Today’s enterprise has to navigate volatile market conditions,
economic uncertainty, and constant competitive pressure from more
nimble startups. To survive and thrive, organizations must be
hyper-focused on driving long-term value by innovating and adapting to
changing conditions faster than their competitors.
Yet many organizations struggle with rapid innovation. KPMG found that
57% of CEOs are concerned that their organizations don’t have
innovative processes to respond to rapid disruption. A recent PwC
survey found that 44% of CEOs felt their speed of technological change
was insufficient and 32% did not possess the key skills required to
support the desired rate of innovation.
One of the reasons organizations are unable to rapidly innovate is because they lack fast access to expertise. Centers of Excellence (COE) were designed to centralize and build scarce, high-demand capabilities and then disseminate that expertise throughout the organization for faster execution. For functions like IT and operations, centers of excellence already have a strong track record of honing best practices for wide-scale adoption across geographies and business units. Gartner explains the importance of creating a COE is to “concentrate existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.” These centers—whether virtual or physical—combine learning, research, and publishing in a specific area and spread that knowledge across the organization.
Develop deep theoretical, operational, and procedural knowledge
Provide thought leadership and direction
Develop, standardize, and disseminate best practices for widespread adoption
Conduct research and develop new innovations
Make recommendations for process or performance improvements
Analysts agree that COEs work. Gartner highlighted that 95% of organizations that establish a cloud center of excellence will deliver quantifiable transformational success through 2022. McKinsey cited that 60% of top-performing companies in advanced analytics have a COE to support their efforts.
Organizations are using COE for everything from supply chain and quality assurance to business analytics and AI. One area that is attracting increasing interest and investment is the need to establish a marketing and insights COE. A dedicated marketing and insights COE signals that the entire organization is committed to improving the customer journey and sales experience and is aligned on using innovation to reach its priorities and goals. COE allows scarce insight resources to extend their value by providing unbiased research, recommendations, and lessons learned to the boarder organization.
A COE allows for the development, testing, deployment, discovery, and measurement of marketing activities and performance. You can create repeatable frameworks to use across the organization, increasing consistency and predictability of results.
The COE can be a laboratory for success, allowing the organization to innovate fast and fail fast—and then use these learnings to improve performance.
A centralized COE makes it easier to monitor, track, and control development costs.
Gartner estimates that marketing organizations utilize only 58% of their martech stack’s full breadth of capabilities, which leaves a lot of potential value yet to be realized. Adoption of COE best practices and recommendations have a substantially shorter learning and acceptance curve, generating faster ROI benefits than traditional models.
Could your organization use a marketing and insight COE to leverage scarce resources, build thought leadership, and improve the marketing and sales function? OPPiDEA is uniquely positioned to help identify and build the skills and capabilities you need to establish an insight COE.
