Center of Excellence and reuse

To encourage the appropriate and best use of Pega Platform™, organizations can create a Center of Excellence (COE). A COE is an internal organization that centralizes the resources and expert staff who support all project roles, including business analysts, lead system architects, and administrators.

Details about the benefits of establishing a COE, its roles and responsibilities, how to accelerate its establishment, plus a brief discussion of the maturity levels that a COE pass through, are described on the following sites.

• Centers of Excellence
• Creating a Center of Excellence

Lead system architects (LSAs) play a crucial role in supporting a COE by creating shared reuse layers. Shared reuse layers contain reusable assets such as reusable components and shared integrations. LSAs should also establish best practices across the enterprise, such as standardizing software development, review, and deployment methods.

The following table contains examples of reusable assets that can be included within a shared reuse layer.

A COE's success is not so much measured by its ability to generate reusable assets. Instead, a COE's success is measured in its ability to get others to adopt those assets and encourage others to contribute additional assets.

Adoption Encouragement

Shareable artifacts that were complex to build have relatively little reuse potential if no one else knows about them. Reuse potential is also discouraged if the shareable assets are overly complex to use.

Ideally, a shareable asset would be something that can be leveraged by the "low-code" users, for example, those following the Low Code Factory approach.

An LSA can minimize the complexity of a shareable solution by making it possible to delegate data tables or by developing a custom smart shape that simplifies configuration. Providing easy-to-follow installation instructions, test code, and example code are beneficial as well. The entire point of investing the time and effort to develop reusable assets is to eliminate the need for anyone else to do the same. This approach is the basis for scalability: implement one, reuse many times.

Adoption cannot be realized if sharable assets are not made available to everyone in an easily consumable way. A COE can create, and LSAs can help maintain, the equivalent of either Pega Marketplace or My Pega. Note how My Pega leverages Space (PegaSocial-Group), which are subdividable into smaller Spaces with the potential to add Attachments at any level.

Contribution Encouragement

Flagging an application in the Application Wizard tab as a possible built-on component application is not enough to encourage reuse. Doing so within a development system of record is useful. Still, it does not help others outside that development team if they are not aware of its existence.

The COE can establish a process for accepting contributions from outside the COE for possible inclusion within the COE's enterprise layer or a more narrowly focused reuse layer such as a division layer. The contributed code is reviewed for adherence to standards, quality, and maintainability. Documentation and regression test code need to be included, not just the code itself.

Giving recognition to contributors accelerates the process. Even more so, contributing to a contest might stimulate interest, for example, an annual, company-wide "hackathon" award ceremony.