In my experience, every business has three main goals: Run, grow, and transform your business. Plenty of information online and offline can teach you the basics. But the crux is in the third. You can make your business stand out by transforming it.
Owning and implementing Centres of Excellence (CoE) is a powerful tool for facilitating business transformation.
In an organization, a CoE is a group of highly-skilled experts whose primary mission is to implement best practices in a specific area. The CoE concept is derived from lean manufacturing. It bridges skills gaps within an organization and ensures seamless implementation of new technologies.
How does this apply in the world of technology? Why should CTOs develop a CoE? Let me explain. It cannot be easy to introduce new technology into an organization. Adopting and integrating these technologies into your business processes will require a robust framework to help you achieve enhanced business value and solidify customer relations. A Technology CoE can help you achieve this!
Let’s look at five steps to build a Technology CoE.
How to build a Technology CoE in easy steps
Vision building
A vision is crucial to driving growth in an organization. It would help if you first defined your current position about your technology landscape. You can only then decide where you want your future to go. Before you can move forward, defining and understanding where you are now and where you wish to be in the future is essential.
You can use your understanding to create a short, medium, and long-term plan that will allow you to achieve your goals efficiently.
All of this will only happen if you can implement your strategies. The next step is to determine the financial aspects of your Technology CoE. This will require you to finalize the funding and investment.
After considering the financial and business objectives, you can develop a sales plan and a road map to help you on your journey. You will then be able to implement your tech vision effectively.
Team Building
Your priorities and objectives are in order. It would help if you found the right people to help you achieve your business goals. You need to, first and foremost, create a leadership group. Effective Leadership is crucial in implementing Technology CoE within a business. A good leader can make or ruin your goal.
After selecting your leadership team, you can use their expertise and experience to choose the individual practice teams to implement your business plan.
To ensure sustained success, training and developing your sales team and your technology is essential. We can only expect to achieve the best results through continuous training and updated training.
Technology Building
We’re all here to learn how to create a Technology CoE to introduce new technologies into our businesses. We use our teams of experts to explore and identify new tools and frameworks relevant to a specific technology.
It is essential first to determine if it is possible to implement these tools and frameworks. To check feasibility, it is best to have the teams develop a Proof of Concept. This will verify your strategy for bringing in new technology.
This would then be followed by creating knowledge repositories, where all the readily available information is compiled in a database. It can be used for data-driven decisions when implementing new technology.
After that, you can work on improving the capability of your business and building accelerators to support growth.
Governance Building
You want to ensure that you follow your plan as it was decided.
A well-formed governance body can guide you and solve problems in implementing new technologies. This team will not only oversee the work but also ensure that standards are met.
Proper governance enables you to accelerate your project and reach your goal much earlier. You can also drastically reduce risks.
After investing enough time in the implementation, the governance team can formulate best practices, such as design reviews and code guidelines. Conduct a thorough evaluation of the initiative.
Promotion Building
You have teams working on the integration of new technologies. It’s like an oiled machine. The last step is to communicate your new technology to all relevant stakeholders.
It is best to create a website dedicated to your Technology CoE, highlighting your business’s initiatives and showing how it is ready for radical change.
You can also promote them through blogs, newsletters, and whitepapers. You can also survey your project to get feedback and bring in more customers.
The benefits of investing in Technology CoEs are apparent, but let me cross the Ts to dot the Is. Technology CoEs can provide you with several benefits.
Resource efficiency
Exchange of technology amongst associates
Encourage your team to learn about new technologies
Best-in-class technologies used to improve the quality of products and services
Reduced implementation time reduces the cost of operation
It must be clear how a Technology CoE can act as an accelerator to bring the best technology to a particular domain to solve a problem and help the organization or customer reap the benefits of its technology investment. These are the ideal technology aspects a CoE would look for
Architects play a vital role
Product engineering is a thought process
Adequate infrastructure development
Keep an eye out for my next post, where I will be discussing how we implemented Technology CoEs in: