Creating an Airtable Centre of Excellence: A Strategic Framework for Enterprise Success

how to read this document

This white paper works for three different audiences. To get the most value for your time, follow the recommended path for your role:

c-suite executives: Read the abstract, introduction, business case (section 3), and conclusion. You want to know: Why invest? What’s the ROI? How does this drive strategic advantage?

IT & platform leaders: Read everything, but focus on organizational models (section 4), core components (section 5), remediation framework (section 6), failure patterns (section 7), and both appendices. You need to know: How do we structure this? What are the technical requirements? How do we manage risk?

business operations & department heads: Read the abstract, introduction, business case (section 3), and core components (section 5). Your questions are: How does this help my team? Will this create bureaucracy? What support will we get?

abstract

Here’s the thing: most enterprises use Airtable completely wrong. Over 80% of the Fortune 100 have adopted it^[1], but without strategic governance, it creates expensive chaos rather than competitive advantage. Teams build brilliant solutions in isolation, then you discover you’ve got 200 ungoverned bases containing sensitive data with no one actually in charge.

This white paper presents a comprehensive framework for building an Airtable Centre of Excellence (COE) based on our analysis of 47 client implementations and proven practices from Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Power Platform COEs^[2][6][7]. Organizations with mature COEs achieve significantly faster time-to-market, substantial cost reductions, and reduced compliance risk, with industry research and our client data showing improvements ranging from 30-50% in delivery speed^[4][5].

We cover three organizational models (centralized, federated, and hybrid), seven core components every COE needs, and a practical four-step process for remediating existing deployments. The framework balances governance with agility, enabling innovation within guardrails rather than killing creativity with bureaucracy.

introduction: the airtable paradox

Picture this: Your marketing team builds an Airtable base to track campaigns. It’s brilliant—saves them 10 hours a week, everyone loves it. Six months later, sales has built one for lead management, operations has one for project tracking, and finance has one for budget planning. Each team thinks they’re being innovative. Nobody’s talking to each other.

You’ve now got sensitive customer data in four different places with four different security configurations. Or more accurately, four places with no real security configuration at all. When IT finally discovers this through a routine audit, the conversation gets uncomfortable fast. You’re not just looking at wasted licensing costs—you’re looking at potential GDPR violations that could cost up to 4% of global annual turnover^[15].

This is where most enterprises are with Airtable right now: caught between grassroots innovation and unmanaged risk. The platform’s ease of use drives adoption, but that same ease creates problems. Our analysis of 47 client engagements shows businesses waste an average of 15-25% of their Airtable spending on duplicate licenses and redundant solutions^[13][26]. Meanwhile, ungoverned bases become increasingly complex, and when the creator leaves, the institutional knowledge walks out the door with them. Remediating this technical debt takes significantly longer and costs substantially more than preventing it in the first place^[14].

The solution isn’t to lock down Airtable—that kills the innovation that made it valuable. The solution is a Centre of Excellence: a framework that enables innovation within guardrails, balancing empowerment with enterprise controls.

what this white paper covers

This framework guides you through the complete journey from ungoverned Airtable chaos to strategic enterprise asset. You’ll learn how to structure your COE for your organizational context, build the seven core components every successful COE needs, and remediate existing deployments without alienating your most innovative users.

We’ve adapted proven practices from platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow to the Airtable context, combining industry research with our own implementation data. The frameworks include practical decision tools you can apply immediately, backed by real case studies from companies like BlackRock, Dropbox, and AWS showing measurable results: 580 hours saved monthly, 2x faster delivery cycles, and solutions that actually scale^[10][11].

If you’re an enterprise leader watching Airtable adoption grow organically while worrying about governance, or an IT leader tasked with “sorting out the Airtable situation,” this white paper gives you the blueprint for doing it right.

the current landscape: what research tells us about COEs

Before diving into the Airtable-specific framework, let’s look at what we know about Centers of Excellence generally and why low-code platforms specifically need them.

4.1 what the research shows

The data on Centers of Excellence is pretty conclusive. Research across multiple enterprise platforms shows that 91% of companies achieving the highest ROI from their technology investments have established COEs^[2]. These aren’t just governance bodies—they’re value engines. Industry research and our analysis of 47 client engagements show organizations with mature COEs consistently achieve faster time-to-market for new applications and improved developer productivity^[4][5].

But here’s the kicker: most digital transformation initiatives fail not because of bad technology choices, but because of inadequate governance^[3]. Companies buy powerful platforms, democratize access to empower business users, then watch in horror as shadow IT proliferates and technical debt accumulates faster than they can manage it.

The low-code market makes this problem more urgent. Industry analysts projected that low-code platforms would account for over 65% of application development activity by 2024^[12], reflecting a fundamental shift in how enterprises build software. The organizations that figure out how to govern this democratization effectively will pull ahead. Those that don’t will drown in technical debt and compliance violations.

4.2 the low-code governance gap

Here’s where it gets interesting: while we have well-documented COE frameworks for traditional platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow, governance guidance for low-code platforms remains surprisingly sparse. As Columbus Global notes, “governance is the missing but critical link in no-code/low-code development”^[12].

The challenge is unique because low-code platforms democratize creation in ways traditional development never did. When your marketing manager can build a customer database in an afternoon, you’ve unlocked tremendous agility. But you’ve also created risk that your traditional governance models weren’t designed to handle. The business user building that database probably isn’t thinking about data retention policies, backup strategies, or what happens when they leave the company.

Salesforce figured this out years ago, establishing the pattern of the hybrid hub-and-spoke COE model^[6]. Microsoft’s Power Platform COE starter kit provides similar structure^[8]. ServiceNow has comprehensive playbooks for enterprise governance^[7]. But Airtable’s unique position—powerful enough for enterprise use cases, accessible enough for non-technical users—means we can’t just copy-paste these frameworks. We need to adapt them.

4.3 what makes airtable different

Airtable sits in an interesting space between spreadsheet and database, between departmental tool and enterprise platform. This creates unique governance challenges. Unlike Salesforce, where most builders have some technical training, Airtable users often come from entirely non-technical backgrounds. Unlike Microsoft Power Platform, where organizational IT typically controls access from day one, Airtable frequently enters enterprises through individual team credit cards and grows organically.

This organic growth is both Airtable’s superpower and its governance nightmare. BlackRock uses it to manage product delivery for hundreds of global team members^[10]. Dropbox rebuilt their entire content production engine on it^[11]. AWS streamlines marketing workflows with it^[23]. These aren’t toy implementations—they’re mission-critical business systems. But they started as grassroots experiments that proved valuable enough to scale.

The question isn’t whether to govern Airtable. The question is how to govern it in a way that preserves the agility and innovation that made it valuable while preventing the chaos that comes from hundreds of ungoverned bases.

4.4 our approach: adapted frameworks, airtable context

This white paper adapts proven COE practices from Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Power Platform to the Airtable context. We’ve taken the structural models that work—hybrid hub-and-spoke organization, demand management processes, champion networks—and modified them for Airtable’s unique characteristics.

The statistics on COE benefits throughout this paper (ROI improvements, efficiency gains) come from general COE research and analogous platform studies, supplemented with Airtable-specific evidence wherever available. Our client implementation data comes from 47 engagements across 2023-2024, primarily with small and mid-size businesses (10-200 employees)^[26]. We’re transparent about this: while the principles scale, organizations with 1,000+ users will face additional complexity that requires framework adaptation.

As an Airtable Gold Partner, prettysimpl continues to refine this framework as more Airtable-specific COE data becomes available through our client work. Consider the frameworks directional rather than prescriptive, and establish your own baseline metrics as you implement.

the business case: why your CFO should care

Before anyone approves a COE initiative, they need to understand what it costs to not have one. The business case for an Airtable COE isn’t about the value you’ll create (though that’s real). It’s about the money you’re already wasting and the risk you’re already carrying.

5.1 the high cost of doing nothing

When we audit enterprise Airtable deployments, we find the same patterns repeatedly. Let’s walk through what ungoverned Airtable actually costs.

Shadow IT and wasted spending shows up first. Different teams independently purchase Airtable licenses, often at different pricing tiers because they’re not coordinating. We regularly find enterprises where three departments are each paying for Pro or Business licenses when a single Enterprise agreement would cost 40% less. Industry research suggests that 15-30% of software spending gets wasted on redundant or underutilized licenses^[13]. In our client analysis, this figure holds true for Airtable specifically^[26].

Mid-sized financial services organizations commonly achieve 30-35% savings through license consolidation. One documented case: a 3,500-employee company reduced software costs by $462,000 annually (33% reduction) by consolidating from 47 vendors to 22^[29]. Multiple named enterprises report similar patterns: an NHS Trust saved £250,000 in 12 months, EDEKA saved €6.2 million^[30]. Organizations essentially pay extra for fragmented governance.

Technical debt accumulates invisibly until it becomes critical. Business users build sophisticated bases without documentation, proper naming conventions, or architectural planning. These bases work brilliantly for six months, then the creator leaves the company. Their replacement inherits an undocumented black box that breaks mysteriously and can’t be easily modified.

Research shows organizations with accumulated technical debt spend 40% more on maintenance and deliver features 25-50% slower^[31]. McKinsey found technical debt extends development timelines and increases costs by 50-200% per feature^[31]. The healthcare.gov failure—a classic technical debt disaster—cost $200 million to remediate^[31]. The pattern is consistent: remediating poorly-architectured bases costs substantially more than building them properly from the start. The difference? The first time, there was no architecture review, no documentation requirements, and no consideration for maintainability. The rebuild must reverse-engineer business logic from unlabeled automation scripts and cryptic formula fields.

Security and compliance violations carry the highest potential cost but often go undetected until an audit or breach forces discovery. Sensitive customer data lives in bases with inappropriate sharing settings. Personal information subject to GDPR sits in bases with no documented retention policy. Financial data gets synced to external tools without proper security review.

GDPR penalties can reach 4% of global annual turnover^[15]. For a company with £50 million in revenue, that’s a potential £2 million fine for compliance violations. Even without regulatory penalties, the reputational damage and customer trust issues from a data breach can be catastrophic. One of our clients discovered during a pre-acquisition audit that they had customer personal data in 14 different Airtable bases, none of which were included in their data protection impact assessment. The acquisition almost fell through because the buyer couldn’t assess the compliance risk.

Failed scaling and lost reusability represents opportunity cost rather than direct expense, but it’s equally expensive. Teams solve the same problems repeatedly because they don’t know another department already built a solution. Bases that could handle departmental scale break when the business tries to expand them enterprise-wide because they were built without architectural standards.

Research suggests this kind of inefficiency costs large companies billions annually in duplicated effort^[16]. In our client work, we routinely find three or four teams who have independently built nearly identical project tracking systems, each spending 2-3 weeks of effort. If they’d coordinated through a COE, one team builds it properly once, and everyone benefits. That’s 6-9 person-weeks of wasted effort for every duplicated solution.

5.2 what a COE actually delivers

The business case for a COE isn’t about creating new value from nothing. It’s about capturing value that’s already being lost and enabling value that’s currently blocked.

Cost optimization shows up in three ways. License consolidation typically reduces costs by 15-25% or more compared to fragmented purchasing^[4][5]. Support costs drop significantly when there’s a central team that actually knows the platform rather than each department figuring things out independently. Development costs fall substantially when teams can reuse components, templates, and patterns rather than building everything custom^[4][5].

Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study of Microsoft Power Platform documented a composite organization achieving 224% ROI with under 6-month payback^[27]. The study found $82 million net present value over 3 years from three value streams: $43.6 million in development cost savings, $44.4 million in user time savings (25% reduction in process time), and $31.3 million from extended automation. Similarly, Nucleus Research documented a supply chain provider achieving 167% ROI within 6 months of implementing their platform COE^[28]. These studies demonstrate the financial viability of properly-structured COE investments across low-code and enterprise platform contexts.

Efficiency gains compound over time. When there’s a library of tested, documented templates and a team that knows how to use them, time-to-market for new applications drops dramatically. Our client engagements and broader industry research consistently show significantly faster delivery when proper COE structures exist^[4][5]. Developer productivity improves substantially when people aren’t constantly reinventing wheels.

More importantly, business teams become self-sufficient faster. With good training, templates, and support, departments can build their own solutions rather than waiting months for IT resources. The COE enables this self-service while ensuring solutions meet enterprise standards.

Risk reduction becomes quantifiable when you track the right metrics. Audit preparation time typically drops 40-60% when there’s centralized visibility into all bases and proper documentation^[15]. More significantly, you avoid the multi-million pound fines that come from compliance violations. Regulatory penalties for poor data governance are substantial and well-documented: British Airways paid £26 million for failing to implement adequate security controls during a breach, Meta paid €1.2 billion for transferring EU data without proper protection^[32]. For a company with £50 million revenue, GDPR’s 4% maximum penalty represents £2 million exposure—making COEs that identify and remediate compliance issues before audits highly valuable risk mitigation investments.

Revenue and innovation impact often gets overlooked but represents the largest potential value. When teams can build solutions in days instead of months, they respond to market opportunities faster. When business users can experiment safely, innovation accelerates. Research shows organizations with mature COEs report 15-25% increases in revenue per employee through productivity gains^[18].

BlackRock’s implementation demonstrates this perfectly. They saved 580 hours monthly in manual work—that’s 3.5 full-time employees worth of capacity^[10]. But the real win was the 2x faster feature delivery cycle. In financial services, being first to market with product improvements creates competitive advantage worth far more than the operational savings.

5.3 case study: blackrock transforms product delivery

BlackRock’s Aladdin Wealth product team faced a challenge most companies would envy: they’d grown too fast. Over 300 global team members needed to coordinate on feature delivery, manage complex client feedback loops, and maintain alignment on roadmaps. Their existing processes were manual, disconnected, and drowning in status update meetings.

The team built a centralized system in Airtable that managed the entire product lifecycle—from the moment a client suggested a feature to the day it shipped. This wasn’t a simple project tracker. It was a comprehensive system that provided a single source of truth for hundreds of stakeholders across multiple time zones and business units.

The results weren’t just good—they were transformational. The team eliminated 580 hours monthly of manual work and status synchronization. That’s not an efficiency improvement; that’s reclaiming three and a half full-time employees worth of capacity. Feature delivery accelerated to 2x the previous pace, directly impacting BlackRock’s ability to serve clients and compete in the market.

But here’s the part that matters for the COE conversation: this wasn’t a massive IT project with year-long timelines and consultants everywhere. It was a business-led solution that scaled because it had proper structure from the start. The system provided governed access to sensitive data, maintained audit trails, and could onboard new team members quickly because it was properly documented.

That’s what a COE enables—innovation that scales rather than innovation that creates technical debt. BlackRock’s solution worked because someone was thinking about architecture, governance, and maintainability from day one, not just “can we make this work for our team right now”^[10].

5.4 the bottom line for executives

The business case for an Airtable COE isn’t about whether you should invest. It’s about recognizing you’re already paying the cost of not having one. The question is whether you want to keep paying inefficiency costs and risk premiums, or invest in structure that captures value and reduces risk.

For a mid-size enterprise with 500 employees and 200 Airtable users, the typical COE investment is £150,000-£250,000 annually (including 2-3 FTE staff, tools, and training programs). Based on our client data, that same organization is likely already spending £75,000 annually in wasted licenses, £120,000 in duplicated development effort, and carrying unquantified compliance risk that could dwarf both of those numbers^[26].

The math isn’t complicated. The hard part is admitting you have a problem that needs solving.

COE organizational models: choosing your structure

The right COE structure depends on your organization’s size, culture, and governance maturity. There’s no single correct model—but there are three foundational approaches that organizations consistently adopt. Most enterprises ultimately land on a hybrid model, but understanding all three options helps you make the right choice for your current context.

6.1 the three foundational models

The Centralized Model puts all Airtable strategy, development, and governance under a single team, typically within IT or a digital transformation office. This team controls everything: who gets access, what bases get built, how integrations happen, and what standards everyone must follow.

This model works best for highly regulated industries where control matters more than speed, smaller enterprises where a central team isn’t a bottleneck, or organizations in early COE maturity where you need to establish governance before you can safely delegate^[19].

The upside is maximum control and standardization. Everything gets reviewed, nothing falls through the cracks, and compliance stays tight. The downside is that the central team becomes a bottleneck. Business units complain about slow delivery, innovation gets stifled by approval processes, and you risk shadow IT re-emerging as frustrated teams bypass the formal channel entirely.

Financial services clients often start with centralized control because regulatory requirements demand it. Every Airtable base requires security review, data classification, and architecture approval. Research on COE evolution shows this works initially at smaller scale but scaling to 4-5x the user base and application count overwhelms central teams^[33]. Request backlogs can grow to 8-12 weeks, driving frustrated departments to bypass governance entirely using personal accounts. Organizations at this point need to evolve their model.

The Federated Model goes the opposite direction—each business unit has autonomous Airtable capability with minimal central coordination. Marketing has their own Airtable experts, standards, and governance. So does Sales, Operations, and Finance. The center might provide an enterprise license agreement and basic guidance, but each unit makes its own decisions.

This model works for very large, highly decentralized organizations where business units already operate semi-independently, or for mature organizations where each unit has sophisticated capability and can be trusted with autonomy^[20].

The upside is agility and close alignment to specific business needs. Each unit moves at their own pace without waiting for central approval. The downside is inconsistent standards, duplicated effort, and higher overall risk. When every unit does things their own way, you get dozens of different security approaches, zero reusability across units, and no way to aggregate platform metrics or demonstrate enterprise value.

Large retail organizations that grant full regional autonomy discover within 12-18 months that each region has independently built solutions for identical problems—sometimes a half-dozen different project management templates. Research shows federated models without central coordination result in 30-50% higher licensing costs and duplicated effort across business units^[33]. Without unified data governance, organizations lose visibility into where sensitive data resides. Autonomy without coordination turns expensive quickly.

The Hybrid (Hub-and-Spoke) Model combines centralized strategic control with distributed delivery capability. A central “hub” COE team sets strategy, defines architecture standards, manages platform governance, and maintains shared resources like template libraries and the champion network. “Spoke” teams or individuals embedded in business units handle actual delivery, building solutions that meet local needs while following central standards.

This model works for most large enterprises seeking to balance control with agility. It’s the recommended default approach unless you have specific reasons to choose centralized or federated^[19][20].

The upside is that you get both governance and speed. The center maintains standards and reduces risk, while embedded experts enable business units to move quickly. Central expertise combines with local business context. The downside is complexity—the model requires clear communication, well-defined operating agreements, and discipline to avoid ambiguity about who makes what decisions.

Research from Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Power Platform COEs consistently shows the hybrid model delivers the best long-term outcomes^[6][7][8]. Organizations that start centralized typically evolve to hybrid as they mature. Those that start federated typically pull back to hybrid when coordination problems become expensive.

6.2 organizational structure and key roles

A mature hybrid COE needs people covering four core functions, though how many people depends on your scale. A 200-user deployment might have 2-3 people covering all functions part-time. A 2,000-user deployment needs 8-12 dedicated people.

Strategy and Platform Leadership lives with the COE Lead or Platform Owner. This person owns the enterprise Airtable vision, roadmap, and budget. They manage executive stakeholder relationships and ensure Airtable stays aligned with strategic business objectives. This isn’t a technical role—it’s a business leadership role that happens to focus on a technology platform.

The COE Lead spends most of their time not building things but ensuring the right things get built. They’re in executive meetings demonstrating ROI, in steering committee sessions prioritizing the portfolio, and in quarterly business reviews explaining why Airtable matters to strategic outcomes. They need credibility with both technical teams and business leadership.

Architecture and Standards falls to the Platform Architect. This person defines technical standards, security architecture, integration strategy, and ensures platform health. They’re the technical conscience of the COE—the one who asks “will this scale?” and “how do we maintain this?” before anyone starts building.

The Platform Architect reviews new base architectures, maintains the standards library, evaluates new Airtable features for enterprise readiness, and troubleshoots complex technical issues. They need deep Airtable expertise, strong systems thinking, and the ability to say “no” when necessary. They’re not gatekeepers—they’re guides who help teams build solutions properly the first time.

Enablement and Community requires an Enablement Lead who designs training programs, manages the champion network, and drives user adoption. This person makes sure people know the platform exists, understand how to use it properly, and have support when they get stuck.

The Enablement Lead isn’t just running training sessions. They’re building the internal Airtable community—identifying champions in each business unit, creating feedback loops that surface problems early, and celebrating successes that demonstrate value. Organizations with active champion networks improve project success rates by 50% or more^[8], and this role makes that happen.

Delivery and Governance needs a combination of Delivery Leads, Developers, and Governance Specialists depending on your delivery model. These people manage demand intake, build solutions (or support business units building their own), ensure quality through architecture reviews, and enforce governance policies.

This function varies most by organizational model. Centralized COEs might have 4-6 developers building everything. Hybrid models might have 1-2 central developers focused on complex solutions and reusable components, with business unit champions handling simpler builds. Federated models might have no central delivery team at all, just governance specialists who review and audit.

6.3 choosing your model: a decision framework

Start with these questions:

How regulated is your industry? Higher regulation typically pushes toward centralized or hybrid with strong central governance. Financial services, healthcare, and government usually need tighter control than retail or technology companies.

How mature is your organization’s governance capability? If you’re just starting to govern user-generated applications, centralized control might be necessary to establish foundational practices. Once those are solid, you can federate.

What’s your organization’s cultural approach to business unit autonomy? Companies that already operate with strong business unit independence will struggle with centralized models. Those with traditionally strong central functions will struggle with federated approaches.

What’s your current Airtable footprint? Under 50 users with 20 bases? Centralized might work fine. Over 500 users with 150 bases? You probably need hybrid or federated.

How much can you invest in COE staffing? Hybrid models need more coordination effort than centralized or federated. Make sure your budget matches your ambition.

For most organizations, we recommend:

Start with a lightweight centralized model to establish governance fundamentals, even if you ultimately want hybrid. Spend 6-12 months getting the basics right: standards documentation, a demand intake process, basic training, and an architecture review gate.

Evolve to hybrid as you scale. When you hit 100+ users or 30+ bases, begin identifying and empowering champions in major business units. Gradually shift delivery capability to embedded experts while maintaining central standards and support.

Reserve federated for truly massive or uniquely decentralized organizations. Most enterprises claiming they need federated autonomy actually need hybrid with strong business unit engagement.

The model you choose matters less than implementing it clearly and communicating it consistently. Ambiguous COE structures—where no one knows who decides what—create more problems than the wrong model implemented decisively.

core components of an airtable COE

An effective Airtable COE integrates seven essential components. Miss one and your governance has holes. Miss three and you don’t really have a COE—you just have some meetings about Airtable.

7.1 vision and strategy alignment

This sounds obvious but most organizations skip it: you need a clear, explicit vision statement that connects Airtable to strategic business objectives. Not “we use Airtable as our low-code platform” but “Airtable enables our teams to move from idea to solution in days instead of months, which directly supports our strategic goal of operational agility.”

The vision answers why Airtable matters to the business, not just what it does. It gives you the foundation for every other decision: Which projects should we prioritize? What standards are worth enforcing? How much should we invest in training? The vision provides the framework for answering these questions consistently.

Illustrative example: Consultancy clients struggle with COE adoption when vision focuses on compliance—“Implement Airtable governance to reduce risk” sounds like bureaucracy. Reframed as empowerment—“Enable every consultant to build client solutions they can stand behind, with confidence that security and quality are handled”—the same governance becomes a resource rather than restriction. The COE stops being perceived as “IT making rules” and becomes “a capability that helps me do better work.”

The vision needs executive sponsorship—someone senior enough that when they say “this matters,” people listen. This sponsor doesn’t run the day-to-day COE operations, but they represent it in leadership meetings, secure budget when needed, and provide air cover when governance decisions create short-term friction.

7.2 governance framework

This is the “operating system” for your COE—the policies, processes, and standards that determine how Airtable gets used enterprise-wide. Think of it in three layers.

Data governance covers how you classify, protect, and manage data in Airtable. This includes data classification schemes (public, internal, confidential, restricted), privacy rules about handling personal data, retention and deletion policies, and data quality standards.

The key is making this practical rather than theoretical. One retail client created a simple four-tier classification with clear examples: Public (product catalog data), Internal (team meeting notes), Confidential (customer contact details), Restricted (financial forecasts). Each tier had specific rules about sharing, exporting, and automation connections. Simple, but comprehensive.

Technical governance defines architecture standards, security configurations, integration patterns, and quality requirements. This is where your Platform Architect lives—establishing patterns that work and preventing approaches that create future problems.

Architecture standards might cover things like: When do you use linked records versus rollup formulas? How do you structure bases for maintainability? What naming conventions apply to fields, tables, and views? What’s the review threshold for automation complexity? These sound mundane but they’re what separate maintainable solutions from technical debt.

Security configurations matter especially on enterprise plans. You’ll define workspace structures, sharing policies, audit logging requirements, and access control patterns. Airtable’s Enterprise Hub lets you enforce many of these policies programmatically rather than trusting people to follow guidelines^[21][25].

Process governance determines how work gets done: how requests get submitted, evaluated, and prioritized; how projects move from idea to delivery; what gates exist for quality and compliance; and how you measure success.

The intake process matters most here. Business units need a clear, low-friction way to request new solutions or changes to existing ones. Make it too heavy and they’ll work around you. Make it too light and you’ll approve things you shouldn’t.

One financial services client implemented a three-tier intake system. Simple requests (template-based solutions, under 5 tables, no sensitive data) got approved within two days through a lightweight form review. Medium complexity requests got a 30-minute architecture consultation before approval. Complex requests (sensitive data, critical business process, or novel integration) went through full architecture review with security and compliance input. This balanced protection with speed.

7.3 standards and best practices library

This is your platform knowledge base—the collected wisdom of what works when building Airtable solutions. As your COE matures, this library becomes increasingly valuable because it prevents teams from solving the same problems repeatedly.

Base templates provide starting points for common use cases. Project tracking, content calendars, CRM-lite, event management, vendor evaluation—whatever patterns recur in your organization. Templates aren’t just empty structures; they include example data, documentation explaining design decisions, and guidance on when to use this template versus building custom.

The ROI of reusable templates is well-documented across enterprise platforms. Eventbrite documented saving 534 engineering days after launching their design system^[35]. Uber achieved 3x faster UI implementation with reusable components^[35]. Forrester research found reusable integration assets deliver 295% ROI over 3 years with 35-45% productivity gains^[34]. These patterns hold consistently for low-code template libraries—organizations that invest 2-4 weeks building comprehensive templates save 8-15 hours on each deployment, achieving payback within 3-6 months with compounding value from repeated reuse.

Automation patterns document proven approaches to common automation scenarios. How do you safely notify external stakeholders? What’s the right way to handle conditional logic in scripts? How do you structure error handling? These patterns help people avoid reinventing solutions and more importantly, avoid making common mistakes.

Interface designs provide UI patterns that work well for different use cases. Forms for data collection, dashboards for executives, detailed views for operational teams. Having tested, accessible interface patterns means people can build good user experiences without extensive design expertise.

Documentation standards ensure solutions remain maintainable. What information must be included in base descriptions? How do you document automation logic? What diagrams or flowcharts help the next person understand what’s happening? Standardizing this makes solutions transferable rather than tribal knowledge.

The library shouldn’t be a SharePoint graveyard where documents go to die. It needs to be actively maintained, easily searchable, and actually used. Many successful COEs build their standards library in Airtable itself—both because it’s a good use case and because it demonstrates the platform’s capability.

7.4 training and enablement programs

People can’t follow standards they don’t understand or use tools they don’t know exist. Comprehensive enablement spans multiple levels.

Basic user training covers the fundamentals for everyone who needs to consume data from Airtable even if they’re not building anything. How to navigate bases, filter views, update records, and understand what they’re looking at. This is often overlooked but matters—frustrated consumers are as problematic as untrained builders.

Builder training enables people to create solutions following COE standards. This typically divides into levels: foundations for simple bases, intermediate for automations and integrations, advanced for complex architectures and scripting.

Airtable’s own Academy provides excellent baseline content^[22]. Smart COEs supplement this with organization-specific training covering internal standards, templates, and governance requirements. One enterprise created a “Builder Certification” program—people completing the training and passing a practical assessment got “Certified Airtable Builder” designation and priority support from the COE team.

Administrator training prepares people to manage the platform itself—workspace administration, security configuration, usage monitoring, and governance enforcement. This usually targets IT staff and business unit champions who’ll operate semi-autonomously.

Role-specific training addresses particular use cases. Sales teams might need training on the CRM template. Finance teams need training on the budget tracking system. Rather than generic “here’s how Airtable works,” role-specific sessions focus on “here’s how to solve your actual job problems with Airtable.”

Training isn’t one-time—it’s continuous. New features appear, standards evolve, people join the organization. Plan for ongoing enablement, not just an initial training wave.

7.5 community building and champion network

Technology adoption is social, not technical. The platforms that succeed in organizations aren’t necessarily the best platforms—they’re the ones with the most engaged user communities.

Your champion network consists of embedded Airtable experts in business units who become local advocates and first-line support. These are often the people who were already building interesting things before the COE existed. Bring them into the fold rather than fighting them.

Champions serve multiple purposes. They’re the local experts their colleagues turn to before escalating to the COE. They provide feedback on what’s working and what’s creating friction. They identify emerging use cases early. They help communicate COE initiatives in language their business unit understands.

Organizations with active champion networks improve project success rates by 50% or more^[8]. This isn’t surprising—people trust peers more than central teams.

Supporting champions means giving them resources: dedicated training, early access to new features, direct line to the COE team, and explicit recognition for their contribution. Some organizations create “Airtable Champion” as a formal designation with job description expectations. Others keep it informal but provide champions time allocation for the role.

Community of practice brings champions and interested builders together regularly to share what they’re learning. This might be monthly showcase sessions where teams demo solutions, quarterly strategy sessions where the COE shares roadmap, or ad-hoc working groups tackling specific challenges.

The COE should facilitate but not dominate these sessions. Let champions present their work, discuss challenges peer-to-peer, and problem-solve collectively. The central team provides structure and captures learnings but shouldn’t turn community sessions into lecture series.

One technology company runs monthly “Airtable Showcase” sessions where teams volunteer to present interesting solutions. Each presentation is 15 minutes: the problem they solved, how they built it, results achieved, and lessons learned. These sessions consistently draw 40-50 people and have become the primary way knowledge spreads across the organization. The COE team attends and takes notes but rarely presents.

7.6 demand management and portfolio

Without structured demand management, you’ll either get overwhelmed with requests or have no visibility into what’s being built. The intake and portfolio process brings order to chaos.

Intake process gives people a clear path to request new solutions or changes to existing ones. This doesn’t need to be heavyweight—a well-designed Airtable form works perfectly—but it needs to capture the right information. What problem are you solving? Who’s impacted? What’s the urgency? What data will be involved? Is there budget for external help if needed?

The intake form routes requests to appropriate reviewers based on complexity and data sensitivity. Simple requests might auto-approve with template suggestions. Medium complexity gets architecture consultation. High complexity or sensitive data requires security and compliance review before proceeding.

Prioritization framework helps you decide what to build when demand exceeds capacity. Common factors include strategic alignment (does this support company objectives?), business impact (how many people or dollars does this affect?), urgency (what happens if we wait?), and technical feasibility (can we actually build this well?).

Different organizations weight these factors differently based on culture and priorities. The important part is having an explicit framework rather than deciding based on whoever complains loudest or has the most senior sponsor.

Portfolio management tracks all Airtable work enterprise-wide—both COE-delivered and business unit-led. This gives you visibility into what’s being built, prevents duplication, enables reuse, and supports value reporting.

The portfolio should categorize solutions by type (operational tools, strategic initiatives, experiments), track status (planning, active development, production, sunsetting), capture ownership (who built it, who maintains it), and link to business outcomes where measurable.

One professional services firm maintains their entire Airtable portfolio in—surprise—Airtable. Every base has a record in the portfolio base capturing metadata, ownership, business value, last review date, and risk assessment. This portfolio view makes quarterly value reporting straightforward and helps identify bases that should be retired or consolidated.

7.7 innovation and value capture

The final component focuses on proactively identifying opportunities to apply Airtable’s capabilities to solve business problems and create competitive advantage.

This means monitoring emerging capabilities from Airtable itself. When Airtable launches new features (like Airtable AI running on specific models^[9]), the COE evaluates enterprise readiness, identifies use cases, and helps business units adopt safely. Early adopters get advantage, but only if they implement properly.

It means scanning for business opportunities where Airtable could create value but isn’t currently being used. The COE team develops relationships with business leadership to understand strategic priorities and spot gaps where rapid application development could help.

One logistics company’s COE noticed the operations team struggling with vendor management—tracking contracts, performance metrics, and issues across 200+ suppliers. No one had requested an Airtable solution because they didn’t know it was possible. The COE built a proof of concept, demonstrated it to operations leadership, and within two months had deployed a vendor management system that saved 15 hours weekly in manual tracking.

Value measurement and storytelling captures the ROI your COE generates and communicates it effectively to stakeholders who control budget. We’ll cover metrics comprehensively in section 9, but the key is connecting Airtable solutions to business outcomes—not just “we built 30 bases” but “those bases saved 450 hours monthly and enabled $2M in new revenue by accelerating proposal response time.”

7.8 case study: dropbox unifies a global content engine

After a merger, Dropbox’s creative and marketing teams found themselves siloed across geographies with disconnected processes. Creative in San Francisco had their workflow, marketing in New York had theirs, web production in Dublin had theirs. Nothing connected. Work disappeared into black boxes. Teams duplicated effort because they didn’t know what others were doing.

The problem wasn’t lack of talent—it was lack of infrastructure. They needed a unified “content engine” that could manage campaigns, production workflows, and asset libraries across global teams while remaining flexible enough to accommodate different team working styles.

They built this engine in Airtable, creating a single platform that served multiple teams without forcing everyone into identical processes. Creative teams could manage production pipelines their way. Marketing could track campaign performance their way. But everything connected—providing visibility, preventing duplication, and enabling collaboration.

The transformation wasn’t just operational. They broke down silos between creative, marketing, and web teams. They created structured, transparent workflows replacing inefficient, untracked processes. Most importantly, they enabled seamless cross-collaboration that was critical for their newly integrated global team^[11].

This is what mature COE thinking looks like: not forcing everyone into rigid standards, but providing enough structure that disparate teams can work together effectively. The platform enables rather than constrains.

remediating existing airtable deployments

Here’s the reality: most enterprises reading this white paper don’t get to start with a clean slate. You’ve already got dozens or hundreds of Airtable bases scattered across departments, built over months or years of organic adoption. Some are business-critical. Some are abandoned. Most fall somewhere in between.

The remediation process determines whether your COE succeeds or fails. Handle it poorly and you alienate your most innovative users while making minimal progress on governance. Handle it well and you bring existing users into the fold as champions while systematically reducing risk.

8.1 a four-step remediation framework

Step one is inventory and assessment—figure out what you actually have. This is harder than it sounds because Airtable’s ease of use means bases proliferate invisibly. People sign up with personal emails, build solutions, and IT has no idea they exist.

Start by working with your Airtable account team to consolidate all known usage under a single enterprise agreement. This gives you admin visibility into bases associated with your domain. Then supplement this with surveys and communications asking people to register bases they’ve built on personal accounts or under different email addresses.

Offer amnesty, not punishment. The message should be “we want to support what you’re doing and make it better,” not “we caught you violating policy.” People need to trust that registering their base won’t result in it being shut down or them being reprimanded.

Once you’ve identified bases, assess each one against key criteria:

Business criticality determines how important this is to daily operations. Does this base support revenue-generating activities? Would the business notice immediately if it stopped working? Is it nice-to-have or mission-critical? Interview base owners and their stakeholders to understand actual usage patterns, not just claimed importance.

Data sensitivity evaluates risk exposure. Does this base contain personal data subject to GDPR or other privacy regulations? Financial data? Competitive information? Customer lists? Assign a classification (public, internal, confidential, restricted) based on the most sensitive data present.

Technical complexity assesses maintainability. How many tables and records? How many automations, integrations, and custom scripts? How many people depend on it? Complex bases with no documentation and unclear ownership create the highest technical debt risk.

Ownership clarity determines who’s responsible and capable. Is there an active owner who understands the base and can maintain it? Multiple owners who share responsibility? Or is the original creator long gone, leaving it orphaned?

Use a scoring rubric to make assessment consistent. One approach: rate each criterion 1-5, then calculate a risk score. High business criticality plus high data sensitivity plus high complexity plus unclear ownership equals very high risk. Low on all dimensions equals very low risk.

Step two is prioritization—decide which bases need immediate attention versus which can wait. You can’t remediate everything simultaneously, and trying to do so guarantees you’ll make minimal progress on anything.

Create a risk matrix plotting business criticality against data sensitivity. High-high bases demand immediate focus—these are business-critical systems containing sensitive data. If they have ownership or technical problems, address them within 30 days.

High criticality with low sensitivity comes next—these bases matter to operations but don’t create compliance risk if you need a few months to address them. Low criticality with high sensitivity needs rapid data remediation even if the base itself isn’t business-critical—you can’t have sensitive data sitting ungoverned regardless of how important the base is.

Low-low bases can wait, and some can be ignored entirely if they’re truly dormant and low-risk.

Financial services organizations commonly discover 70-100 bases during inventory. Risk scoring typically identifies roughly 10% as high-risk requiring immediate attention, 25-30% as medium-risk to address within 90 days, with the remainder as low-risk—patterns consistent with our client remediation work. High-risk bases demand 4-8 weeks of intensive work to address security, compliance, and ownership issues. Medium-risk bases follow, with low-risk bases often grandfathered-in with basic documentation and ownership assignment but minimal active remediation to avoid boiling the ocean.

Step three is choosing remediation strategy—decide what to do with each base. You have four options.

Retire means shut it down. This applies to abandoned bases no one uses anymore, redundant bases where a better solution exists elsewhere, or trivial experiments that never became useful. Archive the data for compliance purposes, export anything someone might want later, then delete the base.

Many organizations discover 20-30% of their bases fall in this category once they actually investigate usage. People started projects, abandoned them, but never cleaned up. Or they built proof-of-concepts that never went anywhere. Or they replaced an old base with a new one but never deleted the original.

Be ruthless here—every base you retire is one fewer thing to maintain, secure, and pay for.

Remediate applies to valuable bases that don’t meet COE standards but are fundamentally sound. Work with the owner to bring them into compliance: apply proper naming conventions, add documentation, classify data appropriately, adjust sharing settings, and register ownership formally.

This is often lighter-weight than rebuilding. You’re not changing how the base works—you’re adding the governance layer it should have had from the start. For many bases, remediation is a 2-4 hour effort: document the structure, update settings, train the owner on standards for future changes.

Rebuild becomes necessary when bases are business-critical but technically unsound. The logic is so convoluted that no one can maintain it. The architecture won’t scale to meet growing needs. The original builder made design choices that create ongoing problems. Or it contains sensitive data with such poor security that patching isn’t sufficient.

Rebuilding means starting fresh using proper architecture and COE standards, then migrating data and users from the old base. This is expensive—research shows remediation takes substantially longer than proper initial development^[14]—but sometimes unavoidable.

Schedule rebuilds deliberately as formal projects with appropriate resources. Don’t try to squeeze them into spare capacity—that guarantees you’ll build the new one badly too.

Grandfather applies to low-risk bases where remediation effort exceeds value. These bases work, they’re not critical, they don’t contain sensitive data, and they’re not creating problems. Acknowledge their existence, document basic ownership, but leave them alone.

Grandfathering saves you from boiling the ocean. Perfectionism kills COE initiatives—trying to bring every base up to complete standards simultaneously is impossible and unnecessary. Accept that some bases will remain slightly non-compliant if the risk is truly minimal.

Apply remediation strategies transparently and consistently. Document your decision criteria so people understand why Base A got rebuilt while Base B got grandfathered. This prevents accusations of favoritism or arbitrary decision-making.

Step four is communication and engagement—manage the change carefully because people get emotionally attached to things they’ve built. Your governance initiative can easily feel like criticism of their work.

Frame remediation as support, not enforcement. “We want to help you make this even better and ensure it’s sustainable long-term” resonates better than “your base doesn’t meet standards and needs to be fixed.” Both are true, but the first invites collaboration while the second triggers defensiveness.

Engage existing Airtable power users early and bring them into the COE as champions. These are often the people who built the most sophisticated bases before formal governance existed. They have deep product knowledge and credibility with peers. If they become COE advocates, others follow. If they resist publicly, you’ve got a political problem.

One technology company handled this brilliantly. When they started their COE, they identified the eight people who’d built the most widely-used bases. Instead of auditing these bases first (which would feel threatening), they invited these builders to join an advisory council helping shape COE standards. The message was “you’re already experts; help us define what good looks like.”

This flipped the dynamic completely. Rather than COE versus innovative users, it became innovative users helping build the COE. Those eight people became the most vocal advocates for standards they’d helped create, and their peers trusted the governance framework because it came from fellow builders.

Be transparent about the timeline and process. Tell people upfront: “We’re inventorying all bases this month, assessing them next month, then working with owners to address high-priority items over the following quarter. Here’s what to expect if your base needs attention.”

Uncertainty creates anxiety and resistance. Clarity creates cooperation.

8.2 a note on timing and resources

Remediation takes longer than most executives expect. A thorough inventory and assessment of 100 bases requires 40-60 hours of actual work, not counting calendar time for coordination and follow-up. Remediating high-priority bases adds 10-40 hours each depending on complexity.

Budget realistic time and don’t rush. Hasty remediation creates new problems while solving old ones. One retail client tried to remediate 47 bases in six weeks because their executive sponsor demanded quick results. They ended up breaking three business-critical workflows because remediation changes weren’t tested adequately, which poisoned relationships with business units and nearly killed the COE initiative.

Better to remediate ten bases properly over three months than fifty bases poorly over six weeks. Quality matters more than speed here.

common failure patterns and how to avoid them

Even well-intentioned COE initiatives fail predictably. Knowing the common patterns helps you spot problems early and correct course before they become fatal.

9.1 when the COE becomes a bottleneck

Symptoms: Request backlog grows beyond 8-10 weeks. Business units complain about slow delivery. Shadow IT re-emerges as frustrated teams bypass the formal process. New base creation drops significantly not because people have what they need but because asking for things takes too long.

Why this happens: Centralized models where the COE team must build everything can’t scale past a certain point. If 500 people need Airtable solutions and 3 people must build them all, the math doesn’t work. The COE becomes a constraint rather than an enabler.

This often stems from good intentions—wanting to ensure quality and maintain standards. But perfect quality delivered three months late loses to good-enough quality delivered this week. Business needs don’t wait for central IT.

How to fix it: Move from centralized to hybrid model. Focus COE team effort on building reusable templates, maintaining standards, and supporting business unit builders rather than building everything centrally. Establish clear criteria for self-service (templates-based, under certain complexity threshold, no sensitive data) versus COE-supported (complex integrations, sensitive data, novel use cases).

Implement a fast-track path for simple requests. If someone just needs a basic project tracker using existing templates, approval should take 2 business days, not 2 weeks. Reserve heavyweight review for genuinely complex or risky projects.

One consulting firm solved bottleneck problems by creating a “Template Gallery” with 12 pre-approved base templates for common use cases. Business units could self-deploy these templates within their workspaces without waiting for COE approval—they just registered the deployment so the COE had visibility. Anything not covered by templates went through the standard intake process. This reduced COE demand by 60% while actually improving governance because template-based solutions followed standards by default.

9.2 when governance gets ignored

Symptoms: Users circumvent established processes. New ungoverned bases continue appearing despite COE existence. The architecture review gate gets skipped routinely. Data classification policies exist on paper but no one follows them in practice. Business units complain governance is bureaucratic and pointless.

Why this happens: Governance processes that don’t serve users get ignored. If your governance framework makes it harder to build good solutions rather than easier, people work around it. This often occurs when COE teams focus on control rather than enablement, when standards are overly rigid, or when the “compliant path” is significantly slower than the non-compliant path.

How to fix it: Make the compliant path the easiest path. Governance that’s baked into templates and tools gets followed automatically. Governance that requires people to remember 47 policies and follow 14 manual steps gets ignored immediately.

Use Airtable’s Enterprise Hub to automate policy enforcement where possible^[21][25]. Don’t rely on people to remember they need to enable specific sharing restrictions—set defaults that enforce those restrictions automatically. Don’t trust people to classify data properly—build classification into base templates with field-level guidance.

Secure visible executive support and communicate it regularly. When business units see that the COE has real backing from leadership, they’re less likely to circumvent it. When it feels like an IT initiative that executives tolerate but don’t truly support, resistance grows.

Most importantly, listen to why people are circumventing governance. If they’re skipping the architecture review because it takes three weeks and asks irrelevant questions, fix the review process. If they’re ignoring data classification because they don’t understand it, improve training and tools. Treat circumvention as feedback about friction in your system, not defiance to be punished.

9.3 when the executive sponsor disengages

Symptoms: Funding gets questioned or reduced. COE mandates stop being enforced—business units push back on requirements and get away with it. Strategic alignment discussions stop happening. The COE Lead stops getting invited to relevant leadership meetings.

Why this happens: Sponsors disengage when they stop seeing value or when other priorities crowd out attention. This often follows failure to communicate wins effectively—if the COE is delivering real value but executives don’t see compelling evidence, they assume it’s not working. It can also happen when initial enthusiasm wanes because governance work is less glamorous than innovation promises.

How to fix it: Relentlessly measure and communicate value. Section 9 covers metrics comprehensively, but the key is presenting a quarterly value scorecard to executives showing clear business impact: hours saved, costs reduced, risks mitigated, strategic initiatives enabled.

Turn metrics into stories. “We reduced license costs by £18,000” is decent. “We reduced license costs by £18,000, which funded the two additional sales operations headcount Finance approved” is better. Connect Airtable wins to things executives already care about.

Tie COE initiatives directly to the sponsor’s strategic goals. If your executive sponsor owns operational efficiency, show how the COE drives efficiency. If they own risk management, emphasize governance and compliance wins. If they own innovation, highlight how the COE enables rapid experimentation.

Schedule regular sponsor updates proactively rather than waiting for them to ask. Quarterly steering committee meetings with pre-read materials and clear decision items keep sponsors engaged. Between meetings, send brief success highlights—“thought you’d want to know, Marketing just launched their campaign tracker and it’s already saving them 12 hours weekly.”

If sponsor engagement drops despite your best efforts, consider whether you have the right sponsor. Sometimes the initial sponsor made sense for launching the COE but isn’t the right long-term leader. Transitioning sponsorship is delicate but sometimes necessary.

9.4 when value remains unproven

Symptoms: The team stays busy building things but can’t demonstrate clear ROI. Business stakeholders question why the COE exists or whether the investment is justified. The COE is perceived as a cost center rather than value driver. Funding remains uncertain year-to-year.

Why this happens: Activity doesn’t equal value. You can build 50 bases and run 100 training sessions while delivering minimal business impact if those bases solve low-value problems or training doesn’t enable actual capability. This happens when COE teams focus on outputs (number of bases built, number of users trained) rather than outcomes (business processes improved, costs reduced, risks mitigated).

It also happens when COE teams build things they think are useful without validating actual business need. The phenomenon of “solution in search of problem” kills COE credibility fast.

How to fix it: Implement rigorous metrics from day one. Section 9 provides comprehensive guidance, but at minimum track time savings, cost reductions, and risk mitigation for every significant project. Capture baseline state before implementation and measure actual change after.

Focus early COE efforts on “quick win” projects with easily measurable outcomes. Don’t start by tackling the most complex, ambiguous problems. Start with clearly defined pain points where Airtable provides obvious value and where success can be demonstrated unambiguously.

One professional services firm deliberately chose their first three COE projects for measurability: consolidate project tracking (measurable license savings), automate status reporting (measurable time savings), and centralize client feedback (measurable improvement in response time). Each project took 4-6 weeks and delivered quantified results. These early wins funded organizational patience for more complex initiatives later.

Turn metrics into compelling stories that demonstrate value to different stakeholders. Finance cares about cost savings. Operations cares about time savings and efficiency. Leadership cares about strategic initiatives enabled. Tailor your value narrative to your audience.

Partner with Finance to validate your methodology for measuring value. If Finance agrees your time-savings calculations are reasonable, they become much more credible to executives. If you’re just making up numbers that Finance disputes, you’ve undermined your own case.

airtable in the enterprise ecosystem

A COE must define where Airtable fits in your broader technology landscape. Trying to use Airtable for everything fails as surely as refusing to use it for anything. The key is understanding its “sweet spot” and having clear guidance about when to use it versus alternatives.

10.1 when to use airtable

Airtable excels in four distinct contexts, and recognizing them helps teams make good platform decisions:

Workflow and process management represents Airtable’s strongest use case. When you need to orchestrate multi-step, human-centric processes—project tracking, content production pipelines, event planning, vendor management, hiring workflows—Airtable provides the right combination of structure, flexibility, and collaboration features.

These workflows typically involve multiple people with different roles, sequential or parallel steps with handoffs, status tracking and visibility requirements, and lightweight automation connecting steps. Traditional development would be overkill. Spreadsheets lack structure and collaboration features. Airtable sits perfectly in the middle.

Collaborative data sets where multiple teams need a shared source of truth benefit from Airtable’s balance of database structure and spreadsheet accessibility. When marketing, sales, and operations all need to view, contribute to, and act upon the same information—customer feedback, product requirements, market research—Airtable enables collaboration without requiring everyone to become database experts.

The key characteristic here is that people need to both consume and contribute. If they’re just viewing reports, a BI tool makes more sense. If they’re just entering data, a form feeding a traditional database works better. But when the same people need to do both—view context, update information, track status, comment on records—Airtable shines.

Rapid application prototyping leverages Airtable’s speed advantage. When you’re testing a new business process or exploring whether a workflow idea actually solves the problem, you don’t want to spend three months building custom software. Build it in Airtable in three days, test it with real users for a month, then decide whether to keep evolving it or migrate to a more robust platform if it proves valuable.

Some prototypes remain in Airtable permanently because they scale adequately for the use case. Others prove the concept then get rebuilt in traditional development tools. Both outcomes are valid—the point is learning fast and cheap.

Connecting disparate data from multiple systems into a unified view for specific business purposes represents an underrated Airtable strength. When you need to bring together information from your CRM, project management tool, finance system, and spreadsheets to support a particular analysis or decision process, Airtable’s integration capabilities and flexible structure make it an excellent integration layer.

This isn’t replacing your systems of record—it’s creating a temporary or ongoing workspace that pulls relevant data together for a specific purpose. One client uses Airtable to consolidate quarterly business review preparation, pulling data from seven different systems into a single base that executives use for review meetings. The data lives authoritatively in source systems, but Airtable provides the unified view.

10.2 when not to use airtable

Equally important is recognizing where Airtable doesn’t fit and pushing back on inappropriate use cases.

Versus spreadsheets: Choose Airtable when you need structure, data validation, relational capabilities, and workflow automation. Choose spreadsheets for one-off analyses, complex calculations, personal list-making, or when the user is an expert in Excel formulas and doesn’t need collaboration features.

Organizations sometimes attempt migrating complex financial models from Excel to Airtable under the mistaken assumption that “everything should be centralized.” Finance teams rightfully resist when models require sophisticated formula arrays and scenario analysis that Airtable can’t replicate elegantly. The right answer is keeping the financial model in Excel but using Airtable to track assumptions, changes, and approvals around the model. Each tool doing what it does best.

Versus Microsoft Power Platform: Choose Airtable when premium user experience, rapid visual development, and collaborative ease of use are paramount. The interface design and learning curve favor Airtable for business-user-led development.

Choose Power Platform when deep integration with the Microsoft 365 and Azure ecosystem is the primary driver, when you need complex backend logic that benefits from Power Automate’s extensive connector library, or when your organization already has significant Power Platform investment and expertise.

This isn’t about which is “better”—it’s about fit. Organizations heavily invested in Microsoft cloud typically find Power Platform integrates more naturally. Organizations prioritizing user experience and speed of development often prefer Airtable. Many enterprises use both for different purposes.

Versus traditional development: Choose Airtable for departmental or cross-functional applications that need to be operational in days or weeks, not months. These are typically applications supporting 10-200 users, with moderate complexity, and where requirements evolve based on usage.

Choose traditional development for enterprise-wide, high-transaction systems of record (ERP, core CRM, HR systems), applications with highly complex, bespoke code requirements, or systems where performance and scale demands exceed Airtable’s limits.

The dividing line often comes down to scope and permanence. If this is a core system supporting 1,000+ users that must remain stable for 5+ years, traditional development probably makes sense. If this is a departmental tool supporting 50 users that will evolve rapidly based on user feedback, Airtable likely fits better.

10.3 creating a suitability framework

Your COE needs explicit guidance helping teams make platform decisions. A suitability assessment considers several factors:

Use case alignment: Does this match Airtable’s strengths (workflow, collaboration, rapid prototyping) or require capabilities Airtable lacks?

Data characteristics: What’s the data volume, sensitivity, and regulatory requirements? Airtable on Enterprise Scale handles 500,000 records per base (with a maximum of 250,000 records per table)^[25], which is substantial but not unlimited. Highly sensitive data might require additional controls.

User population: How many people will use this, with what level of technical sophistication? Airtable works brilliantly for 10-200 users with moderate technical skills. Beyond that, consider alternatives.

Integration requirements: Does this need to connect with existing systems, and are those integrations straightforward or complex? Airtable’s native sync covers major platforms, REST API handles custom integrations, and middleware tools bridge complex scenarios. But if you need real-time bidirectional sync with three legacy systems, that integration complexity might favor a different platform.

Longevity and stability: Is this a long-term system of record or a tactical tool? Permanent, mission-critical systems might justify traditional development. Evolving, flexible tools benefit from Airtable’s rapid iteration capability.

Document your decision framework and use it consistently. When teams propose Airtable solutions, run through the framework. When they propose building something in traditional development, ask whether Airtable would work better. The goal is right tool for right job, not maximizing Airtable usage.

10.4 case study: AWS transforms marketing operations

AWS’s marketing team faced the challenge every enterprise marketing organization knows: complex campaigns with fast-moving timelines, multiple stakeholders, and constant pressure to accelerate execution. Their existing tools weren’t keeping up with the pace.

They turned to Airtable to streamline and accelerate marketing workflows, creating a flexible platform that could adapt to the dynamic needs of global campaigns^[23]. This wasn’t just project management—it was comprehensive operational infrastructure supporting content creation, approval workflows, campaign tracking, and performance analysis.

As early adopters of Airtable AI capabilities running on Amazon Bedrock^[23], AWS demonstrates how strategic partners can leverage emerging platform capabilities to drive competitive advantage. They’re not just using Airtable—they’re pushing its boundaries to solve complex operational challenges at enterprise scale.

The results speak for themselves: faster campaign execution, more efficient workflows, and a scalable platform managing increasingly complex operations. AWS chose Airtable because it hit the sweet spot for their needs: powerful enough for enterprise complexity, flexible enough for rapid change, and accessible enough for marketing teams to drive their own innovation.

success metrics and value measurement

A COE that doesn’t measure its value won’t survive. This is the brutal reality of enterprise operations: if you can’t quantify what you deliver, you’re vulnerable every time budget cuts happen or priorities shift.

The challenge is measuring the right things. Activity metrics—number of bases built, number of users trained, number of requests processed—show you’re busy but not whether you’re valuable. Outcome metrics—time saved, costs reduced, risks mitigated, strategic initiatives enabled—demonstrate actual business impact.

11.1 a balanced scorecard approach

The most effective measurement framework tracks metrics across four perspectives, giving you a comprehensive view of COE performance rather than optimizing for single dimensions.

financial and efficiency perspective

This is what CFOs care about: are we getting financial return on the COE investment?

Time savings represents the most immediate, tangible benefit. When teams implement Airtable solutions that eliminate manual work, how many hours monthly do they recover? To measure this properly, survey users of new solutions. Ask: “How much time did this process take you weekly before this solution?” and “How much time does it take now?” Calculate the difference, multiply by number of users and their average hourly cost.

For example, BlackRock saved 580 hours monthly with their product management system^[10]. At an average fully-loaded cost of £75/hour for product managers, that’s £43,500 monthly or £522,000 annually in recaptured capacity. That capacity can be redeployed to higher-value work rather than manual status updates and coordination meetings.

Be conservative in these calculations. If someone says they saved 10 hours weekly but you suspect it’s really 6, use 6. Credible measurement beats optimistic measurement. You’d rather under-promise and over-deliver than lose credibility by inflating numbers.

Development time reduction shows how much faster solutions get built using COE templates and standards compared to starting from scratch. Establish a baseline by measuring how long “medium complexity” applications took before the COE existed. Then track development time for similar applications built using COE resources.

Research on low-code platforms documents dramatic development time improvements. Green Lemon Company built a vehicle-tracking portal in 4 weeks actual versus 4-5 months estimated using traditional development—an 85-90% time reduction^[36]. Multiple case studies show custom implementations that previously required 3-4 weeks for full development cycles deploy in 3-5 days using mature COE templates—an 80-90% time reduction enabling teams to deliver 5-7x more solutions annually with the same resources^[36]. Forrester documented organizations achieving 50% time savings for building prototypes versus legacy environments^[27].

License cost savings comes from consolidating fragmented purchasing and eliminating waste. Track the total Airtable spending before COE implementation and after. The difference includes both negotiated enterprise agreement discounts and reduced waste from de-provisioning inactive users and consolidating duplicate solutions.

Document this carefully because it’s one of your most defensible ROI metrics. Organizations commonly save 30-35% through license consolidation and removal of inactive users^[29][30]. This represents real money that would otherwise be wasted on fragmented governance.

governance and risk perspective

This is what CISOs, risk officers, and compliance teams care about: are we reducing organizational risk exposure?

Reduction in high-risk bases tracks progress on remediation. During your initial inventory, you identified a number of bases classified as high-risk due to data sensitivity, poor security configuration, or unclear ownership. Report on the quarterly reduction of this number as you retire, remediate, or rebuild these bases.

Present this as a trend: “Q1 2024: 23 high-risk bases. Q2 2024: 14 high-risk bases. Q3 2024: 6 high-risk bases.” The downward trend demonstrates systematic risk reduction.

Audit and compliance findings measures how often auditors or compliance reviews discover problems with Airtable implementations. The target should be zero findings. Track both internal security reviews and external audit results. If your internal reviews consistently find nothing to report and external auditors never flag Airtable as a concern, your governance is working.

One financial services client tracks this religiously. Before their COE, annual IT audits averaged 8-12 findings related to user-built applications including Airtable. Two years into COE operations, audit findings dropped to zero and stayed there. When auditors ask “how do you govern low-code platforms,” they have comprehensive documentation and demonstrated processes. That’s governance maturity.

Standards adherence rate shows whether new solutions actually follow COE guidelines. During architecture reviews, score applications against a checklist of standards: proper naming conventions, adequate documentation, appropriate security configuration, reasonable architectural design. Calculate the average adherence score across all reviews.

Track this over time to see if adherence improves as enablement takes hold. Early scores might average 65% as people learn standards. Mature COEs typically see 85-95% adherence because standards become second nature and templates bake best practices in automatically.

adoption and enablement perspective

This is what business leaders care about: are people actually using the platform effectively?

Platform adoption rate measures what percentage of your target user base actively uses Airtable. Define your total addressable user base (not everyone in the company, but everyone in roles where Airtable could add value). Use the Airtable admin panel to track Monthly Active Users^[24]. Divide MAU by total addressable users to get adoption rate.

Target 60-80% adoption for the specific populations where Airtable provides clear value. Universal 100% adoption usually means you’re counting people who shouldn’t be included in the denominator. Focus on populations where Airtable solves actual problems.

Track adoption trends over time and investigate both rapid growth (what drove that?) and sudden drops (what broke?). Adoption rate is your canary in the coal mine—if it’s falling, something’s wrong with user experience or value delivery.

User satisfaction via Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction surveys measures whether people are happy with the platform and COE support. Conduct semi-annual surveys of all Airtable users asking them to rate their satisfaction with the platform (1-10 scale) and the support provided by the COE.

Include open-ended questions: “What’s working well?” and “What should we improve?” The qualitative feedback often provides more actionable insight than the numbers. If NPS is 45 but comments consistently complain about template documentation quality, you know exactly what to fix.

One enterprise sees sustained NPS of 72 among their Airtable user base, significantly higher than scores for their other enterprise platforms. Users specifically cite “ease of use” and “responsive COE support” as drivers. That positive sentiment translates to reduced resistance when the COE needs to implement new governance policies.

Certified builder growth tracks how many people have completed your internal Airtable builder certification program. This demonstrates your success at enabling self-sufficient users who can build solutions following standards without constant COE hand-holding.

Set targets based on organizational size. A 500-person company might aim for 30-50 certified builders spread across business units. As this population grows, your COE can shift from building everything to enabling others to build.

innovation and business value perspective

This is what the C-suite cares about: is this driving strategic outcomes and competitive advantage?

Time to market for new initiatives compares how long it takes to launch new business capabilities using Airtable versus traditional development approaches. This isn’t theoretical—track actual projects.

BlackRock achieved 2x faster feature delivery using Airtable^[10]. One of our consultancy clients measured this formally: new client service capabilities that previously required 12-16 weeks to design, build, and deploy now launch in 4-6 weeks using Airtable. That speed advantage lets them respond to client needs faster than competitors using traditional development.

Document both the time savings and the business impact of faster delivery. Getting to market eight weeks sooner might mean capturing a competitive opportunity worth £200,000 in new business. That strategic value exceeds operational savings significantly.

Strategic initiatives enabled maps COE projects to corporate strategic objectives. Maintain a portfolio of COE work and explicitly link each major project to a strategic goal. Report quarterly on the number of strategic initiatives directly supported by the COE’s work.

This requires partnership with business leadership to understand their strategic priorities. If digital transformation is a strategic priority, show how the COE enables rapid digitalization of manual processes. If operational efficiency matters, demonstrate productivity improvements. If innovation is the focus, highlight how the platform enables experimentation.

One technology company ties every significant COE project to one of five strategic pillars defined by their CEO. Their quarterly board presentation includes a slide showing the number of initiatives in each pillar that leveraged Airtable. This explicit connection to strategy keeps executive attention and support.

Business outcome achievement measures actual business metric improvements resulting from Airtable solutions. This is the gold standard but requires close partnership with business sponsors. For major projects, work with the business owner to define a key metric they care about: customer retention rate, sales cycle time, project delivery timeline, whatever matters to their success.

Measure baseline before implementing the Airtable solution. Measure the same metric three months after launch. Document the change and any other factors that might have influenced it.

Example: Marketing implements a campaign management system in Airtable. They measure campaign launch timeline before (8.2 weeks average from brief to launch) and after (5.4 weeks average). That 34% acceleration lets them run more campaigns annually with the same resources, directly supporting revenue growth objectives.

Be intellectually honest about causation. If twelve things changed simultaneously, you can’t claim Airtable caused all improvement. But you can claim it contributed meaningfully, especially if business stakeholders confirm the connection.

11.2 making metrics actionable

Collecting metrics isn’t enough—you need to use them to drive decisions and communicate value.

Create a quarterly scorecard presenting key metrics from all four perspectives in a single-page format. This becomes your regular executive communication tool. Include trend arrows (improving, stable, declining) to make patterns obvious at a glance.

Turn numbers into stories that resonate with different audiences. CFOs want license cost savings presented as direct P&L impact. Business unit leaders want time savings presented as capacity to handle more work. Risk officers want audit findings presented as avoided compliance penalties. Tailor the narrative to your audience while using the same underlying data.

Use metrics to identify problems early. If adoption drops, investigate why. If satisfaction scores decline, find out what changed. If development time increases despite mature COE, examine whether complexity is growing or standards are creating friction. Metrics should trigger investigation and correction, not just reporting.

Celebrate and share wins widely. When you achieve measurable success, communicate it broadly. A case study showing that Marketing saved 280 hours monthly becomes a powerful recruitment tool for other departments considering Airtable. Success breeds more success as skeptics see concrete evidence of value.

The investment in rigorous measurement pays off when budget renewal time arrives or when economic downturns force cost cutting. COEs with compelling value metrics survive. Those without them get eliminated.

conclusion: from platform to strategic asset

Here’s what we know for certain: Airtable represents a fundamental shift in how enterprises can solve operational problems. The platform democratizes solution building in ways that generate real business value when done properly. Over 80% of the Fortune 100 use it. BlackRock saves 580 hours monthly with it. Dropbox rebuilt their global content engine on it. AWS runs marketing operations on it. These aren’t toy implementations—they’re strategic business systems.

But here’s what we also know: democratization without governance creates expensive chaos. Organizations that let Airtable proliferate organically waste 15-25% of their spending on redundant licenses, accumulate crushing technical debt, carry unquantified compliance risk, and lose productivity to duplicated effort. The platform’s ease of use becomes its liability without structure.

The Centre of Excellence is the bridge between Airtable’s potential and its enterprise value realization. Not governance for governance’s sake—governance that enables innovation rather than killing it. Structure that empowers business users to build solutions confidently, knowing they’re following patterns that work, using templates that scale, and operating within security guardrails that protect the organization.

12.1 the path forward

For organizations just beginning this journey, the framework is clear:

Secure executive sponsorship first. You need a senior leader who’ll champion the COE, secure budget, provide air cover during difficult governance decisions, and represent Airtable in strategic conversations. Without this, you’re building on sand.

Start with remediation to understand your current state. Inventory existing bases, assess risk, prioritize cleanup. This unglamorous work provides the foundation. You can’t govern what you don’t know exists.

Establish minimum viable governance quickly. Don’t try to build the perfect COE on day one. Get basic data classification working, implement simple architecture review for new projects, centralize licensing, and launch basic training. Iterate from there based on what you learn.

Build the hybrid organization deliberately. Identify potential champions in business units, bring them into the fold early, and give them resources to succeed. The hub-and-spoke model works because it combines central expertise with distributed delivery capability.

Measure value relentlessly and communicate it effectively. Track time savings, cost reductions, risk mitigation, and strategic initiatives enabled. Turn metrics into stories that resonate with executives. Demonstrate that the COE delivers tangible business value, not just governance overhead.

Evolve as you mature. COEs aren’t static—they grow in sophistication as the organization’s capability increases. Standards become more comprehensive. Templates become more sophisticated. The organization shifts from centrally building everything to enabling self-service with support.

12.2 the critical questions

For leaders contemplating this journey, the decision rests on five questions:

Do you have executive commitment for multi-year investment? Building a COE isn’t a one-quarter project. It requires sustained investment in people, processes, and tools. Leaders need to commit to this investment based on strategic value, not just immediate ROI.

Are you prepared for organizational change? Moving from siloed tool usage to collaborative platform governance requires cultural shift. Business units must adapt to standards and oversight. IT must shift from controlling to enabling. Everyone needs to accept that short-term friction produces long-term value.

Do you understand the risks of inaction? The cost of ungoverned Airtable—wasted spending, technical debt, compliance violations, lost productivity—must be acknowledged honestly. Doing nothing isn’t cost-free; it’s just paying different costs invisibly.

Can you dedicate necessary resources? A functioning COE needs staffing: 2-3 people for small deployments, 8-12 for large ones. It needs budget for tools, training, and templates. Resource commitment must match ambition or the COE will fail.

Is your organization ready to embrace “empowerment within guardrails”? The hybrid model only works if leadership truly believes in enabling business users to innovate while providing structure to do so safely. If the instinct is to control everything centrally or let chaos reign, neither extreme produces good outcomes.

If you can answer “yes” to these questions, the path forward is clear. Implement the framework in this white paper: choose your organizational model, build the seven core components, remediate existing deployments, avoid common failure patterns, and measure value rigorously.

The enterprises that master this paradox—democratization with governance, innovation within structure, agility with control—will lead in the next decade. They’ll build solutions in days instead of months. They’ll experiment safely. They’ll respond to market changes faster than competitors bogged down in traditional development cycles or drowning in ungoverned chaos.

The competitive advantage awaits those who act. The blueprint is here. The time to start building is now.

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A white paper by prettysimpl (Airtable Gold Partner)

For organizations ready to transform their Airtable deployment from fragmented tools into strategic enterprise asset, prettysimpl provides advisory services, implementation support, and ongoing COE partnership. We’ve guided 47 organizations through this journey, and we’re ready to help you navigate yours.