This was a hot topic for a number of reasons, I think everyone at the session brought very solid insight and experience which makes this whole topic a lot more fun to riff on. Personally, I moved from being a staunch supporter of BPM COE functions in organizations to maybe a little skeptical. Not that I am doubtful of the value but my skepticism is around sustaining. Can they really thrive without broader organizational maturity? Without that I fear they eventually fall by the wayside as priorities in companies shift. Not to mention the shear contention between organizations this can bring unless everyone is squarely on point as to their role and value either as participants or customers of the COE offering. I started looking at these in earnest at the beginning of 2005 after working with a few clients who had the ambition to begin forming these in their enterprise. Here is a snippit of a whitepaper I was in the process of writing based on the experiences over the course of about a year watching the COEs being built-out.

<--Organizations who are truly setting their sites on creating a center of excellence in Business Process Management will need to create standards in a variety of areas. These types of COE's differ greatly from the historical IT centric ones we are all familiar with. Because of the need to have intimate engagement between business and IT there is much more work to be done. The basic building blocks required are as follows and there are big questions to answer:

1) Common Principals/Philosophy - This is a major factor as the entire organization must understand how the COE will interact between all constituents such as operations, business, IT, finance, etc. Moreover, the enterprise will need to start adopting a process-centric mental model. There is a big mental jump from being a task owner versus a process owner.

2) Governance - Who owns a process, how is process management orchestrated in the business, what is the criteria to charter initiatives, what are the measurements, etc.

3) Frameworks - What are the common practices, tools, and training vehicles used in the COE? How do you measure how effectual they are. How do you extend beyond the enterprise boundary to suppliers, partners, etc

4) Organization - How is the organization aligned, incented, educated, etc. Where do the resources come from?

5) Methodology- By what method or methods will be used to manage process improvement initiatives? How complex?

6) Architecture - Not just the IT architecture which is key, but what is the best business architecture. How are processes attacked and managed

7) Change Management - how does the COE deal with rate of change? How well can the organization absorb change?

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The next topic I have in mind is maintaining an enabling COE versus being constantly pulled into full-time delivery mode with knowledgeable/experienced resources being so scarce in today's businesses.