Thirsty work

By Julian Rogers

For a company as ubiquitous as drinks manufacturer The Coca-Cola Company, its bottler, customer and consumer-facing IT are a crucial cog in global operations spanning over 200 countries. For Sabine Everaet, Europe Group CIO, it’s all about seeing the opportunities of how technology can transform and grow the business, she tells Julian Rogers.

“We need to be ready as an organisation to have generation Y onboard and have them be productive.”
-Sabine Everaet

Before being handed the CIO role 18 months ago you worked in a variety of positions and departments throughout your 15-year career at Coca-Cola. How has this experience stood you in a good position to take the beverage company’s top IT job in Europe?

Sabine Everaet. Before I joined Coca-Cola I was working as a consultant for KPMG and Price Waterhouse mainly on change management and organisational design initiatives. This gave me a business background, and also, I had the opportunity to get experience in different types of industries. After four years in consulting, I started with Coke – the concentrate, marketing and innovation business – as a business analyst / project manager. My first big achievement was the implementation of an ERP system for the juice business in Europe that gave me more of the logistics experience. Then, I moved on to different IT Account Management roles where I learned to engage properly with internal and external customers trying to understand local business needs and cover them as much as possible with European solutions, a big challenge, that required a lot of influencing.

I became the lead of the European application development and support team, and installed a PMO to introduce a formalised tollgate process for development and deployment of any IT solution. Establishing formal processes always requires change management. Associates typically question the need for more formalised deliverables, but need to understand that this is to support the thinking process, allowing for calculated risk management instead of forcing deliverables for the sake of it.

Just before I got appointed Europe Group CIO, I was Deployment Services Director for two years on a worldwide bottling programme. This was critical for me to gain bottler experience which I did not have so far. I have travelled around the world – Australia, China, the Philippines and South Africa – to drive process, data and system standards in a culturally very diverse environment. That was truly positively impacting my skills and experience to grow into my current role.

I have always been a passionate and energetic person, typically satisfied when truly achieving something that drives the business forward. I would strongly encourage people that want to grow to focus on company interest versus personal interest – do the right things for the company and you will be rewarded – and, step out of your comfort zone to experience something totally new which is enriching and preparing you for the next step. Never be happy with what you have achieved, raise the bar for yourself and the people around you on a continuous basis. This is critical.

What were your priorities when you became CIO last year? 

SE. IT globally was in the midst of a transformation when I started, and Europe had to contribute US$1.9 million savings – a key driver of this was the renegotiation of our technology and end user computing outsourcing contract.

It included moving our outsourced IT service desk from Toronto to Manila and at the same time reducing the number of languages from six to one – English only. Also our outsource provider moved the back office monitoring activities mostly from Brussels to Voronezh in Russia. For the local presence in the 28 European locations to deal with end user computing incidents, we moved from a staff augmentation to service based contract. That all resulted in achieving the required savings.

At the same time, big transformation programmes were run in Finance and HR that needed much of IT’s attention. Our team stepped up and started playing an ‘integrated planning’ role, not just planning IT but all business activities, and that across the different functions. This effort was, and is still highly, appreciated by our clients as it allows us to oversee the full impact of the transformation and to manage the risks. In parallel, we need to prepare the team and its skills for moving from back office IT support to enabling the business to grow through IT enabled innovation in the areas of consumers, customers and bottlers.

Another key focus was to build a strong relationship with senior management in Europe, and be included in their routines. It is important to be able to listen to our internal clients when they discuss their specific business challenges. From these discussions, I picked three areas for us to drive innovative change as to how IT can contribute to business growth including driving and executing a far advanced collaboration strategy. At the same time, we had to uplift the credibility of IT as an organisation. Due to restructurings, outsourcing and off-shoring, headcount was reduced by 80 percent over the past 10 years, the operating expenditure by 60 percent. I have made that picture clear to our management team and obtained the ‘go’ for increasing the investment in IT for the first time in 10 years.

Here at Coca-Cola we have a global IT environment. I had to learn to balance the global needs of globalising IT and finding synergy and cost savings with the local requirements of the business. It’s about managing expectations for both the business here in Europe and our IT counterparts in Atlanta [the Company’s headquarters].

How has the recession affected Coca-Cola Europe? Have budgets been cut and are you being expected to do more with less?

SE. Even before the recession hit us, we had a mandate from our CEO to save US$500 million by different functions over three years – 2009 through to 2011. Therefore, we had initiated the transformation initiatives in IT, Finance and HR, as I mentioned before. Yes, on one hand we are doing more with less, we saved 40 percent on our technology and end user computing outsourcing contract. But as of 2010, I’m convincing the business in Europe and Global IT management to reinvest in IT, less into the back-office part but more to drive front office programmes and reinforce the business partnership.

Do you think this tough period has given you the opportunity to be more innovative?

SE. Yes, absolutely. There are different dimensions to innovation. On one hand, we look at it from an IT operating model perspective. This is about the way we operate internally, but also how we execute our outsourcing contracts in a smarter and more efficient way. We started collaborating with our strategic partners to drive this type of innovation. The challenge is going to be adapting the contract before its expiry date.

We are also looking at innovating IT in order to drive personal and team efficiency and effectiveness. We are in the process of building a cohesive collaboration strategy. This includes unified communications to have our colleagues and partners be only one click away and be reached at the device they want. We are ready to launch a wiki-platform to interact around services and programmes, internally in IT but also with our clients. We have just launched an internal Facebook, and are evaluating a YouTube type of tool.

The third innovation area is the most important one and is related to understanding how IT enabled innovation drives either cost reduction or extra revenue and growth for the business. With Finance and HR we are looking at transforming and standardising the processes supported by new systems. At the same time we are working on two, still confidential, innovation projects with the business in the customer and consumer space. The challenge, as for many companies, I suppose, is to find bandwidth in the team to execute the plan, and at the same time drive innovation. The art is to bring this continuous innovation mindset to your teams.

You mentioned your internal versions of Facebook and YouTube. Why you are implementing these social tools?

SE. We need to be ready as an organisation to have generation Y onboard, and have them be productive. People compare their home computing environment with the enterprise one, and start interacting with colleagues just as with their friends and family. We have just launched the internal Facebook to encourage informal interactions and support an organisation that is becoming more and more network based. It also enables us to find expertise throughout the world. This encourages replication of best practices, instead of re-inventing the wheel, and not wisely investing our marketing funds. We are currently testing desktop videoconferencing, etc. We are typically limited by security and network bandwidth. We need to learn to work around these constraints and provide effective and efficient solutions for our end-users. We have a long way to go.

How is cloud computing impacting the way the business operates?

SE. At Coca-Cola, we are not yet taking advantage of the cloud computing possibilities. As we are shifting towards a truly service-oriented organisation, we are assessing options to shift applications to the cloud. The main reasons are cost – you pay per consumption unit – flexibility, easy of support, etcetera. 

We hear a lot of talk about how the CIO role is going to transform in the next 10 years. What’s your 2020 vision?

SE. I do not believe there is a single answer to this question. There are a lot and different opportunities for CIOs but how you shape the role is based on your own experience, interest, potential and drive to influence the business to consolidate different responsibilities. I see the role evolving into a business transformation role which could be either truly transformational in terms of innovation and drastically changing the business operating model within the company and with its partners, or, leading business process management type of work and shared services.

When recruiting, do you look for IT professionals with a good level of business acumen as well as a technology head on their shoulders?

SE. Definitely. Understanding the business is both about the nitty-gritty details of business processes and the short term and strategic direction of the business. On top of that, I would be looking for people with very strong client engagement skills, a lot creativity that helps them to see the opportunities, pro-activity to carve out the work when the opportunity arises, and a lot of drive and passion for learning and execution.

Given the fact we work with a lot of outsource providers as well as internal service providers in Atlanta, it is less important to be truly technical experts. Although, our experience in the team is that a minimum level of technical expertise is required to first and foremost understand the potential of IT, but also to validate solutions delivered by our partners. Working with outside partners on the other hand requires strategic vendor management skills, as opposed to the typical people leadership skills to manage internal teams. Working with in-house service providers requires a high desire to collaborate with other teams and the perseverance to influence the strategy and quality of the deliverables. People need to see how global solutions can cover local needs, but more importantly learn to drive the global agenda and strategy from the field.