As companies scale up, tech sprawl tends to follow suit. More systems, more dependencies, and before you know it, IT feels more like a paradoxical labyrinth. While automation can help cut through the mess by saving time and slashing costs, it’s no magic bullet. Too often, automation happens in scattered, reactive bursts, isolated across teams and tools. These fragmented “islands” of automation won’t work together until they’re connected and unified.
That’s exactly why building an automation center of excellence (CoE) brings in the focus, strategy and cohesion needed to make automation really work, and work well, across a technology organization.
Why an Automation Center of Excellence?
An automation CoE is a dedicated organizational unit that consults the planning, development and implementation of automation initiatives to ensure standardization, efficiency and optimal use of IT resources. It serves as the organization’s central automation command — a dedicated team that steers the planning, development and rollout of automation initiatives. It isn’t just about ticking boxes. It’s about making sure every automation effort is streamlined, standardized and in sync with the company’s IT landscape. By setting clear ownership and defining processes, the CoE brings a coordinated approach to automation that powers the entire business. Without it, many companies find themselves bogged down, unable to innovate at the pace and scale they need to stay ahead.
A few of the challenges an automation CoE addresses include:
- Lack of standardization: Without a centralized entity overseeing automation initiatives, there will likely be inconsistencies in approaches, tools and methodologies used across different departments or teams. The lack of standardization and expertise across systems and tools puts a burden on almost any user looking to use automation.
- Fragmented investments: Different departments or teams may invest in disparate automation solutions that are not aligned with overall business objectives, potentially leading to inefficient use of resources, duplication of efforts and difficulty in measuring the return on investment (ROI) of automation initiatives.
- Inconsistent performance: The absence of standardized processes, tools and methodologies for automation can result in inconsistent performance across your operations, which can lead to suboptimal outcomes, increased maintenance costs and challenges achieving business objectives.
- Missed opportunities for optimization: A CoE provides a platform for sharing best practices, lessons learned and insights gained from automation initiatives. Without such a mechanism, organizations may miss opportunities to optimize automation processes, streamline workflows and improve overall efficiency, resulting in lower ROI.
- Limited scalability: The lack of a centralized governance structure and standardized approach to automation can hinder scalability. Organizations may struggle to scale automation initiatives across different departments, business units or regions, limiting ROI potential and leading to missed opportunities for cost savings and innovation capacity.
What Are the Benefits of an Automation CoE?
An automation CoE is focused on breaking down enterprise silos and promoting automation as a strategic investment imperative for achieving long-term value. It helps to ensure that when teams want to create new initiatives, they don’t duplicate previous efforts. There are various cost, efficiency and agility benefits to setting up such an entity in the enterprise.
For example, it adds consistency to reporting to make calculating automation ROI easier, and it enables teams to identify the right tools for each initiative to minimize costs and optimize results. An automation CoE can accelerate the deployment of self-service IT to further lower costs, reduce the workload on technical support and engineering teams, improve user satisfaction and enhance overall business agility.
It can also help to establish automation best practices and streamline key processes and workflows. The latter in particular will free employees to focus on more complex, high-priority and high-value tasks.
Finally, an automation CoE helps to manage current automation investments more effectively, aligning them to business goals and providing the insight and recommendations to unleash innovation and other benefits across the organization. It can also boost efforts to evangelize and promote automation investments, thereby building automation into enterprise culture.
Ultimately, an automation CoE is a library of workflows and basic technical runbook assets that give teams the autonomy to apply automation in their own world and in their own way. The CoE’s role isn’t to rip and replace existing tools or processes, but to provide the framework for teams to implement automation into existing and preferred tools or methodologies.
The Starter’s Framework
Getting an automation CoE up and running doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are five key steps to set yourself up for success:
- Spot the best automation opportunities. Focus on projects that deliver maximum impact with minimal effort. Use a clear, repeatable process to assess ROI — think about time saved, revenue gained and risks reduced versus the effort and complexity required. A simple question to ask is, “Is this process ready for automation, and do we have the right tools to make it work?”
- Choose the right tech stack. Your CoE needs a solid foundation. Select tools and systems that integrate seamlessly with your organization’s architecture. It might seem challenging at first, but the long-term cultural and technical benefits are worth it. Ensure your technology supports scalability as automation efforts grow.
- Lead with smart governance. Standardize automation without stifling team autonomy. Striking this balance is key. Consider appointing both a business leader and a technical evangelist to champion the initiative and drive adoption across the organization. Clear ownership and guidelines will keep teams aligned while fostering innovation.
- Build cross-functional collaboration. A successful CoE thrives on teamwork. Bring together experts from IT, operations and business units to identify use cases and share automation insights. Cross-functional collaboration ensures automation solves real-world problems while aligning with broader business goals.
- Measure and scale your success. Start small, measure results and scale strategically. Use metrics like time saved, ROI achieved and improvements to service reliability to track success. Celebrate quick wins to build momentum and prove the value of automation across your organization.
By following these steps, you’ll build a strong automation CoE that delivers lasting results — making work smarter, faster and more impactful.
Benefits for All
IT teams aren’t the only ones who will reap the rewards of an automation CoE. Standardizing automation in this way reduces operational costs by minimizing the human errors that stem from manual processes. It reduces regulatory and compliance risk — as well as the associated costs — by providing a consistent, auditable framework for automation.
Finally, it enhances business agility by enabling teams to do more with less and deploy new products and services faster. By nurturing an environment where innovation thrives, it offers a clear pathway to sustainable growth and differentiation.
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