The final key note address of SoTeC 2011 was given by Ginna Raahauge, Vice President of IT for Cisco.
Salesforce.com’s PE ratio is off the charts relative to revenue. Big things are happening. Infrastructure and software represent billions of dollars of opportunity.
It’s not work/life balance any more, but work/life integration. Work from home: Cisco has an aggressive flex policy, allowing employees to work from anywhere.
Integration of tools and devices we use in our personal life: There are 42 million status updates on Facebook per hour. (Statistics were also given for Youtube, blog posts, email, etc.)
Changing worth: She asked how many people in the room worked with a global company; a little more than half did. Events in remote parts of the world can affect your work. One of Cisco’s major fulfillment centers is in Thailand, so Cisco was hit by the tragic flooding there. Cisco opened a call center in Egypt this year. They met the Minister of Technology about opening the call center, and 60 days later there was a revolution, and the government shut the Internet down. “Good you’re here, but there’s definitely a strain in the system.”
Twitter traffic increased 100 times in one week, due to events in Egypt.
Cisco needed to protect their employees and partners, so they rerouted to another call center. There was no disruption to their distributor base. They used social media to track the situation on the ground; would the government hold out?
Lots of events affect us. During the Japan crisis, Google set up a people finder page. Cisco used that to account for every Cisco employee in Japan and their families.
How do we take the opportunity and make it a viable business model? Gartner did a study on changing IT priorities. In the past, we have focused on cost reduction and productivity. Now we’re focusing on reinvestment. 2010 marked a shift to growth. In 2011, innovation made the top ten trends for the first time in three years. Growth will continue to be the focus through 2014. We need to be more agile. IT spending is trending slightly up.
Where Cisco and Gartner see the biggest growth is in telecommunications and computing hardware, and big data. Google has been buying dark fiber for the last five years. Cisco is building self-contained massive data centers.
Critical questions for IT: Navigating volatility, anticipating and responding.
Collaborating and influencing: As a relationship based company, Cisco even does some business on Facebook.
Sprinting with precision.
Cisco has been reevaluating the company. “We think we’re undervalued.” How can IT add business value?
The Japan crisis showed how outsourced our data was. It’s one thing to outsource processes, and another to outsource data. US IT people had to login to systems in Japan and help. Customers asked about the radiation impact. We collaborated, and had to be creative and influential.
IT starts with productivity and cost. But you need to come back with solid reinvestment to build your ROI and profitability. You need innovation, leadership, customer and employee experience, and growth.
What does it take for something to go viral? How come Facebook has taken off, but Google + has stalled a bit? Because we want to go to one place.
Creating conversation about innovation drives a growth agenda. Cisco’s transformation involved a mindset of IT as a services organization. Cisco has grown leaps and bounds by acquiring companies and putting together productivities. Now it needs to do a full integration.
Use cases: Data centers and resiliency, 40% cost savings, 30% more power and efficiency, better utilization and operational efficiency. There’s an IT growth opportunity on the energy side, a better understanding of our carbon footprint.
Conferencing integration: The crashes in 2002 and 2008 stopped travel. Face to face is best, but WebEx can substitute when necessary. Cisco was able to reduce travel costs 50% by holding major three day teleconference events, run visually.
What’s next for Cisco’s transformation? Mobile traffic is increasing, Internet traffic is increasing, and video makes up a larger percentage of traffic.
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated,” Confucius
Cisco’s Five Priorities (replacing 30 priorities and 50 market adjacencies)
1) Leadership is the Core .. routing and sharing services, including security and mobility.
2) Collaboration
3) Data Centers
4) Video
5) Architectures for Business Transformation
There is more shadow IT than ever before. Change is not going to slow down.
Generational differences: Millenials are influenced by Facebook, Y!, and Google. 51% of young workers were prepared to accept a lower wage or lesser role if their work contributed to something “more important or meaningful.” [LG: But younger workers have been saying this at least since the days when Baby Boomers were younger workers. Is this a generational change, or a stage of life thing? It's easier to accept a lower wage for more meaningful work when you don't yet have a mortgage and kids.]
Traditionalist: “No news is good news.”
Baby Boomer: Formal and political.
Generation X: “Honest and unfiltered.”
Millenial: “All the time with everyone.”
The New Normal is volatility and uncertainty. Build for agility. Use IT to build economic sustainability. Consider the possibilities. The true value of IT is not what we make, but what we make possible.
My first contact with the global economy was when my father retired, back in 1970. He had been working for the South American branch of one of the Big Five accounting firms, so his pension, although more or less pegged to the dollar, was paid by a South American bank, and that sometimes made a difference. It left Dad praying, he said, for the peace of Jerusalem and the prosperity of Brazil.