Centers of Excellence

(Photo by Leif Eliasson at Scopio)

Two major patterns of consolidation have been prominent in my career. Today I’d like to look at one. Specifically, I’d like to look at the dangers of developing a Center of Excellence.

You read that correctly. I meant what I said. A Center of Excellence can be risky.

The Beneficial Side

It does offers benefits. When we pull together the people and other resources for a particular area of expertise, the size of the pool can spark creative solutions that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

In southeast Texas, Jefferson County where I grew up, Harris County (Houston), and Freeport in Brazoria County had the highest rates of cancer and highest rates of rare cancers in the state. Until I left Texas, M.D. Anderson was the nearest major cancer treatment center. It’s in Houston, ideally located for that triangle of high incidence of the disease. People who got cancer and chose to be treated by their local doctors tended not to last long. People who went to M.D. Anderson had a fighting chance. Wizards practice oncology there. I have personally known people that hospital saved who seemed not to have a chance, and people who got more years with a good quality of life when the statistics for their type of cancer said they should have been gone in a few months.

That’s an example of the best of what a center of excellence can do.

The Risky Side

But it’s also a risk. Tropical storm Allison badly flooded the entire Texas Medical Center in Houston. M.D. Anderson is there. No matter how good the doctors are, they need the power on, the water supply working, and both staff and patients able to get to the hospital.

That isn’t as bad as it can get.

Decades ago, one of my clients decided to consolidate all its polymer operations at their largest factory. They’ve scrubbed news about what I’m about to tell you until it’s almost impossible to find online, so I won’t name them. They dismantled equipment at scattered factories and reassembled it to make a center of excellence. Some people I knew were there, tending to the computer systems involved in running portions of the plant.

To make something with their polymer, you start with hard pellets of it. You melt the pellets and run the goo through machinery to mold or spin whatever you’re making. It isn’t as simple as it sounds, and melting the pellets takes them close to their combustion point. For a non-professional, imagine having pellets of gasoline and needing to heat them to just short of their flash point to liquify them for use.. That isn’t far off from what has to happen in order to make something with their polymer.

Such plants do all they can to avoid having fires, but every so often the goo starts to burn. Alarms sound. The plant’s fire suppression team sprints into action. If they can put out the fire quickly enough, everything is okay.

Goo caught fire at their new center of excellence and the fire team couldn’t put it out fast enough. That entire portion of the plant burned. The center of excellence was ash.

They stopped moving those manufacturing operations to a single site. Sometimes it’s better to have a few centers of excellence scattered here and there instead of one whopping megacenter.

Spreading the Risk

NASA spread its centers of expertise from the start, mostly as an accidental offshoot of needing to constantly navigate national politics. If its major facilities are spread around the country, they are in multiple states and Congressional districts. No Congressional representative in their right mind would propose to completely shut down a NASA facility in their district and axe those jobs.

As a result, we have Mission Control and astronaut training in Houston, rocket engine testing on the Mississippi coast, wind tunnel testing in Virginia, and so on. I only mentioned one well known facility. My family used to vacation in summer where you can hear (and sometimes feel the vibration from) rocket engine tests. I once interviewed for a job where the wind tunnel tests are done. There are plenty of other NASA facilities that most people are at least vaguely aware of, from Florida to the upper East Coast, across the middle of the country and over to California. Each facility has its specialty, but NASA does not have all its eggs in one basket.

Centers of excellence are a fine idea, but I get anxious when anyone wants to put all their expertise in one spot. It’s generally wiser to have a few centers of modest size far enough apart so that no single event could hit them all.

Just in case.