AWS urges enterprises to embrace their heritage when facing down disruption from startups

Slow IT delivery cycles

These challenges included slow IT delivery cycles, exacerbated by technology teams spending too much time tending to the needs of the firm’s legacy infrastructure, and a process-laden business culture.

“[Process] was for me one of the biggest struggles,” she said. “We had to go through the procurement process, the finance process, the legal process… and the process really became the enemy.”

There was also a fair amount of resistance to change within Coca-Cola, she said: “[There was] a lot of cultural resistance of the changes and the future, and there were a lot of people [working] at Coca-Cola [who had been there] longer than I had. When you have that longevity at a company, it is very difficult to push through change, and we needed to focus on what our customers wanted.”

Overcoming some of these struggles involved reorganising the teams it put in place to oversee various digital projects, with McLemore calling out the work that went into updating some of its HR systems, which included replacing a sizeable on-premise SAP deployment with Workdays’ cloud technologies as an example.

The team overseeing this project was made up of 150 people, which McLemore acknowledges brought its own organisational difficulties, until the decision was taken to break up this big team into a number of smaller ones, based on what part of the project they were involved in.

“[Once] we broke it down into core functions, we began to pick up momentum,” she said. “In order to transform, the first thing you need to do is gain technical flexibility and speed, and [that means] you have to organise into smaller, independent, flexible teams.”

Seeing progress occur can play an important part in helping win over people who remain unconvinced by a company’s digital transformation efforts, as can “lowering the cost” of failure within an organisation, so people feel more at ease with getting involved.

“We had to lower the cost of failure [at Coca-Cola]. No-one is going to take you to the future if when they screw up and something goes wrong, you burn them at the stake,” he said. “If you’re made an example of what not to do, you’re not going to get the reach anymore.”

Another barrier to enterprise digital transformation is a feeling in the company that change is not possible, and – in response – McLemore said it is important for business and IT leaders to remember that, once upon a time, the organisation they work for was a startup too.

“I think enterprises forget they have innovation in their DNA,” she said, before making reference to the fact Coca-Cola started out over 130 years ago being marketed as cough syrup, before the company pivoted and repositioned it as a beverage product. 

“[For enterprises] it is about regaining that DNA and regaining that focus on the things that make you different and the things that are value statements of your organisation, and then pairing that with the technology and the capabilities that exist in the market today,” she said.