Co-designing and igniting a new IT operating model

Carlsberg is one of the leading brands that produces beverages both to professional customers (B2B) and consumers (B2C).

Carlsberg has more than 40,000 employees working at multiple sites throughout the world. The Carlsberg IT organisation consists of Carlsberg Global Shared Services (GSS with 700+ employees) and Carlsberg Global Business Services (GBS with 250+ employees).

Carlsberg’s IT organisation needed to redesign its existing operating model to become even more customer-oriented, increasing global services and operations and utilising its talent and innovation power. The new operating model also needed to enhance agility, scalability and collaboration across units

Restrained by current operating structures and ways of working

The two units of Carlsberg IT both experienced that their current operating structures and ways of working were restraining them from:

• Delivering global services and being detached from the local markets and their demands towards technology
• Being customer-oriented and collaborating across units due to unclear accountabilities and unsolved problems
• Utilising their talent
• Working agile and focusing on innovatio
  

Therefore, Carlsberg’s IT organisation experienced a clear need for creating a new IT operating model that addressed these challenges and ensured that the two units could serve the business in a faster way while anchoring the new ways of working across units.

The project approach

Together with Carlsberg, we based the project approach on Implement’s IT operating model and capability model, which included future benchmarking against vanguards of the industry.

Throughout the entire project lifecycle, Implement assisted with the following as key focus areas:

• Translating the overall IT strategy into future capability needs
• Assessing the current organisation, redesign, reorganisation and plan for upskilling and reskilling across all layers of the organisation to have the right talent at the right places
• Defining clear roles with responsibility and accountability
• Defining key interaction points between the different units

The project was done through a bottom-up approach, ensuring involvement and anchoring across all layers of Carlsberg’s organisation.

Co-designing Carlsberg’s future IT operating model and making it come to life

With the project, Carlsberg established a new operating model leading to an increased focus on the “customer” with a clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and points of contact into GBS. The new operating model also impacted the collaboration with the markets to become stronger as it created a direct link to a functional tower or a discipline by establishing structures to support the matrix organisation.

Carlsberg succeeded in gaining traction and priority for the project across the whole organisation as the solution and core story around how the IT operating model should come to life were co-created with the leadership team. Each leader led the translation of the IT operating model and involvement of all employees to give feedback and provide clarity as well as visibility for the purpose, roles, responsibilities and ways of collaborating. And so Carlsberg defined and initiated concrete actions and a road map towards the future capabilities needed to enable its future operating model.

Creating the new IT operating model, Carlsberg secured a high degree of involvement at all layers at the right time. This had a cascading effect, resulting in an organisation with an increased understanding of how to collaborate across the different units with different purposes.