Today I went to a seminar, organized by HP to promote their offerings in the quality management area. What struck me most was the 'Center of Excellence' notion.  Basically the idea is that (big) organizations should centralize their quality-related activities into one unit (boldly named Center of Excellence), in order to reduce costs.  HP is willing to support you in this endeavor with software and consulting. They even came up with their own maturity model which ranks organizations on one of several levels - the lowest called for some reason 'Manual Testing' and the highest  of course being 'Center of Excellence'.

Somehow I don’t buy into this.  I realize that cost saving measures are in vogue now, but my experience shows that centralization leads to mediocrity at best, not excellence.