How Centers of Excellence Drive Automation and Process Orchestration
This is part 1 of the articles series on Automation and Process Orchestration methodologies.
Organizations that have implemented an end-to-end process orchestration layer will be in a very strong position to gradually adopt AI to transform their business, simply by integrating it as process endpoints. Accordingly, process automation and AI adoption form a natural liaison that organizations should leverage to keep building competitive advantages.
However, as process automation continues to gain momentum across industries, organizations are struggling to manage the many automation initiatives they’re taking on. Projects get developed but end up siloed and disconnected from each other. In the worst case, stakeholders don’t share information, while there’s no end-to-end vision and little coordination between teams.
To solve these issues, many organizations are adopting a Center of Excellence (CoE) approach for automation and process orchestration. Our survey show that 76% of organizations either already have a CoE in place, or are actively working on it. These CoEs establish a process mindset for automation, connect business and IT on automation best practices, and serve as a catalyst to accelerate time to value.
Better alignment between business and IT leadership is an important benefit a CoE approach delivers. In our recent State of Process Automation surveys, 26% of respondents identify lack of alignment as a key reason for not extending automation initiatives in the first place. Another 64% say automation initiatives cannot keep pace with the rate of change in today’s organizations. This calls for a more coordinated approach.
But, what is the exact approach organizations should follow?
There are two schools of thought.
A traditional (maybe even old school) CoE model embraces a centralized, top-down way of managing automation and process orchestration projects. Guided by common processes, rules, and tooling, a rigid CoE team typically implements automation projects on behalf of the entire business. Now, a second, more decentralized and federated model is gaining acceptance – and rightly so. Creating a federated CoE provides enablement and empowers autonomous delivery teams to implement and operate their own automation and process orchestration projects while maintaining consistency and leveraging best practices. Allowing for better organizational scale, this approach is in line with the agile software development paradigms that have taken the industry by storm in the last decade.
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Whichever model an organization chooses, an automation CoE should train its focus on a few specific areas.
Delivery
If organizations want to transform their business through automation, they need to continuously deliver successful automation initiatives. For that, the CoE might help the business evaluate the automation pipeline or coordinate with external partners to staff projects. Beyond that, the CoE could consult with project teams on initial setup, provide constructive feedback on specific milestones, or help to evaluate KPIs for continuous improvement.
Once initiatives or projects are planned, a CoE could step in and help with execution. This would involve evaluating, selecting, and providing technologies in the hyperautomation tech stack, setting up the IT environment for success, and consulting on the right process modeling and implementation logic.
Enablement and knowledge-sharing
Enablement includes defining the relevant skill sets in your organization, finding gaps and building automation skills, and creating and maintaining best practices. Examples could include setting up an internal wiki or documentation, establishing a training curriculum, running hands-on sessions to contextualize training and empowering developers via self-service initiatives to provide the right tools for scaling process orchestration.
Evangelism
One of the CoE’s most important roles is communication – both inside and outside the organization. The CoE needs to spread the word about the vision for process orchestration and automation (via blogs, events, newsletters and speaking engagements), establish authority and trust with business stakeholders, and build a community of practice for automation to share knowledge internally.
Governance
To accelerate automation initiatives, CoEs can provide well-proven architecture patterns, so that not every delivery team needs to reinvent the wheel. This should include initiatives to establish standardization around architecture guidelines, meet compliance regulations, create project templates, and provide guardrails for developers on automation projects. Some CoEs even provide a centralized automation platform upon which teams can implement their own processes. However, the governance is set up, it should never be seen as an impediment by the teams, but more as a valuable offering that helps them to improve time to value. The degree of standardization is thereby heavily influenced by your company culture and IT architecture.
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A Real World CoE in Action
National Bank of Canada, the sixth-largest bank in Canada, created an automation-focused CoE with three goals in mind. First, it wanted to build up in-house process expertise. It did so by setting up training and contextualizing that knowledge within concrete projects. Second, National Bank of Canada aimed to align IT, ops, and business stakeholders. It accomplished this by bringing stakeholders together in one-hour weekly meetings to discuss process automation best practices. Lastly, the bank needed to establish governance. This was achieved by pushing for standardization and re-usability.
The CoE now reduces wasted work and provides support for kickstarting projects. The team has 27 completed projects, with four to five in active development. The community has grown to 40 meetings and counting with more than 100 participants. And time to start new projects has shortened from weeks down to just days.
Conclusion
Automating and orchestrating processes can be challenging. To succeed, organizations can’t rely on siloed teams to carry out isolated initiatives. Processes need to be coordinated and aligned – both through technology and through organizational practices. Creating an automation Center of Excellence can help drive organizational initiatives forward to optimal capacity by sharing knowledge, bringing people together, providing the right tools and improving time to value.
In our part 2 of this two-part byline series, we will discuss how organizations can get started with a Center of Excellence focused on process automation and orchestration.
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