Digital Automation in a Challenging Market
The current disruption in the market has raised immediate issues and shifted priorities for organizations across the globe. Many businesses are focusing on ways to reduce expenses and gain efficiencies through the automation of processes and reporting to underpin decision making.
In order to minimize a siloed implementation of this valuable digital automation and improve an organizations ROI on its overall digital tools investment, it is important to agree on how the organization wants to manage the digital technologies selection and implementation to ensure they are meeting the organization’s goals.
By creating a strong Digital Center of Excellence (COE) model, firms can ensure standardization, prioritize the right opportunities and confirm each company initiative aligns with the company’s strategy. Technologies deployed across the enterprise without a proper management framework are ineffective and more than likely costly and counterproductive to the organization’s goals. In a recent survey, only 18% of organizations have set up a dedicated COE model for digital transformation; however, 88% of these same organizations said that a digital COE is necessary and effective in delivering business value.
What is Digital Center of Excellence?
A Digital COE is a framework that provides leadership, best practices, governance, and collaboration to drive business valued results through technology implementation. This framework includes the governance around the people, processes and technology necessary to maximize the benefits of automation across a division or an entire organization. A Digital Center of Excellence can allow an organization to achieve economies of scale across the organization and ensure alignment with corporate goals.
What are the Roles and Responsibilities of a COE?
It is recommended that the Digital COE team have an executive sponsor, an IT representative, and key employees from the different line-of-business/functional areas. It is important for the sponsorship of the Digital COE to be at an executive level to ensure that the implementation of digital initiatives align with the overall corporate objectives and for the COE to have the appropriate authority to affect the change it is driving. The responsibilities of the COE include:
Develops and executes the organization’s digital goals in alignment with the corporate strategy.
Creates an automation strategy and defines how automation opportunities are identified and prioritized.
Establishes a governance structure that provides the guidelines, processes and templates for the assessment, design, development, deployment and management of digital technologies. The governance structure should provide strategies for mitigating risk while promoting innovation to gain efficiencies.
Sets measures for tracking execution efficiency and measurement of outcomes.
Both tangible and intangible results should be measured to provide executives with a comprehensive view of the investment.
Creates business cases and selects the processes for automation
Evaluates and selects the best automation tools for the organization
Outlines Stakeholder Communication and Management Plans
Establishes the training and deployment plan
Leads change management efforts to assist with adoption across the organization