Enterprise Automation Excellence 5 February 2025 22 MIN

Building a Modern Automation Centre of Excellence

Successful automation teams must balance structure with flexibility to scale effectively. This episode examines how a Centre of Excellence can drive consistency without slowing innovation.

This podcast episode discusses the role and evolution of Automation Centers of Excellence (CoE) in enterprises. The hosts, Dan Twing and Tom O'Rourke, explore how CoEs have become critical organizational structures for managing automation initiatives, discussing how CoEs serve as knowledge-sharing hubs, bridge gaps between technical teams and citizen developers, and help standardize automation practices.

Key Points

  • CoEs are an organizational pattern found in large enterprises to coordinate important cross-group initiatives by streamlining the sharing of technical and organizational knowledge
  • The majority of automation organizations have either formal or informal CoEs
  • CoEs' roles vary from controlling all automation changes to consultative support of citizen developers
  • Automation CoEs are expanding, with 84% reporting moderate to significant growth
  • Automation CoEs can become a bottleneck if they are under-resourced or their work is deprioritized 
  • CoEs can provide essential governance and risk management function, assisting citizen developers in complying with business policies and technology standards
  • Looking beyond automation, CoEs will be crucial for integrating new technologies like AI with existing systems

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