Few organizations, less than 20% according to a recent study by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, are able to execute successfully on their business strategy1. Implementing the right business improvements is nearly impossible when you have no clear understanding of how your business’ strategy, processes, people and content are interconnected. Many of today’s successful organizations have deployed a powerful process center of excellence (COE) to unite business and IT and help drive innovation to transform their businesses. Organizations with a COE are able to successfully execute improvements and handle unexpected challenges and change for a distinct competitive advantage.
When trying to improve or build a COE, make sure you have these six key strategies for success:
- Define and understand your vision and goals
Translating your basic business needs into a well articulated strategy can be daunting. By articulating your business vision and goals upfront you are better able to prioritize and manage your issues and connect them to your overall business strategy.
- Collaborate with IT and business users
To harness the full power of a COE, you must bring together both business and IT. It is critical that these two groups share their knowledge and experience and work together to analyze, map and build new, more effective processes. Both groups must understand the value the other brings to the table and how they can work together to improve the overall business.
- Understand your organization’s strengths, weaknesses and needs
Every organization has its process issues. A strong analysis tool can help you understand exactly how your organization’s systems, people and processes interact – giving you deeper insight into which processes are successful and which processes need work.
- Build a best practices repository
With careful consideration, a best practices repository is one of the best ways to tackle big business challenges. Your team must begin to analyze and understand both your structured and unstructured processes and how you can improve them to drive business growth.
- Leverage software tools to see lifecycle of process
A great COE will help your organization embrace and manage process improvement. Powerful software solutions can help you model and analyze your goals and business strategy, enabling you to better understand where you are and where you want to go. Business analysis tools allow you to model and simulate more of the operational aspects of your enterprise – helping you better understand how your strategy, processes, people and content are interrelated. A business process management tool can help you automate and monitor your human-centric and systems-based processes.
- Focus on process improvement
Today’s business world is ever-changing and it is critical that you are always analyzing and improving your business processes. By always thinking about how to improve and remodel your processes, you will dramatically increase your agility and efficiency for competitive advantage.
1“The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment,” Robert Kaplan and David Norton
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