Centers of Excellence are Critical for Success of Organisation

The CoE should be focused on improving the content creation workflow practices, compliance levels, policies, support and awareness and measurement across the program.

Center of Excellence Defined

Essentially a Center of Excellence brings together varied people and skills that promote collaboration and best practice usage around a specific focus area to drive incremental business results.

Search Center of Excellence Role & Function

The COE, to be effective, needs to be an aggregation of multiple disciplines and levels of the organization in order to provide insight into the various stakeholders roles and how they should collaborate with each other in order to be more effective. In addition to role representation, the COE needs to provide a broad base of information, guidance and should provide the following:

1. Shared Learning – first and foremost a proper CoE will prevent, or minimize the reinvention of the wheel for most business units with a base from which to start their understanding of a process or technique. These formalized and uniform roles and process enable shared learning:

• Aggregation and evangelizing of best practices
• Training and certifications
• Skill assessments & team building

2. Measurements & Metrics — CoEs should be able to demonstrate they are delivering the valued results that justified their creation through the use of output metrics.

• Uniform Metrics
• Uniform tools and collection methods
• Aggregation and evangelization of the results

3. Support — For the specific area of focus, CoE’s should offer support and mentoring to the business lines. The level of support will vary based on ability and resources and organization.

• Sourcing and procurement of shares tools and resources
• Share subject matter experts
• Air cover and support with executive management
• Develop process and opportunity for scale in the service offering
• Where possible, financial and resource support

4. Governance – Not be confused with the dictatorship or gatekeeper of a process or strategy but an enabler, arbitrator, and motivator and in some cases the decider of what is the better of two practices.

• Creation and arbitration of common standards, policies and methodologies
• Enforcement of a consistent architecture and uniform approach across the organization
• A common method and set of techniques for managing information
• Developing and enabling well defined Roles and Responsibilities for team members

Search Center of Excellence Benefits

The most effective Centers of Excellence are ones that offers a variety of benefits that can be gained from centralizing a set of essential functions to support global search and social media marketing programs. Some of the benefits include:

• Better reuse of capabilities across programs
• Reduced speed of delivery
• Cost reduction or elimination through shared infrastructure and tools
• Cost savings through shared skill sets and elimination of redundant or inefficient process or approach
• Reduction in frustration and disorganization for those just adopting search marketing or another marketing function that have no previous experience or basis to form their approach or deployment of the new activity

In summary, a Center of Excellence brings together varied best practices in program development, deployment and measurement to achieve better speed to market, consistency and reduced complexity. The quicker the organization adopts this centralized process for information sharing the quicker they will see a more wide-spread adoption of these practices and a reduction to barriers for improving performance in their specific discipline.