The objective of best practices is to drive efficiencies in various processes, reduce failures, and simplify the design of solutions through the potential application of patterns. Based on these reasons, it is of benefit to formulize many functions and processes by using best practices. In many organizational situations, however, the belief is that best practices can be universally accepted without considering the internal capabilities of an organization.
The industrial world has seen three major revolutions over the last 200 years. The first revolution was initiated by the capability to generate power through steam and distribute this electricity as utility to residential and non-residential facilities (Rojko, 2017).
Cloud computing has proliferated every aspect of organizations in the public and private sectors. The attractiveness of these deployment models lies in their utilitarian concepts: they allow organizations to apply various cost models and therefore deliver a more agile response to the ever-increasing demand of competitiveness and high-level service offerings that organizations must provide.
The adoption and implementation of the concept of a center of excellence (CoE) has become very popular in recent years within IT organizations. The push comes most often from software vendors who provide a large suite of applications such as ERP systems [1]. The purpose is to establish an organizational unit of experts within IT that is able to provide in greater depth cross-functional support of such applications to the business. The advantage of this approach is that the pooled resources of functional and technical experts are able to develop and solve business and technical problems faster, quickly adjust to changing business requirements, and provide the corporation with a new agility to manage their application landscape according to changing market demands.
