Champions & operating rhythm

The state of it

One of 5 topics within Change leadership & adoption.

18 documents from 11 organizations address who carries the work after launch. The recommendations converge quickly - a centre of excellence, a steering committee, champions, a community of practice - and the convergence is itself a warning, because these are the structures organizations already know how to create and then leave to decay.

Microsoft's CIO material is the most useful because it treats the proliferation as the risk: as adoption grows, platform admins, governance leads, champions, trainers and support teams all acquire a role, and without clearly defined responsibilities across them the result is duplication, shadow use and fragmented oversight.

The issues, by agreement

How many independent organizations name each issue as a problem. An issue is only as real as the number of separate publishers that identify it, so the count is the ranking. Bars are organizations, not documents. Where the count reads ours, no publisher here states the issue and the analysis is our own.

The issues in full

Each issue carries the organizations that name it, the numbers behind it, and the remedies proposed - with the concrete steps under each. Every citation points at a section of a named document, so any count here can be checked.

Issue 01Our analysis1 qualifies it2026 evidence

A centre of excellence is created without deciding what it decides

Champions, a CoE and a steering committee are stood up quickly because the organization knows how. What is rarely settled is which decisions each of them owns.

How to fix it — 1 approach, 3 steps

Write the decision rights before creating the body

Name which decisions the centre of excellence owns, which it advises on, and which stay in the business - before it exists.

Done when A published list assigns each recurring decision - what gets built, funded and stopped - to a named body or role, written before the centre of excellence existed, with a two-quarter review of whether the decision was actually taken there.

List the recurring decisions: what gets built, what gets funded, what gets stopped.0-30 daysCIO
Assign each to a named body or role, and publish it.0-30 daysCEO
Review after two quarters whether any decision was actually taken there.90-180 daysCompany Secretary

The evidence — 2 documents

Organization	Document	Position
KPMGConsultancy · April 2026	Building the AI business caseOur reading Proposes a steering committee or centre of excellence with a step-by-step funnel, and prioritisation decided within it.Steering committee and centre of excellence	proposes a fix
McKinsey & CompanyConsultancy · August 2026	Agentic AI change leadershipOur reading Locates the work in leadership behaviour and workforce design as much as in a structure, which is a different answer to the same question.Change leadership	qualifies it

Issue 02Our analysis

The coordination structure is assembled after the pilot, when the scope was always cross-functional

A pilot is run inside one function because that is where the enthusiasm was. The work then turns out to cross procurement, supply chain, operations and IT, and a coordinating structure is improvised at the point it is already needed.

The structural argument is that this touches virtually every part of the organization, more than earlier technology waves did, which is exactly why the operating structure has to be settled at the start rather than retrofitted - both to find the highest-value opportunities at an enterprise level and to carry them through. The failure mode is not that people refuse to cooperate later. It is that a pilot scoped inside one function produces a design only that function can own, and the redesign needed to make it enterprise-wide is far more expensive than having convened the group on day one.

How to fix it — 1 approach, 3 steps

Convene the affected functions before the pilot, not after it

Decide the coordinating group at the point the first use case is chosen. It costs a meeting then and a redesign later.

Done when The functions a use case touches downstream were listed before build started, the COO and CIO share a written objective for it, and each stage review records any function added to that list.

Name every function the use case touches downstream, before build starts.0-30 daysCOO
Put the COO and CIO on the same objective for it, in writing.30-90 daysCEO
Review scope at each stage against the functions listed, and add whoever was missed.ongoingCOO

The evidence — 1 document

Organization	Document	Position
Carnegie Mellon SEIAcademic	The AI Adoption Maturity ModelOur reading Proposes reframing the question from which technology to adopt to which capabilities must exist, which is a decision no single function can take alone.From technology choice to organizational capability	proposes a fix

Who is represented

This dossier is drawn from 12 organizations working on the subject, 3 of which are cited directly in the issues above.

Consultancy — 6

McKinsey & Company 5 KPMG 1 Deloitte 3 Accenture 1 Boston Consulting Group 1 Capgemini 1

Institution — 2

FinOps Foundation 1 World Economic Forum 1

Academic — 1

Carnegie Mellon SEI 1

Hyperscaler — 2

Google Cloud 2 Microsoft 1

Frontier lab — 1

OpenAI 1