VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Digital operating models are the way that digital gets done. A digital center of excellence is a part of an organization where you standardize best practices, knowledge, and sometimes technology around digital that you then push out across the organization to make sure the organization is working in a consistent way and in an efficient way, and ideally in a high value way. In terms of maturity, it's one of the lower maturity models. It's usually the first step from having no digital practice to having a digital practice at all. And in it, you would tend to have a group of experts who curate either expertise or assets about digital. Those experts in this unit build those assets in those areas, data experience, engineering and product, and then basically work in partnership with different business units to roll out those ideas or those assets across the organization. We helped a luxury beauty CP implement a digital center of excellence, and one of the greatest positives of that was being able to create shared digital assets that all parts of the organization could use in one central place. In particular, we helped them build a reference and capability architecture that they could use for their digital operations everywhere in every country and with every brand. That's something that could not have been done if digital was distributed across the different components of the organization, as it would be in a less mature model. One of the greatest challenges is that that COE did not have formal power to make decisions, and that meant a lot of time collaborating with the different business units that would be working with them, but also influencing those different business units to roll out and adopt those ideas. So it couldn't move as quickly as a digital core organization that has more of a direct mandate to act.