Why COEs Fail
Recently I’ve been involved in a number of large scale projects around centers of excellence (COEs) — whether designing and building them from scratch or helping improve COEs already in place. Elsewhere I’ve written a number of long posts about topics relating to COEs that I’ve distilled into a post on successful COEs for John Mancini’s 8 Things Page. So here, I want to do the same for unsuccessful COEs and look at the main reasons I see COEs fail—or at least struggle—in my own practice.
#1. Failure to address a real organizational need
No matter how well designed the COE, how talented its members are, or how much top-level support it has, if it doesn’t address a real organizational need it will ultimately fail. Membership in a COE is something over and above employees’ day-to-day responsibilities. If it doesn’t have a direct, significant, and tangible impact to the organization as a whole, it won’t last for long; people outside the COE will stop caring about it and people inside it will find other, more mission-critical tasks to take the place of their COE duties.
#2. Poor alignment with the aims and goals of the larger organization
Clashing with the aims and goals of the larger organization can endanger a COE’s success (or even survival). This is not to suggest that a COE has to move in lockstep with the larger organization, but it does have to operate in alignment with it, i.e., in awareness of its aims and goals and the larger political forces at play. By doing so, it can pave the way for its recommendations by framing them in light of organizational aims and goals.
#3. Lack of top down support
Even if a COE is positioned to meet a real organizational need, without some measure of top-down support, it faces an uphill battle to remain relevant and avoid becoming simply one more committee in the eyes of the wider organization. It’s possible, of course, for a COE to be relevant, respected, and do productive work with no executive-level support — but it’s much more difficult, and the kind of work the COE can accomplish is much more limited.
#4. Gaps in stakeholder representation
A COE needs to ensure involvement from three broad classes of stakeholders: IT, corporate governance, and business functions. By doing so, the COE increases the likelihood that it considers all factors relevant to the organization when doing its work. It also ensures that no single group will be 100% satisfied with the work of the COE, but no single group will be 100% dissatisfied, either. What will emerge from the proper balance of stakeholder representation is a “good enough” solution that meets 75% of the needs of all stakeholders — and in this way likely better meets the needs of the organization as a whole.
#5. Insufficient time commitment from COE members
This is an ever-present threat to a COE, even to one that has succeeded in finding a real organizational need to address, garnered top-level support, and secured a balanced set of stakeholders to participate in it. Even with all that in place, the reality is that COE membership is not usually anyone’s full-time job. Their performance metrics don’t depend on it, nor do their bonuses, commissions, or salary increases. It’s an “over and above” activity, one that may provide tremendous satisfaction to members and deliver great value to the organization, but an “over and above” activity nonetheless.
So when there’s an operational crunch, downsizing, or other circumstances that cause folks to be short of time, over and above activities like COEs are at risk, not because members don’t value them, but because they find themselves short of time.
#6. Failure to adapt to changing conditions in the larger organization or marketplace
There are many ways a COE can get out of step with the larger business context. For example, a collaboration COE built in 2007 will have been organized around an approach to collaboration and the dominant technologies for supporting it that are already shifting, both because of new technology and changes in the way people use social computing technologies. If a collaboration COE failed to take these changes into consideration, it would be hard pressed to continue to deliver value to the organization. Given this, COEs must make sure they devote a certain amount of their time and energy keeping an ear to the ground for organizational and marketplace changes that may affect them.
The final word
In the end, these are the main reasons I’ve found that COEs fail, but I’d be interested to hear about the experiences others have had in trying to stand up and maintain successful COEs, whether as consultants, COE participants, or even passive observers who’ve witnessed the success or failure of COEs from the sidelines in the course of their working lives.
