Center of Excellence

No.

This is a very vague title that basically means “a group of people who share information about a skill.”

Wikipedia even comes out and says:

Due to its broad usage and vague legal precedent, a “center of excellence” in one context may have completely different characteristics from another. The focus area might be a technology, a business concept, a skill, or a broad area of study.

Interestingly, Merriam-Webster defines it as:

a place of high achievement (in some subject or area)

They provide this example:

The university is becoming a center of excellence for genetic engineering.

So, they’re saying that it’s not something you create, it’s something that exists. Someone external to an entity might declare it a “center of excellence,” rather than it being proactively created for that purpose.

The Cambridge Dictionary echoes that meaning:

a place or an organization that is known for doing a particular activity very well, and that is involved in new developments, new ways of working, etc.

Some other definitions –

From Tech Target, What is a Center of Excellence (COE)?:

A center of excellence (CoE) is a team of skilled knowledge workers whose mission is to provide the organization they work for with best practices around a particular area of interest.

From Cleverism, How to Set Up a Center of Excellence:

The definition of a CoE states that they are a group of people leading the organization and its different structures in a specific focus area towards pre-determined goals. Hence, the aim of a CoE is to improve expertise in a certain area and make the most of its resources to help the business to improve.

Salesforce defines four kinds in Overcoming the Curse of the Center of Excellence Model (COE):

Best Practice Centers – These are the “sharers,” focusing on creating environments where business units can collaborate with each other on like-minded processes and technologies, designed to more rapidly enable lines of business.

DevOps Centers – These are the “doers,” focusing on providing a shared service to scope, design, develop, and deliver across with optimal IT governance, designed to foster standardization and reuse.

Competency Centers – These are the “guiders,” focusing on establishing best practices and standards to enable, build competency, and embed expertise within individual lines of business through the creation of targeted improvement agendas.

Innovation Centers – These are the “creators,” focusing on the incubation and experimentation required to develop the capabilities with (emerging) technologies, designed to accelerate maturity and time to value.

I couldn’t find any etymology or meaning on that term. The Salesforce article linked above says:

Centers of Excellence (COE) have been around in technology for over 30 years […] the COE has its origin in manufacturing, where it is used as a centralized body to help improve factory operations and output.

I couldn’t find much else.

Why I Looked It Up

The term comes up occasionally when I work with organizations in my job. I was curious if there was some standard definition for this, or if it’s just a vague notion and every organization defines the specifics themselves.

It’s the latter, it seems.