Cisco

CASE SUMMARY

Cisco 1.0 was all about getting people connected by selling truckloads of routers and switches, and it company one of the fastest-growing in American business history. Cisco 2.0 was cantered on business process change, using all the hardware and new gears like IP telephones. Cisco 3.0 employs more hardware and software to transform business models enabling productivity growth to soar as it did in the late 1990’s.

Cisco believes that productivity can grow not at 1 or 2 %, but 3-5% for the sustainable future and this is an audacious vision that will be driven by the type of collaborative, Web 2.0 technology that keeps employees in touch via interactive web forums like wiki blogs; IM; interactive “team blogs” and above all videoconferencing and its big brother telepresence. The question that arises is whether Cisco’s latest initiative is only videoconferencing or something revolutionary?

The new emphasis on intensely collaborative technologies at Cisco ups the ante for their CIO Rebecca Jacoby, who has been the point person for rolling out telepresence and other new age tools. Jacoby is leading Cisco through a transformation by making itself the test bed for the next generation of collaborative tools. Since it began to roll out the immersive conferencing technology in late 2006, Cisco has developed telepresence rooms in 160 of its offices worldwide.

With a globalized workforce of highly connected, tech savvy users, the adoption and learning of flow both ways, to and from Cisco is possible. The biggest challenge is to keep up with where ideas are going and seeing how they can keep shaped and focused. One of the initiatives undertaken by Jacoby is the creation of an online communication centre where new collaborative tools can be deployed, tested and refined. Equally powerful is Cisco’s I-Zone wiki, a companywide forum for new business ideas launched by emerging technologies group. In 18 months it has produced 600 ideas for potential $ 1bn per...