9MARCH 2021CoEBefore discussion about the RPA CoE and any RPA specific let's understand what CoE is. Gartner defines a COE as a physical or virtual center of knowledge concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value. This definition can be broken down into four key elements. These elements are: focusing on a tight scope defined around a specific capability, defining the location for CoE, optimization and leveraging resources internal to the organization and finally delivering incremental value to the organization. According to SAP, a Center of Excellence combines business and IT talents with industry best practices to drive and achieve continued value from investments in SAP technologies. It's essentially a team of highly skilled individuals and experts that is the acknowledged source of knowledge within an organization. Centers of Excellence are tasked with keeping SAP investments on course, so they continue to meet business objectives. Nevertheless, some differences in definitions of CoE exist, the following could be highlighted: A CoE is a centralized unit inside the organization which brings value by concentrating on some separate subject area and activity, provides strategic, holistic approach to manage this activity and standardizes best practices for wide-scale adoption. These activities are usually represented by implementation, management and usage of new technology or adoption, management and usage of new concept or skill. The mission of CoE in any case is to align Business and IT by provision of transparency and efficiency of implementation, innovation, operation, and quality of business processes and IT solutions.The focus areas for a Center of Excellence are the following:· Provide thought leadership, direction and governance for the subject specific initiatives· Enable continuous improvement and benefit realization culture in organization· Establish and promote best practices· Trend analysis and R&D to provide valuable recommendations· Manage the initiatives and use-cases, both as incoming flow (e.g. which comes from different organization units or vendors) and inside flow (use-cases identification and prioritization)· Define business cases and support value management approach for ongoing initiatives· Facilitate buy-in for automation projects from all relevant stakeholders and establish change management practices· Support, education and employee enablement· Optimize the organization or subject area by centralizing resources with high-demand and unique knowledge or skills and streamlining their contributions across a wide range of areas· Improve daily operations through the identification, development and support of reusable assets· Reduce delivery times, development, and maintenance costs by increasing efficiencies and leveraging reusable assets· Identify and reduce duplication of effort across initiatives within the subject area or organization-wideThere is a number of ways how Centers of Excellence can add value to organizations across all business units due to their specialized subject matter expertise and operational agility. The five major ways in which COEs provide value are below:· Support business strategy of an organization: COEs prime function is to define a single enterprise-wide approach and a roadmap of initiatives by aligning the strategic goals and IT objectives and providing a holistic approach to manage these activities· Increased efficiency in resources usage: COEs can widen the reach subject-related capabilities and streamline access to them across the organization due to centralization of scarce, high-demand capabilities like knowledge, skills and experiences· Increased delivery speed: COEs can eliminate bottlenecks by streamlining access to critical capabilities and reuse of experienced activities and assets. This increases speed of delivery, development, and maintenance of critical business processes· Optimized costs: COEs eliminate inefficient practices and decrease costs by defining business cases for activities and streamlining processes, creating reusable assets, reducing redundancy and providing value-based approach· Increased quality of services and products: COEs enable uniformity of service and product delivery, along with tight, end-to-end customer experiences due to standardization and usage of best practices across the organizationThe general role of a CoE for a subject specific area, such as automation, is based on the following pillars, which are detailed below:ConclusionAn RPA CoE has a wide range of benefits that can vastly improve a business capability. However, building an automation CoE that matches organization's goals perfectly is no easy task. Implementing the CoE throughout the organization also requires a significant effort. While establishing a COE requires time and effort, the payback can be significant. ITO
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