What is developing a centre of excellence?
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Definition of developing a centre of excellence
From Wikipedia
A centre of excellence (COE) is a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area.
The focus area could be data analytics, data science, AI or business intelligence.
Executive view
Developing a centre of excellence promotes collaboration in your business and defines best practice for your specific focus area - whether it be AI, data science, analytics or business intelligence - to drive progress towards your strategic goals. A centre of excellence provides a central department of expertise that can be drawn on to build capability and enthusiasm across different departments.
Developing a centre of excellence helps businesses:
foster a positive data culture
define best practices
promote collaboration
provide a way to build skills and solutions that support your data science strategy
Business function leader view
Developing a centre of excellence helps teams to build skills, knowledge and progress in the area of focus. If your organisation has a data strategy, a data science strategy or an AI strategy, developing a centre of excellence is a tried and tested method for ensuring that all teams are aligned towards the strategic goals and are progressing towards them.
You may need this service if:
you have a data science strategy but are not seeing enough progress towards the strategic goals.
you are having trouble fostering enthusiasm and positive culture for data science and AI.
your team lacks the skill and knowledge required to implement data initiatives.
KPIs you should consider measuring for this are:
improved progress towards strategic goals
increased enthusiasm for the focus area
increased up-skilling of staff in the focus area
Technical view
Developing a centre of excellence sets and maintains best practices for the focus area, creating a central function that can make software and technology decisions, avoiding the risk of shadow IT and improving IT efficiency across the organisation. Developing a centre of excellence can also create leadership opportunities for technologists in the organisation, improving staff retention by allowing career progression.
Developing a centre of excellence helps deliver:
a central function for software and technology decision making.
increased awareness of IT issues across the organisation.
improved skills across the organisation.
Get this service if you encounter:
shadow IT - software and technology decisions being made by different departments without IT being involved.
a lack of appreciation for the focus area by other departments.
poor staff retention due to a lack of career progression opportunities.
Key criteria to consider are:
Does enough talent exist within the organisation to develop a centre of excellence or will you need to recruit experts?
How will you up-skill staff from relevant departments?
How will the decisions of the centre of excellence be communicated and upheld across the organisation?
Building an AI centre of excellence in manufacturing
Most manufacturers have run at least one AI pilot. Many run several. The ones that stall at pilot stage usually share the same problem: no one owns AI as a function, so it stays a side project.
A centre of excellence changes that. For metals manufacturers looking to adopt AI tools across production, quality, and commercial teams, a well-structured CoE means:
- One place for decisions: Which tools to adopt, which data standards to follow, which vendors to trust. No more every department buying something different.
- Skills that stick: Training engineers and planners to work with AI tools — and keeping that knowledge in-house when staff move on.
- Momentum: Pilot projects get productionised. Wins get shared across sites. Progress compounds instead of resetting every year.
- Less shadow IT: When teams trust the CoE to solve their data problems, they stop building their own spreadsheet workarounds.
GoSmarter AI works with manufacturers at various stages of this journey. Whether you’re establishing your first data governance framework or scaling tools like the Rebar Optimiser across multiple sites, having the right internal structure is what turns a good tool into lasting change.