Company Details
Industry: Healthcare - Dental Laboratory Technology
Company Size: 5000
Location: Newport Beach, California
Company Products: Dental implants, and associated manufacturing technology
Services:
Technical dental education
About this Project
Creation of an IT Center of Excellence plan targeting implementation of best practices and enhanced process efficiency.
Executive Summary
This case study highlights the design of an IT Center of Excellence (CoE) establishment program within a dental technology organization’s IT division. The AGL partner’s program introduced scaled process across all IT disciplines, established transparent communications with other divisions, and ensured sustained alignment of IT division work with strategic business goals.
Challenge
The AGL partner’s analysis concluded that the IT division faced challenges with its organizational structure, processes, and interdepartmental alignment. There was a lack of scalable process methodologies necessary to meet the needs of a growing IT division with efficiency requirements; there was insufficient transparency and collaboration between IT and other divisions which resulted in work that was at times both duplicative and/or contradictory; and there was inconsistent alignment of IT project priorities with company strategic business objectives. The AGL partner set out to establish best practices aimed at achieving a cohesive and efficient IT division that was aligned with industry best practices applied with customizations tailored to the client’s industry and specific business needs.
Course of Action
To address the challenges, a multi-phased plan to create an IT CoE was created, which involved the following:
- Evaluation of the existing state of several IT division disciplines was conducted, including software architecture, design, engineering, user experience, quality assurance, DevOps, IT infrastructure, network operations, product management, project management, tools, training, data, vendor partnerships, and personnel management
- Definition of the desired end state for each of the areas, based on established best practices modified to accommodate the needs of the industry and organization
- Creation of a phased implementation plan to close the gap between current state and target state
Outcome
The transformation efforts resulted in significant improvements across the IT division. The establishment of an IT CoE promoted shared best practices across disciplines, enhanced enterprise level collaboration, and focus on activities supporting a unified strategic roadmap.
Going forward, the partnership between senior IT management and executive stakeholders played a crucial role in planning and tracking key performance indicators, continuous improvement initiatives enhanced by data-driven analysis, and ensuring the sustainability of the new processes. These benefits were bootstrapped by the technical management staff, along with business and leadership stakeholders receiving coaching to effectively sustain best practices, plan and collaborate at scale, and foresee challenges on the horizon.
Overall, this case study showcases how the establishment an IT CoE and adoption of industry best practices tailored to meet the organization’s specific needs successfully optimized processes, fostered a culture of continuous improvement, enhanced inter-department transparency and collaboration, and allowed the division to achieve enhanced efficiency in delivering projects closely aligned with top business strategies.