Have you had your Coke today?  Jack Bergstrand knows what it takes for a $30 billion beverage company to maintain its global brand. During his 25-year career with The Coca-Cola Company, he gained much operational and strategic experience running everything from manufacturing to marketing, and even IT. In fact, as vice president of business systems, Bergstrand overhauled the company's global IT operations, including data standards operations, and enterprise-wide global systems initiatives.

Bergstrand's first major IT project included spearheading The Coca-Cola Company's global rollout of a single SAP solution. The rollout included the concentrate division, all manufacturing facilities, and an overall accounting backbone. He says that the project provided the needed discipline or foundation for achieving business impact. "It also established a single platform for assessing global information which dramatically improved the company's transparency.  This single source of the truth enabled people to make better, faster, and consistent decisions.  Over time, the project helped the company benefit from global economies of scale, such as shared services, and better handle growth, through acquisitions or internal efforts.”
 
When the SAP project was combined with IT, Bergstrand got the job of running the entire global IT operation, but he first had to restructure the organization. In this podcast, Bergstrand talks about how the restructuring of The Coca-Cola's global IT operations achieved business impact, what things CIOs can do to improve the business impact of IT, and how organizational structure can influence business impact.
 
Today, Bergstrand, who retired from The Coca-Cola Company, now leads Brand Velocity, a consulting firm focused on helping Fortune 500 companies improve the business impact of IT across large-scale technology projects. He says, "We help our clients rapidly identify and overcome the business issues that cause 70 percent of large technology projects to fall behind or fail completely." In this podcast, he also provides some of the warning signs CIOs need to look for to prevent project delays.

Bio
Before becoming CEO of Brand Velocity, Jack Bergstrand spent close to 25 years in executive leadership positions at a $40 billion software drink company. His positions included vice president of business systems for The Coca-Cola Company and senior vice president and chief financial officer of Coca-Cola Beverages, Ltd. He also served as the vice president of manufacturing and logistics. During Bergstrand's first 10 years with the company, he focused on sales and marketing, holding the positions of division manager, and vice president of marketing for The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New England.
 
He has a MS in management from Stanford University, a MA in advertising from Michigan State University, and is a doctoral candidate in the Executive Leadership Program at The George Washington University.

Resources
Weathering the Perfect Storm - CFO magazine
How Executives and Boards Can Improve Large-Scale Technology Projects - TechWeb Library

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis