- You may have heard of the concept
of a Center of Excellence, or COE, before.
It's an in-house entity that provides capabilities
for a specific area of focus.
And now, many businesses are applying the concept
to RPA so they can create standards
and scale their transformation efforts.
Leveraging a COE is how many businesses aim
to squeeze the most value out of their RPA initiatives.
As I hope I've impressed upon you,
getting an RPA program right can be a complex initiative
that requires careful planning and research.
But if you're able to get a capable COE up and running,
it can help you achieve success and can provide advantages,
like economies of scales, reusable components,
and the power of group purchasing
for automation products and services.
As you can see, having an internal capability
can be a useful launching point
for large-scale development and support.
The COE topic is a rich and detailed one,
but for this course, I just want to touch on the highlights.
The functions in a COE are centered around the needs
of the business, so their focus areas can vary.
For example, one organization might use their COE
for demand generation, in which the aim is
to educate other business units on RPA
and how it can be applied.
Another organization might want to be self-reliant
in RPA development as it scales up
its digital transformation efforts.
In this case, they would use a COE
for internal training and solution design.
For many large enterprises, every RPA solution is handed off
to a COE for continual maintenance, administration,
and risk management, making upkeep as efficient as possible.
Of course, if your organization is an overachiever,
you could feasibly build a COE
that does all of these functions.
But no matter what capability you decide to focus on,
a COE brings scalability and reusability to the equation.
To coordinate all these functions,
governance is a key factor that must be carefully planned.
For example, you'll have to decide
on an organizational structure for your COE.
In my experience, COEs tend to be
either centralized or federated.
Centralized models, which are the most common,
concentrate the RPA capability
at one point in the organization,
which means that all business functions defer
to the COE for support and resources.
Federated models are also quite common.
This is when a central COE provides the framework
for different business divisions to build their own COEs,
rather than having one COE for the whole organization.
This is helpful for more complex organizations,
where business units are more distinct
in culture and processes.
There are also, in my experience,
less common models like divisional COEs,
but I'll save those for another course.
You'll also have to consider the point of control.
Do you want your COE to be owned and governed
by a business or IT, or maybe a mix of both?
This will influence the degree
of control over development standards,
change management, and IT requirements.
Let me emphasize that there isn't really a clear,
winning combination of the considerations I described.
And in a sense, they aren't even the
most important part of planning a COE.
The truth is that a COE won't work well
unless it matches the DNA of your organization.
It takes a good understanding
of your own organizational structure to know
which COE model will be the best fit.
For that reason, when helping enterprises think
through their COE strategy, my first question
to any firm is, tell me about the last successful COE
your organization stood up?
If you can answer the question, that's great.
You're equipped to champion, fund,
measure, and enable this capability.
If you've struggled to establish COEs in the past,
chances are good that now isn't the time
you're gonna crack this nut, be honest
about your organizational DNA.
In this case, instead of developing
your own Center of Excellence, you might choose
to leverage a managed Center of Excellence,
in which a third party runs those services for you.
The benefits are that a managed COE provides
a cost certainty for the project
while ensuring a high standard of service quality.
In addition, businesses are able to leverage the expertise
of the firm they're working with,
especially if the firm is a specialist in RPA.
So if that fits the bill of your organizational DNA better
than internally built COEs, then it might
just be the most logical option.
Either way, if you're keen on developing a COE,
I encourage you to ask around
and learn from others' successes and failures.
A COE is a complicated initiative,
but when carried out thoughtfully, it can be very rewarding.