The data team creates a federated center of excellence to align departmental and corporate resources and foster strategic technology partnerships.

A hallmark of a data analytics program is one or more centers of excellence (or competency centers) staffed by experts in various facets of data and analytics. In general, mature data analytics programs have three centers of excellence: a corporate BI team, a corporate data science team, and a corporate data management team. These teams build complex data and analytics applications for the enterprise and facilitate self-service by providing coaching and support to data analysts and data scientists.

The first task of any data team is to foster alignment with business units that need data to run their business. To do that, data teams need to work in concert with an Analytics Council to deliver enterprise services. They need to manage efficient project intake and prioritization processes to ensure rapid delivery of new functionality to the business. They also need to support governance processes that certify and operationalize new insights to ensure the delivery of trustworthy data. And finally, they need to coach, mentor, manage, and support embedded data analysts and scientists to ensure they deliver value for their department without creating data silos.