Building a Digital Center of Excellence (COE)

You’ve decided to purchase a new software solution for your business - now what?  Even more important than the solution itself is being able to successfully implement it within your company. What use is a solution if no one is using it? 

Enablement and adoption are the cornerstones of any successful digital implementation. While not every organization is ready—or big enough—to establish a full center of excellence (COE), there are still some options to get you started on the right path. In particular, our Digital Center of Excellence methodology is a great start for any size organization.

A Digital COE encompasses the key pillars of a traditional COE, such as communication, enablement and support. The main difference between the two methods is that with a traditional COE, you would form a team of people to help with use case intake, resource allocation, etc. With a digital COE, the team of people is replaced with a self-service, internal site.

Traditionally, an organization’s intranet site was a place to share internal content and store static documents. It has now also become an increasingly vital tool for improving employee engagement, productivity and collaboration between employees and departments. This is especially true in today’s dynamic work environment where people often work cross-functionally across different locations. 

Here are some benefits of setting up a digital COE: 

• Self scalability: Encourage self-serve, self-paced training and learning among end-users, using tech solutions you already have.
• Easy to access for all of your organization: Provide an easy-to-manage online hub for resources and information that any employee can access with their organizational credentials.
• Resource prioritization: Free up time and bandwidth for you and your team to focus on big picture program strategy and goals for the new software at your organization.

For maximum effectiveness, your digital COE should provide a project overview and scope, your objectives and KPIs, success stories and ways users can contact you or other members of your implementation team. 

COE example: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Let’s take a look at how one of our customers saw success building out a digital COE.

In January 2020, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was looking to up-level their electronic signature usage by implementing DocuSign. But, like many other organizations, when COVID-19 forced many employees to work from home, the Port Authority needed a way to shift their entire workforce to a digital-first environment rather than slowly scaling over time. Aside from employee experience, the Port Authority was also looking to enhance their customer’s experience, create more efficient operational workflows and support their goals for a more sustainable output. 

To accomplish this, the Port Authority created what they call the DocuSign Resource Center on their intranet site. Within this site, they hosted pre-recorded learning sessions, how-to guides, share upcoming enhancements and share user generated data. Their self-service model is specifically geared towards training and end user enablement as well as troubleshooting from anywhere. 

In addition to enabling end users, the Port Authority has also expanded their digital COE to encompass developer needs as well as a new collaborative channel for DocuSign power users to communicate in real time and share tips and tricks they have picked up along the way. 

By setting up this digital COE, the Port Authority enabled their end users quickly and efficiently, while also benefiting from increased document turnaround speed, enhanced document security and lower transaction costs. 

Setting up a Digital Center of Excellence is easy, cost effective and scalable. To learn more about setting up your own digital COE, DocuSign customers can check out our Knowledge Market whitepaper. Not a DocuSign customer yet? Here’s a link for non-customers.

You can also watch our webinar with DocuSign Agreement Cloud experts and hear directly from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on their plans to continue and expand their digital COE.