowledge transfer for the critical talent across the organization.
• Raise awareness and support the organization's effort to develop meaningful job descriptions, job families, and an attractive career path to attract and retain critical talent.

Understanding and Communicating the Big Picture

Creating uniform, enterprise-wide information processes requires diplomacy and a detailed understanding of the needs of business units. It also requires careful analysis of the required information tasks to determine whether they are business or IT tasks. In addition, a careful and consistent analysis of these tasks and processes is essential for the organization to reach the right balance between centralizing and decentralizing these tasks. The CoE staff can look at the big picture, especially as it relates to the value chain, and communicate that information to decision makers, analysts, and other stakeholders. These business views should provide decision makers, analysts, and other stakeholders with a good understanding of the organizational value chain.

In addition, the CoE can:

• Be cognizant of industry best practices and apply them to current processes when appropriate.
• Carefully identify and analyze the required information processes to clearly define what should be handled and owned by the business and IT organizations.
• Recognize internal politics and identify obstacles and bring this knowledge to the executive sponsor with prescriptive recommendations to resolve these issues.
• Evaluate the current state of data quality, consistency, security, and access, and make recommendations.
• Establish processes to connect with data stewards in business areas to discuss and solve data quality issues and support the organization's data quality, master data, and governance initiatives.
• Develop processes to promote best practices around the use of analytics, performance management, and business solutions.
• Identify the best way for individuals to engage with the CoE and a process for working with other CoEs (if they exist).

Assessing the Impact of Technology

While technology often changes at a fast pace, people and organizational cultures don't. When figuring out whether a new technology is valuable you need to take a variety of issues into consideration, including the analysis of the technology impact on business users, culture and change management requirements, resource requirements, and of course how this technology augments and integrates with other technologies and scheduled enhancements. The CoE is in a good position to help objectively assess the value of adopting technology improvements to meet the increasing business requirements and, more important, work with other IT and business groups to coordinate these enhancements with other initiatives planned for the organization.

A CoE can ask:

   Is the organization collecting and integrating enterprise information to support the decision-making process? The ultimate test of the success of the organization's effort to manage its enterprise data is to answer yes to this question. One of the main objectives of establishing a CoE is to address the challenges organizations face when they try to integrate enterprise data and break the departmental silos. The CoE organization will have business user representatives to make sure business requirements are well defined. The CoE's job is to constantly manage the organization's information environment (data warehouses, marts, or any other architecture) to ensure the proper information is collected, integrated, and stored. Consequently, when executed properly, the concept of establishing an enterprise CoE will have a direct and visible impact on the organization's information infrastructure.

   Is there a business analytics strategy and architecture? As business users continue to increase their use and reliance on BI, analytics, performance management, and business solutions, the process of coordinating these various efforts can be very inefficient. A properly established CoE will own the requirement of developing and maintaining an enterprise business analytics strategy and architecture. This work must be done in close collaboration with the IT team to align the BA strategy and architecture with the enterprise IT information strategies and architectures.

   What new technology should we use? In addition, the CoE will be in the best position to evaluate and select new technologies to support the business requirements. In doing so, the CoE, in collaboration with the business users, will be evaluating the use of new technology to introduce efficiency and produce the insight to support the business decision-making process. The CoE can look into better ways to analyze information visually (using interactive and dynamic data visualization methods, exploring strategies and technologies to analyze big data, utilizing best practices for applying analytics in business solutions, and determining the pros and cons of using cloud-based or hosted options).

   Does our strategy scale and extend to support the growing business requirements? As the organization starts to organize its information management efforts, a long-term view of the extendability and scalability of the information architecture is necessary. The CoE will work closely with the IT team to ensure this requirement is met. This will allow the organization's information environment to keep up with the business requirements, manage the information infrastructure cost, and help justify the required investments in information infrastructure.

   What types of analytic methods are needed? Many low-maturity organizations get stuck in the rut of using regression analysis, or simple spreadsheet analysis. A CoE can work with the business users to identify the appropriate robust analytical methods to support the decision-making process, and ensure the information marts are properly structured to collect, store, and provide the right information in the right formation to support the required information analyses.

   Are we using high-quality data to make decisions? One of the critical requirements and benefits for the CoE is to support the organization's effort in cleaning its data, managing its master data, and applying the appropriate level of information governance. A properly executed CoE will support the organization's efforts around these topics and, depending on each environment, may take some or all responsibility to lead the organization's effort in these areas.

Communicating Value

The CoE can have one of its biggest impacts in the culture arena, helping set a tone that embraces fact-based and analytically driven decision making. This organization dimension is probably the hardest to change, but has the most significant impact on the organization's ability to become insight-driven. Changing the organization's culture will take time, diplomacy, and careful changes to the way the organization evaluates its employees' performance, provides incentives and rewards, hires and promotes new skills, and communicates strategies and objectives. The CoE supports the organization's effort by communicating the organization's business priorities and objectives and demonstrating (through communicating its success stories) the value of business insight, analytics, and information as a corporate asset.

The CoE can:

• Work closely with the business users to demonstrate the value of using new technologies and support them in meeting their business objectives.
• Document and communicate new successes achieved by the business units using new methods, technology, and analytics.
• Work as a change agent to encourage business users to try new approaches and use new technologies to address their business priorities.
• Encourage experimenting with new ideas and accept unsuccessful attempts (from time to time) as part of the maturity process.
• Leverage existing domain and analytical skills to promote a collaborative atmosphere.
• Create an internal method to exchange ideas and re-use methods and techniques to solve business problems.
• Work closely with the heads of business units to dedicate resources and effort to support them in meeting their business objectives.

PHASED VERSUS BIG BANG APPROACH FOR STARTING A CoE

Should you start in phases or go for a big commitment? A phased approach is more practical. Organizations generally learn a lot from the initial attempts to establish a CoE. Taking a phased approach enables them to use these lessons learned to evaluate and expand the scope of their CoEs through later iterations. It's important that a CoE establish credibility with early successes that build its reputation and earn it continual ongoing support from business units, IT, and executive sponsors. The phased approach should keep in mind an organization's level of maturity. An organization operating at the Departmental Level might inaugurate a CoE with the objective of breaking down the departmental silos. An Enterprise Level organization might use the CoE to focus initially on improving its marketing efforts to identify valuable customers and cross-sell opportunities.

In the early stages of a CoE, it is important to keep the focus somewhat narrow. The CoE can only bite off so much without getting a reputation for trying to do too much too soon—or fail to deliver tangible results and lose its credibility with the business units. The CoE needs an initial win and a success story to catch the attention of the business unit and encourage its participation and engagement with the CoE. As the CoE begins to establish its roles and relationships within the organization, its members will be better equipped to deal effectively with thorny internal politics. Limiting the scope of the CoE's influence, at first, allows the CoE to ensure continued buy-in and collaboration.

FINDING THE RIGHT FUNDING MECHANISM

Organizations often flounder when it comes to determining how to fund a CoE. You want business units to use the services, expertise, and advice of the CoE. Thus, charging for using the CoE is tricky. Business units within Department Level organizations, for instance, don't want to be charged to then be told they need to work at breaking down their information silos. It would be reasonable to be charged for consulting on the purchase of major analytics—the kind of consulting the business unit might have looked for outside the organization. But, in general, to acquire strong support for the CoE's toughest work—building an enterprise-wide view of data and changing culture to be data-driven—the CoE needs to be budgeted as a line item in the overhead budget. To make sure the budgeted dollars remain, the CoE's first task is to work with its executive sponsor to develop a set of metrics it will be measured on.

SELECTING THE RIGHT PERSONALITIES

There is no one right way to staff a CoE, or one specific mix of skills. Many staffing decisions are made as a result of completing an assessment of the current information management practices in the organization. The assessment will not only reveal the organizational maturity level but, more important, will also identify the organization's weaknesses and strengths that may impact its ability to achieve its business priorities. Identifying these weaknesses and strengths and conducting a capability gap analysis will enable the organization to figure out the proper ways to close gaps, address weaknesses, and leverage strengths. These are the essential first steps to identifying and designing the proper CoE organizational structure and identifying the required resources to staff it. In general, the key traits necessary for CoE resources are:

• Business, technical, and industry domain background
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical and IT processes
• Strong skills at working collaboratively with many groups
• Ability to listen to the business, technical, and personal requirements from the business users
• Excellent communication and personal skills
• Specialized skills determined by the focus and function

RAMPING UP YOUR CHANGE AGENT

Ultimately, CoEs should be part of a broader roadmap to address gaps and weaknesses in capabilities and in the current information management practices in an organization. The CoE can be your catalyst, your agent of change, and a key means of accelerating the organization's efforts to evolve into a higher maturity level.

As noted earlier, CoEs are not silver bullets, and they don't solve all problems. But when organizations think through the role and mission of a CoE and support it at the highest levels, the centers can produce significant value and tangible results.

Organizations should not establish a CoE just because it is a best practice approach to improve efficiency and alignment between business and IT. Don't do it because it seems like it is something you should do. A much better approach is to understand the concept and its strategic nature, something you learned about in reading this chapter. The next chapter focuses on how organizations can develop a business analytics strategy.

NOTE

  1. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010).