Coca Cola may not immediately strike you as an obvious reference for how to use ICT innovatively to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public services.  I thought it a solution story that is worth bringing to your attention here when viewing the story of how Coca Cola has deployed SharePoint Online in a cloud computing solution to improve workforce collaboration and provide one version of the truth with a single, well-managed and structured repository of corporate information:

With 72,000 people, 431 facilities and 55,000 vehicles serving 2.4 coolers worldwide, finding a way to connect all the Coca-Cola employees was a major challenge.  Microsoft Online Services, in particular SharePoint Online, has enabled Coca Cola to build a safe and secure intranet that gives the global workforce the ability to share knowledge in ways that were familiar to them, such as blogs and social networking.

The Government Spending Review is a catalyst that has stimulated Public Sector organisations into fundamental questioning and re-evaluation of their strategy and how they can deliver public services with considerably greater efficiency and effectiveness.  Recent media stories such as the initiative by three London councils (Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, and Westminster) to merge services in a ‘super council’ and the strategic decision by Suffolk County Council to outsource most of its services and retain a core staff to manage the outsourced contracts, demonstrate that any effective restructuring and rationalisation is likely to involve considerable upheaval to people, processes and technology.

Technology will be an important enabler of this change in the way public services are delivered and much better information sharing and cross-agency/organisation online collaboration will be essential to success.  In that respect, Coca Cola may still seem an odd customer example to reference but I would ask you towatch the video and see how a global commercial organisation is successfully managing the complexities of information management and collaboration using a cloud-based SharePoint solution to empower individuals based anywhere to work more effectively with anyone across their organisation to innovate and inform and ensure a single version of the truth is available across a complex organisation.