Jargonautica
Product and Adoption

Champions and Centre of Excellence

Also called: Centre of Excellence

Two common ways of organising adoption. Champions are enthusiasts embedded in each team who help their colleagues. A centre of excellence is a central team providing standards, tooling and review. Champions spread use quickly and inconsistently; central teams give consistency and can become a bottleneck. Most organisations need both.

Technical view

A federated model typically has a central function owning platform, policy, evaluation infrastructure and review of higher-risk use cases, while domain teams own application development within those guardrails. Success factors include the central team providing genuinely useful shared services rather than only gatekeeping, published standards with a fast approval path for low-risk work, and a use case register giving visibility of what exists.


Part of AI Terminology Index, section: Product and Adoption.

How it connects

Champions and Centre of Excellence links to 4 other terms. The faint lines are links between those terms. See it in the full graph.

Maturity ModelMaturity ModelMachine Learning OperationsMachine Learning Op…Use Case SelectionUse Case SelectionChange ManagementChange ManagementChampions and Centre of Excellence