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Can you drive IT delivery efficiency across your company without a COE? What is a COE? Emily Bell-Wootten tries to tackle this subject in her latest blog.
My clients come to me with a wide range of business needs, but if they could wave a magic wand, most would immediately conjure up charters of: reduced costs, improved quality, reduced staff and increased customer satisfaction. But since magic wands don’t exist, what’s the next best thing? Establishing a Center of Excellence (COE) in Innovation, Delivery of Design and Technology Solutions.
While each one of these charters (business goals) listed above will have a different discovery and team to solve the problem, establishing a COE and following an Innovation and Delivery framework will help you work through each project with little business interruption.
Take note: Establishing a Center of Excellence (COE) in Innovation, Design or Delivery is not easy. Its creation requires an innovation focused organization that can be flexible and adaptive in every part of it. What I typically find in businesses, are siloed departments, that guard their processes closely. To achieve automation across your organization, you must remove those silos in favor of collaboration, communication, shared data and processes. So, really, a COE is a process improvement initiative across an organization.
What can you gain from a COE?
Centralized Expertise
Maintaining skill sets
Strategic Innovation
In the effort to increase the value of your ideas, I would start with an Innovation Council that focuses on current industry trends and new ideas at the top and then trickles down ideas to the Delivery/Automation teams. What does this look like? The graphic below shows the highlights:
Ultimately, the goal is to help you create an insights driven business, where all development is Customer Focused, Agile, and Innovative.
During my career I have had the privilege of creating COE’s, in various forms, for several clients. However, one great example was for one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., where I consulted on marketing and IT projects. In 2017, they were seeking to break down their departmental silos and consolidate the use of technology and processes across all hospitals and business units. They were also looking for Innovation to drive new projects. The COE started by meeting quarterly to discuss innovations in the market, concerning the project at hand. Next, our team stepped in to manage their software vendors, research and create a strategy for technology retirement and consolidation, and finally, created a delivery COE to implement our strategy. The future result will be the migration of over 50 hospital websites onto 1 ECM platform, the consolidation of marketing software and digital images across brands, and a net new development strategy for the next 5 years to reduce business interruption. Though this COE is focused on delivery excellence and communication between IT and Marketing, this same framework can work across your organization.
If you feel your organization could use a fresh infusion of ideas or just better delivery processes, drop me a line. @ekbell ebelldallas@gmail.com
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Emily Bell-Wootten is a Marketing and Technology Executive, lending her talents as a Director to NTT DATA and Dell Services, and is the Founder and CEO of After Interactive LLC, a digital marketing and social media solutions agency. With over 17 years of experience, Emily specializes in growth strategy through Innovative Technology, Digital Customer Engagement, Digital Marketing, Enterprise Content Management and Social Media, and has worked with clients across industries. @ekbellLinkedIn
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