Industry focused Centers of Excellence

This might sound weird and someone can ask that what is the need to having centers of excellence (CoE) within an analytics services company. Let me justify and describe the role they can play. In my last post on bridging the gap between Business and Business Intelligence, I mentioned that that understanding of the domain (industry) is the key to the success of a BI implementation. This skill set is missing within most of the companies who claimed to be an expert in BI. Knowing the domain better equips a solution provider to come up with a useful framework. Some of the roles these CoE can play are: Key Performance Indicators for Business After thorough research the CoE can come up with the KPIs for a given industry. The decision makers in the companies need to be on top of these numbers always. They can be used to measure the overall health of the business. The CoE should have an understanding about what all need to done in case of a large variation in these KPIs. This will help the people using BI taking the timely actions. Implementing best practices using analytics These CoE can collaborate with or follow the industry leaders and management consultancy companies for the best practices they use within a given vertical. For example, McKinsey coming up with their recommendations on how a company in retail can optimize its store operations, these CoE can understand from an analytics perspective. After going through proper research, they can come up with a framework, talking about what-it-takes and how to deploy the same using BI. Cross Domain frameworks Analytics world has evolved many domain specific terminologies. For example, revenue maximization is a hot area within telecom domain and this concept is not being used in any other vertical. I strongly feel that CoE have a role to play here in leveraging the successful models from industry in another similar domain. They can understand the core concepts and apply these principals for a new problem. The time is running out, need to catch up my team at 7 am. Will talk about some more charters that can be allocated to these centers of excellence. Their existence will definitely add a tremendous value in the BI value chain. Convinced? :) Happy Decisions !!