As a producer of Events for IBM Automation, I pore over survey results and spend a lot of time asking attendees what they thought of each agenda. A few years ago, I got an answer that changed everything for me. “You do a good job telling us what the software does, but how about telling us how to make it successful?”

Light dawns in the rock garden!

Ever since that comment, I have made sure that we have “Client Success” topics on every agenda, such as Design Thinking, creating Customer Empathy Maps, Change Management, and how to build a Business Case for your Automation project.  One topic that is absolutely huge for Client Success is an organizational structure that many customers use to help them prioritize automation, build consensus amongst all stakeholders and manage design and deployment: the Automation Center of Excellence (CoE).

For a recent Virtual Event produced with AIIM (the Association for Intelligent Information Management), I was fortunate to book one of the world’s foremost experts on CoEs, Ben Chance, a Partner with IBM GBS, who helps organization set up Coes, and also happens to be a first class advocate for the CoE approach.

Do yourself a favor and invest 15 minutes in listening to Ben describe his team’s methodology and how they work with customers to get a CoE set up and running, and then how they hand it off to the customer side to run it themselves. You want to know how to make Automation successful?  Start here.

I also invited Ben to join me for an episode of “Two Questions About Automation.”  Again, he condensed a lot of wisdom into two information-packed answers.  Check it out in the “Two Questions About Automation” playlist I created.