Creating a Center of Excellence to Accelerate Digital Transformation

A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a centralized team in your organization that manages your implementation roadmap, support model and enablement strategy.

When implementing new technology tools, it’s important to ensure your organization's digitization goals are met with the right resources, the right strategy and the right support. Communication and efficiency are key. As more departments complete implementations, it’s time to start thinking about creating efficiencies and moving toward a centralized Center of Excellence.

Center of Excellence framework

We’ve found that creating a CoE can help bridge gaps and ensure meaningful implementation across an ever-evolving organization. A CoE is a group of internal experts, mostly managed by IT (but with strong business-user support), dedicated to establishing standards and driving the enterprise-wide success of a specific technology. 

As multiple use cases go live, the adoption process can become disjointed and disorganized. While there isn’t a specific order your organization needs to go in to create a successful CoE, we recommend starting with governance. 

We recommend a five fundamental pillar model for CoE design to ensure maximum effectiveness and alignment:

1. Governance

A solid governance model is vital to the success of a CoE. The role of governance is to organize operational, financial, risk management and reporting processes to help teams remain in alignment. The CoE’s governing body is also responsible for creating the framework that keeps the other four pillars in sync with the organization's digitization goals while providing structured and consistent decision-making.

2. Resource allocation

Meet staffing needs and adoption goals with the right resources at the right time by selecting your admins and power users first. Having dedicated personnel guarantees that each branch of your CoE is suitably staffed and prepared to train, support, communicate effectively, and partner with the business.

3. Communication plan

Information gaps between teams across organizations are quite prevalent. Closing these gaps with a well thought out communication strategy is crucial to your CoE’s success and validity. Your communication plan should be simple and effective. 

4. Enablement strategy

Creating an effective and all-encompassing enablement strategy is critical to the success of your implementation and  adoption. This component of your CoE trains users and admins on the new solution and ensures they know how to utilize the solutions in their daily business processes. 

5. Support framework

To ensure your deployment’s long-term success, a support framework that can aid your users, provides success metrics to CoE leadership and validates new product releases is critical to success. Building a support model blueprint and establishing the team should occur parallel to the implementation itself. Successful support frameworks reduce barriers to adoption and guarantee long term user confidence and enablement.

Get Started with your CoE

For tips and best practices on building a CoE from our Customer Success team, check out our Center of Excellence hub on the Docusign Knowledge Market. We outline the steps to success and dive even further into each of the five CoE pillars.