What Department Does the Automation Center of Excellence Belong In?
Process automation is a growing trend and so is the question of what department it belongs in. This article explores what an Automation Center of Excellence is and which departments it can operate from best.
What is an Automation Center of Excellence?
The definition of a Center of Excellence (CoE) is a team which promotes collaboration and best practices related to a focus area to drive value (Strickler, 2016). In large organizations, the CoE is usually a department of its own.
Strickler goes on to state that the CoE is responsible for supporting lines of business through services or subject matter experts. They're also responsible for standards, methodologies, and tools, as well as training, performance monitoring, and governance.
Salesforce puts it best when they mention that CoEs have been around for decades, but people still have a hard time defining them in a consistent manner. Within their blog article, Salesforce goes on to share the perception of CoEs as being broken into best practice centers, DevOps centers, competency centers, and innovations centers (Evans, 2016).
CoEs may focus on process improvement, project management, quality assurance, risk and compliance, HR, and other areas of the business. They typically have a single focus area, although there are some which may have overlapping interests and capabilities.
Not all CoEs have the same level of resources or power, so it's crucial to recognize their limitations within your company and act accordingly.
- Practice centers focus on breaking down barriers between departments and sharing industry best practices. You might think of these as a department of ‘coaches.’
- DevOps centers are those that undertake implementation, development, and maintenance of solutions.
- Competency centers would include something such as a Project Management Office that offers skilled resources to the organization (such as leading projects to successful completion).
- Innovation centers, on the other hand, are responsible for creating new solutions from scratch or by synthesizing existing tools and processes anew.
What department does the Automation Center of Excellence belong to?
For those with a background in technology, they often see the Automation Center of Excellence as belonging to IT or Software Development. For those in operations, especially in companies that already have business improvement CoEs, they'll make the argument for having automation belong to a specific business group or unit.
One reason that business-oriented people see automation as belonging to them is due to the negative perception of IT cycle times. Regardless, industry experience has shown that RPA implementation, from a purely technology perspective, is often best seated within IT-orientated groups.
An exception could be made when a company is primarily technology-based and their employees have an above-average IT skill-set. Above average would cover experience with the software development lifecycle, version control, user acceptance testing, requirement gathering, and much more.
The only other time an automation CoE should be run outside an IT department is when there's a good case which doesn’t happen to rely on ‘IT takes too long’ or ‘RPA is low-code and doesn’t require coding’ types of arguments. These arguments don’t hold up in the long-term because issues will emerge in a non-IT team managing RPA.
For example, if a bot’s volume increases to the point where additional servers are required and the person who built the automation has left the company, it won't be easy to hire an RPA developer and have the business manage them and their IT delivery. It won't be easy in the sense that the business will have to overcome the very same hurdles that were originally stated as reasons for not having IT manage automations (that IT takes too long and that automation is easy enough to manage with low-code solutions within the business).
One thing to note is that executives may make the valid case for having RPA business analysts remain within a business group. In fact, this is a perfect argument to make because:
Cons to business teams running automation
If a business line, such as operations or marketing, decides to bring in a new automation suite like Automation Anywhere or BluePrism, they'll still require approval from IT. They'll also rely on IT for implementing infrastructure to support automation and for approving requests that make changes a reality.
If the business line experiences an incident with their automation, or fails to maintain development quality or scalability, the rest of the business will lose trust in RPA. Loss of trust results in eroded value and a more difficult roadway to an enterprise automation that runs as a profit-center.
Consider another scenario in which a business director asks for non-RPA resources from a technology Vice President, but that request is rejected due to limited resources or prioritization. In such a scenario where integration or system upgrades are denied, the business may easily jump into RPA ‘patching’ of processes because that's the only tool available to them (rather than considering the criticality of other solutions).
Patching problems disregards the importance of business process management and optimization before implementing technology. For example, if an underlying automation need is due to the reason that a company doesn't have a Customer Relationship Management system, automation should not be delivered that mirrors the functionality of a CRM in a piece-meal fashion. A piece-meal approach to automation, rather than employing the right systems, can be damaging to a company of any size as it results in duplicative work and unnecessary system complexity.
Does the Automation Center of Excellence need to be its own department?
An Automation Center of Excellence can be its own department within the IT business line or it can be a team that reports to a Software Development or IT director. The specific answer will depend on the size of the organization, the maturity of its RPA program, and its goals.
If an RPA initiative is in a proof-of-concept stage where contractors come in for 6 months, then it might make sense to have it managed under an existing IT department. If the end-goal is to make enterprise automation a strength of the company (provided as a service to other departments) then its worth exploring the creation of a new department that reports to an information or innovation line of business.
Under no circumstances should an IT team, or contractor, be managed solely through a business department of a company that doesn't specialize in IT.
Footnote:
The terms 'RPA' and 'Robotic Process Automation' are used due to their popularity in the industry. A simpler and less confusing term is process automation (which will hopefully overtake 'RPA' in the near future).
References:
Evans, M. (2016, February 9). Overcoming the Curse of the Center of Excellence Model (COE). Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/center-of-excellence-curse/
Strickler, J. (2016, November 9). What is a Center of Excellence. WordPress.com. https://agileelements.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/what-is-a-center-of-excellence/