GCC Enabler

  Every enterprise that has built a Global Capability Center eventually asks the same question: is the operating model we are running the right one for what we are trying to accomplish — and if not, what does the right one look like? The question is deceptively simple. The operating model of a GCC encompasses every organizational decision that determines how the center functions: the governance structure that connects the GCC to the enterprise's strategic priorities, the talent architecture that determines the ceiling of what the GCC can build, the technology infrastructure that enables or constrains the GCC's capability development, the business unit relationship model that determines whether the GCC's output is used in decisions or filed in reports, and the performance measurement framework that determines whether the GCC is measured on the outcomes it should be producing or the processes it is currently executing. Getting any one of these dimensions wrong produces predic...

The enterprise that buys a partial GCC setup solution does not usually know it has bought a partial solution at the time of purchase. The proposal was comprehensive. The service description covered the major dimensions. The pricing seemed reasonable relative to the organizational value the solution was supposed to deliver. The partiality reveals itself later — in the regulatory compliance gap that appears in the second year when the India income tax authority initiates a transfer pricing inquiry and the enterprise discovers that the transfer pricing documentation framework was never established. In the senior attrition spike that occurs in Month Fourteen when the hiring bar that was set too low in the build phase produces a team that the best senior engineers do not want to work in. In the governance dysfunction of Year Two when the enterprise tries to take over the operate phase management and discovers that the governance processes the enabler was running were never documented in a f...

  Ask ten enterprise leaders what their Center of Excellence does and you will get ten different answers. Ask them whether it is delivering what it was designed to deliver and most will pause before answering. The Center of Excellence is one of the most widely adopted and least consistently executed organizational models in global enterprise operations. Every major organization has one — often several. Few have built one that has sustained its strategic relevance beyond the initial mandate that justified its creation. The reason is not that the model is flawed. It is that most organizations have built their CoE around the wrong organizing principle. They have built it to manage knowledge rather than to create it. To standardize practice rather than to advance it. To protect organizational consistency rather than to push the organizational frontier. And knowledge management, practice standardization, and consistency protection — while genuinely useful — are not the activities that p...