Commentary

Mary Hayes Weier
 

Coca-Cola's CIO Talks Innovation

The décor in the executive wing at Coca-Cola's headquarters -- Ming vases, mahogany furniture, plush carpets -- could have been lifted straight out of 1886, the year Coke was born. No question, Coke is a company steeped in tradition. But equally important for Coke is continued innovation, and that's where CIO Jean-Michel Arès and his team are helping out.

The décor in the executive wing at Coca-Cola's headquarters -- Ming vases, mahogany furniture, plush carpets -- could have been lifted straight out of 1886, the year Coke was born. No question, Coke is a company steeped in tradition. But equally important for Coke is continued innovation, and that's where CIO Jean-Michel Arès and his team are helping out.I met with Jean-Michel and some of his team members at Coke's Atlanta headquarters last week, to talk about systems and processes that are helping keep innovation alive at Coke. See for yourself what Coke is doing:


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To recap from the video, what follows are some of Coke's innovation efforts:

  • Coke's "common innovation framework," a process and an IT platform (based on Clarity project-management software) that gives operating units in 50 countries the ability to search for and reapply brand and marketing concepts around the world. That means the Coke team in Europe, for example, can see what's working in cutting-edge Japan and reapply that concept. Yet that's just one example of many possibilities provided by such visibility -- consider that Coke has a mind-boggling 400 brands of beverages.

  • Its "right execution daily" system that lets commercial teams define a picture of success at stores and publish those results to salespersons' mobile devices in other stores.

  • Templates of best practices that are easily replicated throughout the company, made possible by Coke's use of SAP's relatively new service-oriented architecture technologies.
  • Arès says Coke also is looking at software as a service, joining the growing legion of very big companies who don't consider SaaS just a small-to-midsize business thing. CRM and desktop apps, Arès says, are obvious areas Coke will be looking at.

    All this seems pretty good proof to me that even 100-year-old companies can still innovate. What do you think?


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