Design principles
CUSCOE is built on eleven design principles. The first five define the Centres of Excellence. The other six connect the functions the centres depend on.
| No. | Principle | In short | Evidence status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Competency-based membership | Members must demonstrate the centre's minimum technical level. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 2 | Skill transparency | A visible ten-level capability matrix drives allocation. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 3 | Technical leadership | Each centre is led by a principal technical resource who sets standards. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 4 | Managerial independence | The centre lead is not a line manager. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 5 | Executive advocacy | A named executive protects and governs the centres. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 6 | Portfolio | A single governed source of truth for what is sold and delivered. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 7 | Customer Success | Owns the customer and account P&L from signature. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 8 | Sales | Wins new customers, sells only from the Portfolio, on the three-layer model. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 9 | Finance | Approves the cost model once and signs off outliers only. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 10 | Supporting functions: legal and compliance and IT | Define standards once at Portfolio level, with escalation instead of vetoes. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
| 11 | Board | A named board-level owner for AI and final escalation. | Evaluated against an illustrative scenario |
What the evidence label means
Evaluated against an illustrative scenario means the principle was reasoned through against a realistic scenario, a mid-market SaaS provider moving to AI as a service, using design science research methods. This is described in the KMIS 2026 paper (Copeland and Mogford, 2026), listed on the About page. It shows the principle is coherent, not that it works in practice. Live testing is the next stage, and this page will be updated as results are published.
None of the principles removes tension between functions. They give that tension a structure, an escalation route and a named owner. How well they work still depends on how they are applied.