#2: The Bottom-Up Approach
The Bottom-Up approach is the second way that I’ve seen organizations start a competency center or Center of Excellence (CoE). I covered the first way, the Top-Down approach in my first Competency Center post.
In many cases, informal competency centers are created in response to specific projects. These “centers” may just be a wiki or collection of shared documents. What ends up happening is multiple centers cover the same technology but for different use cases. The Bottom-Up approach occurs when a leader forms a team to collect and compile best practices across these centers. This team may or may not have upper management’s endorsement. Rather, the team is internally motivated to improve efficiency, collaboration, and effectiveness. Team members are true practitioners from the trenches that want to swap war stories. I love the passion and energy that exudes from these teams.
Here’s what I’ve noticed with competency centers in decision management.
To Fund or Not Fund the Initiative
Because the initiative is not top-down, getting funding is usually more challenging. In some extreme cases, I’ve seen teams meet “secretly” and without any dedicated funding. However, these competency centers tends to be less ambitious. I’ve attended a few informal brown-bag sessions that enabled a team to spread awareness of a technology and share best practices. This is a great start, but having dedicated time and resources (which requires funding) can dramatically accelerate knowledge sharing.
With funding, teams can organize and facilitate more regular, intensive brainstorming sessions, discussing real problems and capturing tried-and-true expertise. I have seen cases where the role of the competency center was primarily to host and “project manage” the effort. In other cases, the role was to be the expert consultant. Both approaches seems to work as long as everyone is passionate and energetic enough.
Resource Sharing
In decision management, Enterprise Architecture (EA) tends to own the Decision Management CoE. Because EA defines the overall architecture for the software infrastructure, this group also recommends an architecture for the deployment of decision services. With deployment architecture, they may also offer best practices on the repository structure and business user interface. I expect that Business Analysts will eventually take ownership of the CoEs, at least on the best practices part.
However, the advantage of EA being the owner is that they can contribute resources. While not always the case, my top-down example from my earlier competency center post, the CoE was merely the trainer and “hot-line” provider. EAs can have a more active role and acquire hands-on experience with the practitioners in various use cases. Most architects have a knack for frameworks too. As they work on different projects, they can pinpoint the similarities and differences. Over time, they can develop reusable frameworks that can speed up subsequent projects.
If you are lucky, you’ll have some Product Managers that will integrating those functionalities back into the commercial product so that you do not have to maintain the customization. This was certainly one of the reasons I was invited to a lot of those sessions. As a vendor, these discussions are invaluable to our own roadmap.
Knowledge Base
I love that quote from Michael Polanyi:
We know more than we can tell
I love it because it emphasizes one of the key challenges for a Decision Management practice: “how do you elicit your Business Rules?”
I am also intellectually interested in the various ways we can capture and share our corporate knowledge at large, focusing on best practices. In a recent talk at Directions 2011, Andrew McAfee illustrated that challenge by asking the audience if they would feel capable of cooking as well as a renowned chef by simply by reading his or her book. Having French chefs as my 3 brothers, I understood his point. I consider myself a decent cook, but I’m not delusional enough to think that I can cook as well as any one of them! Expertise is hard to capture and transfer via documentation alone.
Over the past few years, many technologies have addressed parts of that challenge:
- A Corporate Wiki is a great start for documenting best practices, tips, and tricks.
- A Social Platform allows practitioners to “shape their serendipity” by communicating issues and collaborating on solving them.
Intranets were an even earlier attempt. In general, social technologies provide a stronger and more dynamic fabric for knowledge exchange. I am a strong believer in Collaborative tools and techniques and should be part of a CoE.
What to Look Out For in the Bottom-Up Approach
As mentioned earlier, lack of funding and/or upper management endorsement may be a hindrance. However, the main pitfall I have seen is misalignment of expectations. The CoE may start with the ambition to capture and spread best practices but may end up as a hotline for corporate users. One CoE I recall evolved into a bi-weekly call where only a handful of people showed up to discuss one “bug.” As the CoE leader, it is critical to not only set clear guidelines and expectations, but also detect changing dynamics and know how to reel everyone back in.
Read the Rest of Our 3 Ways to Start a Competency Center Series:
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