Centre 4 Enablement vs Centre of Excellence
What is the difference
The concept of a Centre of Excellence originated back in the 1990’s in the field of manufacturing. The basic idea was to establish dedicated facilities and teams of experts to develop methods and processes aimed at developing new products. These centres then had the responsibility of training employees in these new methods and processes and sharing their expertise with the rest of the company.
When the IT Industry picked up this concept it was normally implemented as a centralised model within the IT department with the aim of providing advice on architecture, development, security, implementation and support services amongst other subjects, on a project by project basis and developing patterns and processes that would be used as common architecture assets across these projects. The Centre of Excellence was staffed by those people seen to be the experts in their given area.
So, to summarise a Centre of Excellence is normally seen as a centralised group of experts who provide their services in either engagement to projects or the provision of assets to the organisation and normally to IT projects within that organisation. In order to provide a Centre of Excellence an organisation has to “gather” its experts either full time or part time into either a physical or virtual team
For this reason, and the limited ability to service customers by way of time or the development of new assets, the use of a Centre of Excellence would often lead to the creation of bottlenecks within the organisation. When bottlenecks occurred and where project timescales became compromised the IT Projects that could not tolerate the bottleneck would find ways to work around the Centre of Excellence or develop their own, often not standard solutions, and therefore defeat its original purpose for which the Centre of Excellence was founded.
And so we come to the Centre 4 Enablement.
Now, as I have described previously, the Centre 4 Enablement can be implemented as a Core team of people, a federated group of people or a hybrid virtual team. In an organisational sense the Centre of Excellence and the Centre 4 Enablement can look very similar. However, whereas the Centre of Excellence will have a centrally focussed mindset the Centre 4 Enablement should have a federated organisational mindset which serves as a foundation to an operating model that focuses on securing and managing reusable assets which can be discovered by all IT and Business focussed projects across the organisation. So, in the Centre 4 Enablement, while there may be experts involved in the provision of foundational and reusable assets, the promotion to the wider organisation is through mechanisms that can ‘serve’ these assets to the rest of the company rather than relying on individual experts to engage with projects on a one-to-one basis to impart their knowledge or advise on the use of the assets they have produced.
In summary then the Centre 4 Enablement is a federated organisational entity with an approach to provide their expertise and assets through a self-service model for other IT and Business projects to consume. Of course, there may be some engagement with projects especially in the areas of consultancy and governance but this is generally on a much lighter touch basis and the main drive is to promote self-service and agility in the IT and business organisation.
At this point its important to point out that the functions of both a Centre of Excellence and the Centre 4 Enablement can be known by many different names in any organisation and therefore it is vital that you examine what a group does and how they do it before deciding if an entity is actually performing the role of a Centre of Excellence or a Centre 4 Enablement. While the term Centre of Excellence has been around for quite some time there may be a trend now to refer to a Centre 4 Enablement just because it sounds more relevant in today’s organisational environment. Be aware that some Centres of Excellence may be hiding under the description of a Centre 4 Enablement!
Terms and names of business groups are not what is important to archiving excellence, innovation and agility in business, it is the products and assets and their provision to the business in a timely and secure manner which will enable the business to achieve business goals and savings in development times and costs which they never thought possible in the past. In order to do this you need to enrol expertise from across the business as it should always be remembered that the experts in an organisation do not all reside in the IT department.
As I described above one of the big difference between a Centre of Excellence and a Centre 4 Enablement is the delivery model that is used by each. For a Centre of Excellence the delivery model is normally focussed within the IT department and is focussed on Project delivery. By its very nature a Centre of Excellence is staffed by those people seen to be experts in their fields and therefore will inevitably become bottlenecks to any projects wishing to use their services to develop new collateral.
Looking at the Centre 4 Enablement the focus becomes building assets and capabilities that projects can consume themselves on a self-service basis in the timeframe they require. OK there may be some questions but the involvement of the Centre 4 Enablement staff at a project level but this is much reduced. They don’t become a bottleneck.
From a governance point of view the Centre of Excellence can be a place where access to key IT systems and data can be seen to be strict and limited. The Centre of Excellence may wish to control, sometimes for good reason, when and how, data is accessed by projects.
On the other hand, the Centre 4 Enablement, certainly in a MuleSoft implementation will have tackled access to system and data through the governance processes that have been build and delivered through foundational API’s and API Fragments. Access to data by customers and projects will still be through Self Service but with relatively light touch but important governance and will require authorisation through the use of API Contracts.
From an output perspective the Centre of Excellence is normally staffed by the organisation experts that build, own and manage patterns, architectures, best practices, security and access control models while in a Centre 4 Enablement these assets can be gathered from across the business, validated by the Centre f4 Enablement and then offered for use by the entire organisation. In this way excellence is federated for the benefit of all.
So I think we can see a pattern emerging here in the difference between a Centre of Excellence and a Centre 4 Enablement and at its core it revolves around, a centralised versus federated self service delivery mindset. The Centre 4 Enablement is focused on providing reusable, composable assets which can be used to build innovative, agile and cost saving solutions using building blocks of assets, primarily connectors, API fragments and API’s whilst the Centre of Excellent is targeted at providing best practice consultancy and assets of excellence which may or may not be reusable.
In a Centre of Excellence the mindset is focussed centrally, leveraging experts in a central role to build, deliver and maintain the organisations IT assets, in all forms, for the benefit of the organisation. As I said previously with a Centre of Excellence unfortunately demand often outstrips supply and therefore the attempt to reach excellence is often bypassed by project timescales and the expectation of the business for delivery to meet business demands. This can lead to a spiral of lack of excellence and the promotion of technical debt.
On the other hand the Centre 4 Enablement has a mindset that seeks excellence across the business in a decentralised and federated model and seeks experts that may sit centrally within the organisation or in the lines of business where business expertise can make the difference in delivering assets of excellent quality.
Don’t get me wrong, a Centre of Enablement will still be staffed by experts but experts with a different mindset. Yes, some foundational assets will be produced by the Centre 4 Enablement and they will be responsible for governance in order to protect the security and efficiency of the production environment. But in a MuleSoft implementation it will be the contents of the production environment, the API’s, fragments and connectors that will have been assembled that will provide the excellence sought by the Centre of Excellence just in a federated manner.
So finally, I would just like to come back to one of the key aspects of the Centre 4 Enablement and that is evangelisation. I have said many times, and this does apply to a limited extent for the Centre of Excellence as well, there is no point in producing or assembling assets of whatever type if no one knows about them and how to use them. Evangelisation across all part of the business is key to driving success of the business and delivering the innovation that all businesses seek.
So, while evangelisation is a fundamental issue its worth remembering that it is will be a key role within a Centre 4 Enablement while it can become another time consuming challenge for a Centre of Excellence.
I just want to finish by stating that both Centre of Excellence and the Centre 4 Enablement have their roles and both can be critical within an organisation but you now should have the tools to identify how these are operating in your business. A Centre of Excellence could operate alongside a Centre 4 Enablement if the roles and groups are fully understood but I think this would be a highly unusual structure which would have to have well understood boundaries and responsibilities and as a last point it’s important to state that a Centre 4 Enablement is not just a MuleSoft concept. The structure and importantly the mindset of an enabling team can apply in almost any organisation.
