The Big Data Transformation

Chapter 3. The Center of Excellence Model: Advice from Criteo

You have probably been reading and hearing about Centers of Excellence. But what are they?

A Center of Excellence (CoE) provides a central source of standardized products, expertise, and best practices for a particular functional area. It can also provide a business with visibility into quality and performance parameters of the delivered product, service, or process. This helps to keep everyone informed and aligned with long-term business objectives.

Could you benefit from a big-data CoE? Criteo has, and it has some advice for those who would like to create one for their business.

According to Justin Coffey, a senior staff development lead at the performance marketing technology company, whether you formally call it a CoE or not, your big-data analytics initiatives should be led by a team that promotes collaboration with and between users and technologists throughout your organization. This team should also identify and spread best practices around big-data analytics to drive business- or customer-valued results. HPE uses the term “data democratization” to describe organizations that increase access to data from a variety of internal groups in this way.

That being said, even though the model tends to be variable across companies, the work of the CoE tends to be quite similar, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Defining a common set of best practices and work standards around big data

• Assessing (or helping ...