Accelerated Innovation

Prioritizing GenAI Initiatives with CoE Input

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Prioritizing GenAI Initiatives with CoE Input

Description

This capability ensures that the GenAI Center of Enablement (CoE) plays an active, structured role in shaping which GenAI initiatives move forward. By embedding the CoE into prioritization processes, organizations can evaluate ideas with a strategic lens, apply enterprise-wide insights, and align resources for maximum impact.

Why it's Important

As GenAI use cases proliferate across business units, prioritization becomes a critical bottleneck-or accelerator. Without an informed, consistent approach, high-potential opportunities may be overlooked while low-value initiatives consume precious time and funding. A CoE-led prioritization process ensures ideas are ranked based on feasibility, impact, risk, and readiness-not on visibility or stakeholder influence alone. This reduces redundant effort, streamlines resource allocation, and boosts the ROI of GenAI investments. CoE input also helps standardize criteria, align initiatives with enterprise goals, and foster transparency across stakeholders.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Unclear CoE decision rights: Without clearly defined authority, the CoE’s input may be advisory only-leading to misalignment or bypassed recommendations.
  • Inconsistent prioritization criteria: Business units may evaluate GenAI opportunities based on differing standards, resulting in uneven value delivery.
  • Competing priorities across stakeholders: Departments may advocate for their own initiatives without full visibility into broader enterprise goals.
  • Limited visibility into in-flight projects: A lack of centralized tracking makes it difficult to avoid redundancy or spot dependencies across teams.
  • Difficulty assessing feasibility and impact: Many proposals lack the data needed to evaluate technical complexity or business value at intake.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires standardizing evaluation frameworks, integrating CoE participation into governance processes, and navigating organizational politics around prioritization.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the GenAI Center of Enablement (CoE) Best Practices workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.
  • Defining the vision and mission of a GenAI CoE.
  • Establishing governance and ownership structures.
  • Cataloging core services and support functions.
  • Communicating value and success metrics.
  • Planning the evolution and scaling of the CoE.
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement GenAI Strategy.
  • Align on your Current State and define your Target State.
  • Create an actionable enablement plan.
  • Define target timeline and measures of success.
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Stand up a lightweight GenAI intake process: Introduce a simple, shared template to capture new GenAI ideas for CoE evaluation.
  • Pilot a cross-functional prioritization workshop: Facilitate a live session with key stakeholders to rank initiatives based on business value and feasibility.
  • Publish early prioritization criteria: Share draft scoring rubrics to promote transparency and gather input across teams.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • GenAI Use Case Discovery & Prioritization Best Practices.
  • GenAI R&D Acceleration & Applied Innovation Best Practices.
  • GenAI R&D Acceleration & Applied Innovation Best Practices.
  • Enterprise GenAI Architecture & Tooling Best Practices.
  • GenAI Development Best Practices & Support.
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Evaluate the CoE’s role in prioritization and identify gaps in influence, access, or decision quality.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Document where and how CoE input is formally incorporated into intake and decision-making processes.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Establish clear metrics for evaluating business impact, feasibility, and technical readiness of each initiative.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Sequence CoE integration into intake and portfolio management based on urgency and business unit maturity.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Educate stakeholders on the value of CoE input, and ensure toolkits, templates, and scoring rubrics are available.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Share how prioritization decisions are made, where CoE input is used, and how teams can engage the process.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases
  • Define Standardized Prioritization Criteria: Establish consistent evaluation rubrics that balance business impact, technical feasibility, and risk.
  • Codify the CoE’s Role in Governance: Make CoE participation in intake, ranking, and approval processes a documented part of enterprise governance.
  • Create Templates for Prioritization Workshops: Develop reusable agendas, slides, and scoring tools to streamline cross-functional prioritization sessions.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers
  • Scale CoE Engagement Across Portfolios: Expand CoE influence into more domains, business units, and operational areas.
  • Automate Prioritization Workflows: Implement intake portals and scoring automations to reduce manual coordination and improve throughput.
  • Train Teams on Prioritization Practices: Enable decentralized teams to adopt and execute consistent evaluation processes with confidence.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum
  • Highlight High-Impact Prioritization Outcomes: Showcase GenAI projects that drove strong ROI due to strategic selection and CoE guidance.
  • Share Lessons Learned from Prioritization: Publish postmortems or retrospectives that illustrate how smart decisions were made-and why they mattered.
  • Recognize CoE Contributors: Celebrate individuals or teams who helped shape effective prioritization frameworks or scaled adoption across business units.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific Capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine
  • Integrate Prioritization into Enterprise Planning Cycles: Align GenAI initiative ranking with quarterly or annual strategic planning processes.
  • Embed CoE Input into Project Management Systems: Ensure prioritization status and CoE recommendations are visible in intake and portfolio tools.
  • Establish Always-On Intake Channels: Create seamless ways for teams to submit ideas and receive timely prioritization feedback.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort
  • Automate Intake, Evaluation, and Scoring: Use AI-assisted tools to pre-score initiatives based on known metadata, impact estimates, and alignment.
  • Enable Real-Time Portfolio Dashboards: Provide live visibility into GenAI project status, prioritization rankings, and resource allocations.
  • Trigger Governance Reviews Based on Priority: Automatically route top-priority GenAI initiatives for security, compliance, or risk reviews.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases
  • Refine Prioritization Based on Outcomes: Regularly revisit scoring models based on actual business value delivered from past initiatives.
  • Expand Scoring to Include Emerging Factors: Incorporate complexity signals like dependency risk, ethical concerns, or external visibility.
  • Benchmark Against External Innovation Pipelines: Compare your prioritization outputs to market trends and competitors to find whitespace opportunities.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Excluding the CoE from early decisions: Bypassing the CoE during intake or evaluation can lead to inconsistent prioritization and lost strategic alignment.
  • Overengineering scoring frameworks: Complex, overly rigid criteria can delay decision-making and frustrate stakeholders.
  • Allowing stakeholder influence to override value: Prioritization driven by politics rather than impact can erode credibility and ROI.
  • Failing to revisit and refine criteria: Static frameworks can become misaligned as goals shift or new risks emerge.
  • Neglecting communication around prioritization outcomes: Lack of transparency can breed confusion or resistance from affected teams.

Targeted Benefits

While Prioritizing GenAI Initiatives with CoE Input can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Increased ROI from GenAI investments: Resources are funneled toward initiatives with the highest strategic and financial value.
  • Stronger cross-functional alignment: A transparent, CoE-led process helps unify stakeholders around enterprise goals.
  • Faster execution of high-impact projects: Prioritization clears the path for top initiatives to receive funding, attention, and support.
  • Improved visibility into the GenAI portfolio: Centralized prioritization enables better oversight, tracking, and governance.
  • Competitive advantage through disciplined innovation: A mature prioritization capability ensures you focus on what matters most-and get there first.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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