Accelerate Digital Transformation with a Center of Excellence
Communication and efficiency are key to implementing new technologies. As more departments complete implementation and multiple use cases go live, adoption can become disjointed and disorganized, leading to communication gaps and siloed workflows. We’ve found that creating a Center of Excellence can help bridge gaps and ensure meaningful implementation across an ever-evolving organization.
A Center of Excellence (COE) is a centralized team within your organization that manages your implementation roadmap, support model, enablement strategy and shares best practices and training based on their knowledge from previous implementations. This is a group of internal experts, mostly managed by IT (but with strong business-user support), dedicated to establishing standards and driving the enterprise-wide success of a specific technology.
We use a five fundamental pillar model for COE design to ensure maximum effectiveness and alignment:
1. Governance
A solid governance model is vital to the success of a COE. The role of governance is to organize operational, financial, risk management and reporting processes to help teams remain in alignment. The COE’s governing body is also responsible for creating the framework that keeps the other four pillars in sync with the organization's digitization goals while providing structured and consistent decision-making.
2. Resource allocation
Meet staffing needs and adoption goals with the right resources at the right time by selecting your admins and power users first. Having dedicated personnel guarantees that each branch of your COE is suitably staffed and prepared to train, support, communicate effectively, and partner with the business.
3. Communication plan
Organizations often find information gaps between teams quite prevalent. Closing these gaps with a well thought out communication strategy is crucial to your COE’s success and validity. We've simplified our favorite communication techniques and strategies to make your communication plan simple and effective.
4. Enablement strategy
Creating an effective and all-encompassing enablement strategy is critical to the success of your DocuSign Agreement Cloud adoption. This component of your COE trains users and admins on your Agreement Cloud solution and ensures they know how to utilize the solutions in their daily business processes.
5. Support framework
The support team owns assisting your users, providing success metrics to COE leadership and validating new DocuSign product releases. Successful support frameworks reduce barriers to adoption and guarantee long term user confidence and enablement. This also ensures your users are getting ongoing help from the right sources.
Get Started
For tips and best practices on building a COE straight from our Professional Services team, check out our on-demand webinar, “Do More with DocuSign: Center of Excellence.” In the webinar, our Customer Success team shows you how other organizations have successfully implemented a COE.
If you are already a DocuSign customer, we have some additional resources on implementing a COE. Just log in to the DocuSign Knowledge Market and head to our Center of Excellence hub to dive even further into each of our five COE pillars.