Talking about competency center - how difficult is it to create competency center?
Well think about this Thomas Covenant comes out of jail after serving 12 years for a crime he did not commit and 20 steps from the massive steel gates somebody throws a plate of banana nut cake with ice-cream topping directly on his face, ruining the only shirt he had and a minute later his spouse stops beside him in a new Mercedes, not to pick him up but hand him over the divorce paper. If this was not enough - 10 minutes from this incident he is abducted by aliens who were visiting earth to get used lipton tea bags which they use to clean their teeth. This is cherry pecan pie as compared to building competency centers for a large organization.
What are the functions of an ARIS Competency Center?
- Act as a knowledge base for an enterprise tool which helps in maintaining and monitoring Enterprise Systems Design.
- It acts as a covenant for a system design methods and conventions.
- Helps project delivery team with their systems modeling using the enterprise systems engineering methodology.
- Support BPM and BAM implementation
This sounds simple but remember I am trying to stay away from buzz words and focusing on what really matters.
When talking about a competency center a particular example can draw parallel and I am posting the pictures for both cases. Please understand that I am a hands-on architect who build houses so I like this example. (if you are building a COE and competency center you need to get your hands dirty). This example should not give you the idea that you should all go and build houses but you should be able to find similar examples. Any competency center is scalable and you can do a conformal mapping of competency center for one product into another product easily. (This is where capability maturity comes into play). It is much easier for a CMMI level 4 company to set up a competency center and follow its methods than a CMMI level 1 company. It is kind of a chicken and egg issue here - because at the same time unless you develop competency centers within companies for repeatable compresses you are not moving up the CMMI ladder. (kinda like eating crab - it takes effort but pay's off)
Here are the 2 pictures - figure 1 shows the construction of a house and figure 2 shows the ARIS competency center.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Please see also: