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The Future is (Almost) Now… Is Your CoE Ready?

As I look forward into 2019, and reflect on 2018, I see ‘the future’ rapidly becoming the ‘the now.’ From the increasing number of things I can do on my smartphone, to the ability of using a website—and the process automation behind it—to accomplish what I used to need to talk to a person for, to Robotic Process Automation (RPA), I feel the increasing pace of evolution. Yes, all these things were in place in 2017, and some even before. However, with technologies like RPA reaching a tipping point, and with Digital Transformation becoming such a large focus for many organizations, the tempo of change and the focus on new and more holistic approaches has certainly picked up.

In the APQC’s Process Management Paradigm Shift article, they point out several shifts in the Process Excellence / Business Process Management world.  Front and center is the focus on Digital Business Transformation initiatives, which promise to improve the customer experience through automation, better data management, and better focus on the customer. Crucial here is process excellence and automation, which requires standardization, and a holistic focus to avoid sub-optimization. Ever-increasing customer centricity is also key to this with Customer Journey Mapping. An ability to assess when to implement Robotic Process Automation is becoming increasingly important for standardized and stable processes. However, accomplishing business transformation, and particularly automation, also means tighter integration between process excellence and IT/automation efforts, and establishing a collaborative culture for managing process change throughout the organization.

At the epicenter of this push to the future is the Center of Excellence (CoE).  A CoE has the opportunity to not only help execute process excellence efforts more efficiently, it can also collaboratively focus the organization on the holistic transformation necessary to meet key strategic objectives. That’s a tall order; particularly given the challenges common to CoEs:

  • Lacking C-level management sponsorship
  • Being too narrowly focused on one methodology or toolset
  • Separate CoEs for Process Excellence and Automation (that don’t coordinate)
  • Not having the business ‘bought in’
  • Disconnected from enterprise risk/control efforts
  • Not guiding or enforcing the governance of content
  • Etc.

Does your CoE have a clear maturity model to assess efforts against? Does your CoE have the correct people, processes, and technology in place—and proper support for them—to accomplish its goals?

iGrafx is the backbone of the CoE, and our software powers many of the largest Centers of Excellence in the world.  iGrafx Professional Services can help with an assessment, with getting better use out of iGrafx, and with initial application of iGrafx technology to the efforts of your CoE. Our goal is to help your CoE be even more ready for the future… now.

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