Center of excellence
A center of excellence (CoE) is a dedicated team that concentrates an organization's expertise in one discipline, such as customer research, analytics or automation, and provides the rest of the business with standards, best practices, tools and guidance.
How it works
A CoE sits centrally and serves many teams. It sets methods and quality standards, maintains shared tools and templates, trains people across the organization, and often handles the most complex work itself. In research, an insights CoE might own the research repository, standard survey instruments, vendor relationships and the review of studies run by product teams.
The model balances consistency with speed: teams across the business do their own work, and the CoE keeps it rigorous and comparable. It tends to fail without an executive sponsor, clear governance and measurable goals, becoming a bottleneck or a bureaucracy instead of an enabler.
A worked example
A consumer goods company with 14 brand teams creates a research CoE of 6 people. It standardizes 3 core study templates and a shared repository. Within a year, brand teams run twice as many studies, and cross-brand comparisons become possible because every study now measures purchase intent the same way.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
When many teams run their own research, a center of excellence worries about uneven interviewing, and Pulse's moderator asks well-formed questions whoever on the business side wrote the brief.