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TroyDeJong

IT Services Manager

Africa and Levant Region

I look after IT Services across Cisco’s Africa and Levant region although I am based in Cisco’s UK HQ office in London Bedfont Lakes; an interesting dynamic made possible through the advanced collaboration tools that we have at our disposal today across the organisation.

I am now in my 11th year within IT at Cisco having been based in the UK throughout, with the exception of a 2 month special assignment in 2006 to San Jose, Cisco’s corporate HQ; certainly an interesting experience that I have recommended to many a colleague before now.

I started out in the desktop team and quickly moved into the deployment of Voice and Unified communications tools, then onto Wide Area Network architecture optimization. More recently I have been operating in a broader, more consultative capacity, directly supporting the head of Sales for Africa and his leadership teams. My core focus is on how we can improve the end to end client experience and maximise Return on Investment of IT Services for our employees and ultimately be able to tell this story to our partners and customers. Much of my work involves supporting with customer and occasionally press engagements, which I hugely enjoy.

My journey at Cisco has been both exciting and challenging as you might expect. The first half of my Cisco career saw me supporting our European client base, the right stage on which to start out, in a more mature market where planning and predicting deliveries was wholly achievable for the most part. During the second half of my tenure, I have been committed to supporting the Emerging Market’s theatre, an area of intense focus and opportunity for Cisco. Here with all the planning in the world, sometimes delivering a relatively small change for clients can demand as much resource and effort as delivering transformational change in a more mature market. That said, where we have delivered transformational change across Africa and Emerging as a whole, particularly of late with the arrival of the submarine cables which have enabled this change, the rewards have been enormous. We have a vision in our team; delivering “Equal access to IT Services” for our Emerging Markets based clients that are the equal of services we deliver to our clients all over the world ; one day this will be a reality and sooner than we might think.