How to Start a Technology Center of Excellence

Before going into the topic, it is very important to understand about what can be called as “(Technology) Center of Excellence” and why do an organization need one?

Why an organization need a center of excellence for any technology?

Multiple reasons. Following are the key ones:

1. Planning to start a new technology initiative enterprise-wide or in multiple LOB based on enterprise business needs. For example, Center of Excellence for BPM, SOA, EA, Big Data etc. For instance, a large company want to adopt BPM practice. This is where COE is needed.
2. As a software service provider, one might want to start a new team who does R&D on the technology, put POCs in place, create training material, hire right set of people, setup best practices etc as part of COE initiative. The primary objective is to attract new clients.

What is a Technology Center of Excellence?

A technology center of excellence is a unit comprising of a set of people, processes, governance and technology practice in place to meet the organization requirement of adoption and widespread use of technology along with expert help wherever required. Following are some of the key activities that can be performed as part of technology COE:

1. People
   • Leadership team
   • Team building (Technology, Sales)
   • Training to technology & sales team stakeholders
2. Processes
   • Identify vision, mission & objective; propagate the same to the team
   • Budget allocation
   • Consulting, Development (Migration) & QA methodologies
   • Sales Strategy & Roadmap (for software service provider)
   • Maturity Model & assessment of initiative from time to time
3. Governance
   • Setup & promote software quality governance practices (design/code review guidelines & best practices, training, tools & framework procurement, team)
   • Sales review from time-to-time (for software service provider)
4. Technology
   • Identification of tools & frameworks
   • Procurement/installation/configuration plan
   • Developing POCs
   • Setup & promote standard guidelines & best practices
   • Setup & promote knowledge repositories around technology & functional domain concepts
   • IT Lab setup including procurement of appropriate hardware & training to IT team