The rise of the Centre of Excellence in modern businesses

If you work in tech or an organisation that is heavily reliant on tech infrastructure, you may have heard the phrase “Centre of Excellence” before.

 

Essentially a team of in-house experts, a Centre of Excellence is a group of professionals within a business with one collective vision – whether that’s streamlining processes and access to expertise, standardising best practices across a business or driving business change through technology adoption.

 

While it sounds grandiose, at its most basic level, a Centre of Excellence simply allows professionals from different disciplines within an organisation to pool resources, share insights, standardise processes and innovate.

 

The benefits of establishing a Centre of Excellence

 

The benefits of establishing a Centre of Excellence are well-documented: it can help you to achieve buy-in from your C-Suite, enable widespread adoption of new processes, allow you to pool resources more effectively, drive technology adoption, draw in higher-quality talent and candidates and help you build trust with your customers.

 

Beyond this, a Centre of Excellence can also be a boon for organisations seeking to implement cloud infrastructure. The work required to undergo digital transformation through the cloud lends itself perfectly to the Centre of Excellence model.

 

Creating a Cloud Centre of Excellence is widely considered to be one of the best ways to drive cloud-enabled digital transformation. This is primarily because a well-run Cloud Centre of Excellence will ensure your organisation has the functional team, governance and insight needed to move your business and its processes over to the cloud – and keep things running smoothly while you do!

 

Yet, despite the benefits, in the not-so-distant past, Centres of Excellence were reserved for only the most successful and profitable organisations – those that had the luxury of setting up interdepartmental teams dedicated almost entirely to innovation.

 

Many organisations would talk about them, and some would dream of establishing one, but only a select few could create a truly successful Centre of Excellence. So, what changed?

 

 

The ultimate goal for tech companies

 

Modern businesses not only face unprecedented levels of pressure from nimble start-ups and hugely fluctuating market trends, but they’re also emerging from a global pandemic – one that changed the way many organisations operate.

 

In a world where technology adoption is moving quicker than ever – and is more critical to business success than ever before – it follows that the Centre of Excellence model has exploded in popularity, if only due to the innovation it is known to engender.

 

Research shows that most business leaders today are extremely concerned about their organisation’s level of innovation. One survey even highlighted how a staggering 44 percent of CEOs feel the speed of technical knowledge change within their organisation is simply insufficient.

 

And of course, with many organisations going fully remote due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the proven track record that the Centre of Excellence model has in enabling effective digital transformation, it’s unlikely that we’ll see adoption rates slow down anytime soon.

 

However, Centre of Excellences can’t work without having the right talent in place – and we’re in the middle of the biggest digital skills gap the tech industry has seen. There’s a significant demand for mid-level and senior cloud professionals to take the reins on digital transformation projects, and that’s exactly the kind of people you need in your Centre of Excellence.

 

It’s up to schools, colleges, cloud vendors and companies such as Revolent to create net new talent and help bridge the digital skills gap.

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In need of cloud talent to help build out your Centre of Excellence, or want to learn more about establishing one? Visit revolentgroup.com to see how Revolent can help

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by Nabila Salem, President, Revolent