COE best practices

Establishing an internal steering committee/team as the Center of Excellence (COE) for creating advanced analytics is a complex process. Its primary purpose is to provide a blueprint to onboard data teams, and enable them with technical and operational practices, support for handling issues and tickets, and executive alignment to ensure that technical investments align to business objectives and value can be realized and quantified. The role is that of an enabler, as a governance overseer, but never to the point of a bottleneck. In some organizations, the COE team is responsible for managing all or part of an infrastructure and the shared data ingestion process, ratifying vendor tools and frameworks for internal consumption. They are either funded directly or get compensated by a chargeback model from the individual lines of business that they service.

The foundational blocks include the following aspects:

• Cloud strategy: Which cloud to use, whether a...