Having a Centre of Excellence is all well and good - but if other departments don't interact with it, does it risk becoming redundant? Worse - if departments feel they are being superseded by the CoE, they may actively avoid sharing information and create silos that harm the parent organization.
Matt Gusteitus, Director of Automation at Eli Lilly, says that all areas of a business are on a learning curve, and you have to get on it in order to see improvements over time. Part of that learning can mean changing - and particularly, changing where the main source of knowledge resides.
"We may be the core currently but, over time, that may evolve into us working with IT and they may become the center. And so, for us, it's not really thinking about, Oh, we're the center. Everything should come through us but more, how do we leverage what we've already learned, into something much bigger, for the company?"