Cisco 3.0
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Business, Networking on
One of the themes at last week’s CScape event was the re-invention of Cisco as a collaborative service oriented organisation.
This is one of the issues I’ve been thinking about for some time. How do we build businesses that focus on process, on collaboration and on dealing with a global organisation? The service orientated enterprise is on its way, and we need to consider how we structure businesses to operate in a world where IT is no longer hierarchical, where users can define their own applications, and Web 2.0-style tools bring social networking to the desktop.
I’ve written about the architecture council movement before, as an approach to aligning business and IT goals. Cisco has taken this approach to heart, and has taken it further, using the idea of stakeholder councils as a structure for managing a business that’s too global and too large for the traditional hands-on C-level management structure we’re familiar with.
Councils of interest are a new way of working that really couldn’t have existed a few years ago. To work effectively they need to be part of a networked organisation that has tools to enable deep collaboration.
That’s more than just emailing documents around an intranet - it’s about collaborative document creation, video conferencing, expert identification, and distributed decision making. There need to be tools to help teams build their own enterprise mashups, bringing information together from multiple sources and finding appropriate ways of visualising the resulting data set without distorting the information it contains.
These are complex tasks, and Cisco has a big job ahead as it reengineers its business model. However the rewards are great, and Cisco’s CEO John Chambers says it has already seen benefits - allowing the company to substantially increase its number of key goals from two or three to more than ten. That’s a change that allows Cisco to increase its risk of project failure, as an expanded portfolio can be expected to contain projects that fail - in the certainty that there will be many projects that succeed.
It’s a brave new world out there - and it’s one that traditionally hierarchical businesses like Microsoft need to embrace. There’s no point in being conservative for comfort’s sake, especially when you’ve got thousands of experts you can draw on when making a decision. The networked business should be able to make decisions far more quickly than the slow hierarchical organisation tree, as messages pass from synapse to synapse directly, rather than up and down the slow chain of command.
So, are you a dinosaur or a shrew? If the pundits are to believed, there’s a big asteroid of a recession on the way, and one way to survive is to be nimble and fast. If you can respond to your customers needs faster than the competition, well, then you’ve just proved Darwin right. Evolution is for businesses and IT too.
It’ll be interesting to see if Cisco 3.0 is an example of the next stage in business evolution. I suspect it is.
–Simon
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