More than technology, collaboration is about process and culture
Today I’d like to talk about how you sustain a collaboration effort and keep it moving forward inside your organization.
Collaboration is much more than an IT capability – it is also about process and culture. At Cisco, we recognized this point and realized we needed to create an active, engaged internal collaboration and communications board to drive our process internally.
According to the recent Cisco Connected World Report, three out of five employees believe they don’t need to be in the office to be productive or efficient at their jobs. Yet 45 percent of IT departments are feeling challenged to provide the mobile, distributed access that workers want. This challenge crosses company sizes, countries and industries, but is especially notable in fields like construction that have traditionally required in-person engagement. Like many IT organizations that must partner with their facilities counterparts, Cisco IT works closely with Cisco Workplace Resources (WPR) and its construction vendors. In our new Texas Data Center 2 (DC2) project, we’re learning that productivity gains for our partners and vendors are gains for us too.
Tags: BIM, collaboration, data center, IPD, texas
How do you get started deploying collaboration?
In my meetings with Cisco customers, I find that companies have moved beyond asking “what is collaboration?” to “how do I get started?”
Corporate executives at the most senior levels are at a point where they understand the value of collaboration, how this will transform how we work and how IT really does deliver “services” (I’ll fully address the value proposition of collaboration in a later blog – stay tuned for that).
Given the complexity of enterprise networks, solving a problem reported by a customer can often mean drawing on the expertise of multiple Cisco support engineers (SEs). But with more than 2,300 Cisco SEs worldwide, we needed to give them online tools for finding colleagues who know the right information and are available right now to offer help.
We developed these tools in the form of a “Find an Expert” application, which allows the engineers to identify and collaborate with experts who match the skills they require to solve tough customer problems. The application shows a detailed view of each expert’s skills, then provides collaboration buttons that are implemented in the internally developed case-management applications also used by the busy Cisco SEs. Read More »
Tags: CUAE, Find an Expert, Presence, WebEX
Why is Cisco’s approach to collaboration different?
If you’ve been following the trends in collaboration, you know that several technology companies have developed various forms of collaboration solutions. As I’ve said in my previous blog, Cisco’s solution to collaboration is Cisco Quad which is an approach rooted in communications (stemming from our core competency in unified communication) and video (another area of our expertise is in video conferencing and services). We believe it’s this killer combination of communications and video that will ultimately best define and drive collaboration and, of course, include the ability to access text and content along the way.
Cisco’s existing production data center in Texas has 1920 batteries protecting IT loads in the event of a utility power failure. Our Texas Data Center 2 (DC2) will have zero. Running at around 3000 rpm to generate 480V (60Hz) of electricity, the dynamic rotary UPS system will provide Texas DC2 with efficient, reliable backup power that’s both planet friendly and a sound investment. And if you read more below, I’ll tell you why.
Tags: data center, rotary dynamic flywheel, texas, UPS
WHAT IS COLLABORATION?
Picking up on my last blog, I’d like to delve into the topic of: “what is collaboration?”
We’ve defined enterprise collaboration as a consolidation of four key elements:
Tags: collaboration
With the rapid increase in cloud services adoption, many in the industry are asking: Is the current IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management framework relevant to emerging cloud and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) providers? In Cisco IT, we think it is. When our new Texas Data Center 2 (DC2) facility is complete, Cisco IT will be delivering private cloud services to our internal customers and transforming into an ITaaS provider. To find out more about how both Texas DC2 and ITIL are integral to this transformation, read more below.
Tags: cloud, data center, data center 2011, ITaaS, ITIL, texas
Collaboration will transform how you work.
Hi everyone. I’m Sheila Jordan, Cisco vice president for Communications and Collaboration IT. Today I’m starting a series of weekly blog postings I’m calling “Collaboration is Hot …. Very Hot.” I’d like to share with you how we at Cisco are translating and deploying collaboration across our company.
Let me start out by explaining: “why collaboration?”
Simply stated, collaboration transforms how we work – it is a radical transformation. At Cisco, we’ve defined collaboration as where “social networking meets work” – effectively using social networking capabilities (chat, video, tagging, blogging) and incorporating them into our transactional systems and overall workflow.
Tags: collaboration, quad
In Cisco Data Center 2011-Texas, you hear a lot about the pursuit of Gold LEED certification for our new Texas Data Center 2 (DC2) facility. But while people who design and support buildings may be familiar with LEED, not all who design and support IT networks are. Here’s a quick primer and some thoughts on what LEED certification means to our IT organization.
Tags: data center, Green, leed
Introducing a new industry standard takes time, patience, and persistence. But adopting one can take courage. Customers often have concerns about the deployment of pre-standard product, how complete the standard really is, the availability of solutions, the insertion into long-term roadmaps, whether the benefits outweigh the risks for early adoption, and most importantly, knowing when to invest. When considering the implementation of a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solution, the Cisco IT group has decided that the investment time is now, and we’re already starting to realize the benefits this technology can bring.
Tags: 2011, cable fiber, data center, FCoE
As described in my contact center upgrade post, Cisco recently upgraded the Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise (ICME) and Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) systems that serve our contact centers to software Release 8.
Here are the top lessons we learned from this activity and the recommendations I would offer to Cisco customers who are planning a similar upgrade.
Tags: call manager, central controller, ICM, ICME, IPCC, UC, UCCE, unified communications
Calling on your mobile in the office, and seeing the bill at the end of the month, makes you wish you could use your mobile on your office phone network. In my last blog (“Dual-mode phones: Challenges for an Enterprise Deployment“) I described how dual mode phones can provide that, by connecting to your office phone network via wireless LAN (802.11 wireless) whenever free wireless Internet access is available to let you do that.
Tags: citrix, desktop virtualization, netapp, vdi, virtualized desktop infrastructure
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the period January through July 2010 as the warmest on record for average global land and ocean temperatures. In August 2010, a piece of Greenland broke off and formed a floating ice island four times the size of Manhattan. With IT organizations around the world focused on the challenges of protecting the environment and reducing costs associated with power and cooling, why would Cisco choose a notoriously warm area such as Texas to build a new, planet-friendly data center?
Tags: airside economizer, cooling, data center 2011, Green
Cisco maintains a dedicated infrastructure of call systems to serve the company’s 110 contact centers worldwide. Our infrastructure includes two Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise (ICME) systems for global call routing and six Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) systems for call handling within a region or a strategic company location.
We have a lot of different contact center teams and, over the years, we weren’t consistent in the way we upgraded the Cisco UCM software at each of the sites, which led to several problems:
Tags: call manager, contact center, ICM, UCM, unified communications
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