This article provides a perspective on CoE from the relevance of IT Industry and business which is ideally seen in today's competitive world

What is CoE?

In today's world, the Centre of Excellence (CoE) applies to any organization who wants to create and use excellent state of art and showcase its technological, service and business oriented capabilities to the entire world in a competitive environment. CoE is the combined effect of emerging business model and technologies.

Centre of Excellence (CoE) refers to creation of assets for an organization and reaping maximum business benefits from the usage of such assets. The objective of creating CoE for any organization is always customer centric and is meant for providing unique solutions to their customers.

The Centers of Excellence (CoE) trend very recently has gained traction within the IT department of large organizations. In fact, the META Group refers to the model as "the next step in IT evolution" (Source: The Application Center of Excellence, META Group, 2003).

IT organizations of all types and dimensions are embracing the CoE model as a practical way of consistent and continuous ally improvement of their business operations. Industry analysts also support the move to the CoE model.

A CoE is an organization, focused on optimizing application or service characteristics such as quality, performance, or availability. It provides management an automation platform for processes, consulting, and support services, leadership as well as advocacy to optimize these attributes.

In IT world, CoE acts as a central point of contact to facilitate collaboration between the lines of business, enterprise architects, database administrators and application developers. It helps in speed adoption, improve knowledge sharing, lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TOC), and broaden the reach and context of enterprise application deployment, migrations, consolidations and upgrades.

CoE Brings together a dedicated team of appropriate domain expertise and enables the organizations to identify core patterns of integration, share best practices, leverage skills and standard tools across the enterprise.

A CoE provides a central source of standardized products & services with expertise, and best practices. It can also provide the entire organization with visibility into quality and performance parameters of the delivered application and support functions, helping them to keep everyone informed and keeping the applications and services aligned with business objectives.

The strategy and roadmap for CoE are required to launch and sustain the business needs. Without a COE, you will lack the necessary ecosystem and opportunity to optimize resources, funding, competencies, and governance structure, hence the ideology of the CoE should be in synchronization with the philosophy of the organization business imperative.

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About the Author

The author is Principal Consultant in Quality Consulting Group (QPRIME) of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. He has over 24 years of experience in IT and Mfg organizations. His expertise lies in process consulting and project/program management, outsourcing, knowledge management, competency building, strategic initiatives and Quality Function Management.