CoE vs CoEn
You may have seen Mark Smith’s recent posts on LinkedIn about the difference between a Centre of Excellence (CoE) and Centre of Enablement (CoEn)? (If you haven’t then check out Mark and his posts! He’s a true superstar! - Here’s a LINK to the post I’m thinking of.)
Reading this resonated with how I’ve been thinking and talking about this topic. It’s often thought that the Centre of Excellence is not only responsible for configuring the platform, setting governance, running platform operations, measuring performance, managing licenses etc. but also responsible for enagaging with makers and leaders, building a community, educating people etc.
Image : Having a Vision and Strategy that brings together CoE and CoEn releases Business Value and Business Opportunities
The CoE team provide us with the safe, strong, scalable foundations to provide the platform for use. They give us the framework which can be developed in, and a roadmap to unlock future features and capabilities - They’re the enabler.
The CoEn team take the platform into the business and show them how to use it, what sort of things it can be used for, how to solve problems with it, and celebrate their success with them and tell the world - They unlock some of the business value
We also have the option of whether in our team we provide a development service to rapidly work through a backlog of opportunities to produce robust, well architected, solutions, which are maintained and supported and the value tracked - They are the team who realise the solution value
Whilst they can be the same group of people these two sets of activities generally require different skill sets and may have different goals or ways of measuring success and so are often a blended team which can be either a formal team, or a virtual team from across different areas.
The CoE, we can think of as being primarily a Technical set of skills, and the CoEn being more of a Change Management set of skills. The best outcome is having these two elements highly integrated and connected which may potentially be looking at the team through a ‘Product Management’ set of eyes to equip the team with all the skills required to deliver the biggest value to an organisation.
Image : Typical capabilities in the CoE and CoEn parts of our model
The best examples I’ve seen of these have been where the Platform Owner and Adoption Lead are working hand in hand. We can then have a situation where the Platform roadmap has a strong feed into it’s prioritisation through what business areas and business makers are requiring to deliver the most value, and the Business adoption can give insights into value being enabled by the platform, and gain insights from data and telemetry from the platform team. It’s a win win relationship whether these groups are formally part of the same team, or the CoEn is run from the business, or multiple business areas.
Business ownership / leadership may be something that grows with maturity of adoption. Something for us to talk about in a later post!
As always I’d love to hear your thoughts, insights, comments, ideas - so please let me know!
