One of the questions Cisco sales teams ask themselves is how can we continually improve our business with our customers. Often the answer lies in the relationship between Cisco and our customers.
Customers want to do business with companies that understand their culture (both the company culture and the local, national culture), and they want to do business with organizations that have shared values.
Nikos Gerogiannis, Cisco Service & Support Manager in Emerging Markets, is talking to his customers about inclusion and diversity during quarterly business reviews. Instead of focusing solely on facts and figures, Gerogiannis and his team include non-direct business elements including Inclusion—how we leverage diversity by bringing together a mix of unique individual backgrounds to collectively and more effectively meet our business objectives and Diversity—the Collective mixture of differences and similarities including but not limited to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, physical abilities, culture, occupation, position, education, work, and behavioral styles and the perspectives of each individual shaped by his/her nation and experiences.
This move has created an open conversation between Cisco and our customers, as they share both the concept and experience of team spirit. For example, one customer wants to leverage Cisco’s inclusion and diversity practices in their own business. Another customer wants to start to change the perception that their customers have of them and are looking to Cisco to find out how we are doing this so they can model this same perspective for their own customers.
When the new SEACOM submarine fiberoptic cable reached Mombasa, Kenya (from Mumbai, India via Durban) in July and began to deliver reliable, less expensive Internet access to East Africa, improved access to healthcare information might not have been the first thing on everyone’s mind. But that 1.28 Terabytes-per-second cable is providing rural Kenyans with healthcare information – and much more.
The new connectivity has jump-started a series of six new community centers across the country. And through these “pilot pasha centers” (pasha means “to inform” in Swahili), rural Kenyans are beginning to take advantage of many new opportunities – including access to important healthcare information as well as education, new markets and business opportunities, financial and government services, and more from around Kenya and the world – all at a much more affordable price.
I recently interviewed Dr. Peter Drury, lead for healthcare in emerging markets for Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group, about health information systems in developing nations. Dr. Drury is particularly interested in the opportunities the pasha centers offer from a public health perspective.
”We want to get a starter pack of health content deployed in these connected community centers in a way that is both easily accessible and relevant to the local people,” he told me. “Better still, we hope to find ways in which they can, locally and/or in collaboration with other people, begin to develop locally applicable health content to supplement whatever they will get from external sources.”
The collaborators behind the pilot pasha centers (the Kenya ICT Board and Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco’s global strategic consulting arm) believe that the ICT platform and an entrepreneurial model will enable resource-poor communities to enjoy affordable access to a very wide range of information, due to economies of scale and the aggregation of demand reducing the unit price.
In a modest building of less than 400 square feet known as the Blossom World cybercafé in Kangundo, a small town of 10,000 in Kenya, a non commercial, public-private collaboration between the Kenya ICT Board and Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) launched the Pasha centres. The center is designed to model a community-focused format that will be self-sufficient by using technology in the form of a Web 2.0 collaborative online platform for the Digital Village Pasha Program led by the board.
This initiative falls under the Kenya ICT Board’s Digital Villages Project (DVP) also known as “Pasha Centres.” The overall goal is to enhance the livelihoods of local citizens and encourage new micro-enterprises by providing access to information, education and new markets.
Slovakia’s first national IT Fitness Test was launched earlier this month. Over the next weeks, students from over 830 secondary schools, colleges and universities will put to test their IT knowledge, digital literacy and skills in computers and networks.
The test is organized by the Slovak Ministry of Education and the IT Association as part of the e-Skills Week initiative of the European Commission. Cisco Slovakia and several other organizations have joined as supporters and Frantisek Jakab, Cisco Networking Academy manager is leading the IT Fitness Test project and acts as chairman of the Testing Committee.
In case you missed these on our main ‘the Platform’ blog, some interesting insights on the role of emerging markets within the global economic environment came out of our presence at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland over the weekend.
Firstly Paul Mountford, Cisco’s president for Emerging Markets outlined the differences between the somewhat gloomy atmosphere last year and a more upbeat focus on rebuilding, redesigning and rethinking this year.
Cisco CEO John Chambers also addressed the broad question of growth in emerging markets in an interview with Mario Bartiromo on CNBC during WEF. Based on his discussions with leadership in China, India and 5 leaders in the Middle East that he met with last week ahead of his visit to Davos, Chambers talks about his view that emerging markets are poised to come back in a big way.
CNBC writes: “Most of the global economies have stabilized,” John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, said. “Here in Davos, the mood is much more positive than a year ago, especially for the technology companies. And that’s natural because when economies start to recover, you apply first technology – get your productivity up – then you add jobs.
You can watch John’s response here directly on CNBC’s website here.
What’s your view? Are emerging markets coming back in a big way?
On January 19, Andrey Kharitonov, Alexey Lukatsky, Oleg Snigirev, Sergey Timofeev and Vasily Tomilin from Cisco’s Moscow office joined some 30 thousand Muscovites to celebrate Epiphany in a centuries-old tradition.
Like many other Russian Orthodox followers they braved the chill, typical for this time of the year (less than 2 degrees Farhenheit), and took a swim in a hole cut in the ice covering the Moscow river.
Our goal was to showcase the important role information and communication technologies play in driving societies towards innovation and achieving economic growth and prosperity.
A global team of 27 Cisco volunteers came together in Sohar, Oman, with Fast Lane, a Cisco Learning Partner, to promote discussions on how ICT training can facilitate the transformation of Oman’s society by developing and empowering Omani youth; the main source for local IT talent.
Business Outreach: Setting the Course
Cisco’s Middle East Employee Resource Group brings together employees who want to enhance their careers, support the community, and grow the business by facilitating business partnerships between Cisco and the community. As part of the Business Outreach Program, they were part of a global team representing employees in Dubai, Egypt, KSA, Lebanon, Belgium and the US.
They started this journey by agreeing to deliver a pilot training program to college and high school students with the objective of:
Increasing technology awareness,
Enhancing technical and business skills for local workforce development, and
No parent enjoys taking a sick child to see the doctor. And in rural Argentina, ‘seeing the doctor’ can involve a journey of many hundreds of kilometers to get to the prestigious Prof. Dr. Juan P. Garrahan Pediatric Hospital in Buenos Aires. But this is a journey which is often unnecessary.
The reason, I learned when I recently interviewed Dr. Luis Carniglia, who is in charge of Garrahan’s Reference and Counter-reference Program, is that many parents whisk their kids off to the Buenos Aires hospital simply because they do not trust the medics in their local healthcare center. The Garrahan is one of the top pediatric hospitals in the region—and as a parent myself I know what it is like to want the very best for your children.
But a high proportion of cases the Garrahan’s doctors get to see could easily be treated at a local hospital, says Dr. Carniglia, if only parents could somehow be convinced that the medical attention there is just as good as it is in the capital. Mindful of this, Dr. Carniglia is heading a project to extend the Garrahan’s 12-year-old remote patient consultation service with Cisco TelePresence and Unified Communications, so Buenos Aires-based doctors can give real-time support to medics doing consultations in regional centers.
In practice, this means parents can now have the reassurance of seeing a Garrahan specialist—over TelePresence or via Unified Communications—alongside their local pediatric doctor.
This reinforces parents’ confidence in regional healthcare staff and removes the need for costly and time-consuming travel.
You can also see the system in action in this video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) featuring Dr. Carniglia, members of the Cisco team working on the telemedicine project, and Telefónica, the service provider involved.
The Cisco Networking Academy program in Kenya has opened an IT academy in collaboration with Deaf Aid, a Norwegian based nongovernmental organization in Nairobi. The new centre provides a forum for reflection on the plight of the disabled with regard to equal access to learning and career opportunities, especially in the emergent market-savvy ICT industry. This is a key milestone in Cisco’s commitment to support ICT capacity building for all citizens and give them an equal opportunity regardless of their social and physical status.
Cisco Networking Academy is a global education program providing Information Technology skills to students globally to improve their career and economic opportunities in communities around the world. In Kenya, Cisco has partnered with educational institutions and Non Governmental Organizations, through which the public has access to the Cisco training in ICT. Through these partnerships, Cisco has established community academies to serve people from disadvantaged areas.
Although the recent UN Climate Change conference left open many important questions, some of the participants were able to experience that it is actually possible to do things differently and in a more environmentally friendly way, thanks to collaborative technologies.
Delegates from the Czech Republic and Hungary took advantage of the Cisco Global Climate Change Meeting Platform to hold press briefings via Cisco TelePresence. As a result, journalists could stay up-to-date on what’s going on in Copenhagen, without having to travel there physically.
The Global Climate Change Meeting Platform will stay in place until the end of 2010 and will support future climate change discussions by allowing delegates from around the globe to join discussions in a more environmentally sustainable, efficient and inclusive manner.
Two years ago, the company took a bold decision to make a move toward the Eastern side of the planet.
The move was manifested by a high-tech, green and state of the art campus built in Bangalore. Top senior executives took the leap of faith and moved their entire lives half way across the world in what could easily be labeled as an adventure of their life time. Their task wasn’t easy. They had the responsibility of redefining the way the company does business on a global scale.
The ICT sector not only drives innovation, but fuels competitiveness in the global economy. Jobs in information and communication technologies (ICT) sectors, like telecommunications and the Internet, are key sources of growth and crucial for the growth of the economy.
Cisco conducted an ICT gender gap study in June 2009, which found that female students in five European countries have computer skills but many avoid technology careers. The study concludes that the single most de-motivating factor is the view that the tech sector is inherently better suited to men. Amy Christen, Global Vice President of Cisco Networking Academy, believes that industry and government should collaborate to change girls’ perceptions and galvanize more women.
So if this is taking place in Europe, what are the consequences for emerging countries? A recent Global Voices article, focusing on Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), caught my attention as it discussed the opportunities for empowerment of women, and alleviation of gender disparity.
Anyone who has seen Wim Elfrink in the flesh knows he has an infectious enthusiasm for innovation. So perhaps it is not surprising that the Cisco Chief Globalisation Officer’s no-holding-back attitude has spawned a new approach to learning in rural India. Elfrink uprooted from San Jose, CA, to Bangalore in India in 2006 to head up Cisco’s Globalisation Centre East and since then has been a fierce advocate of collaboration tools such as Cisco TelePresence and Unified Communications as a means of cutting down on business travel.
Paradoxically, though, a business trip has triggered a new application for this very type of technology.
While visiting Chhindwara in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Elfrink challenged a group of young people to come up with business ideas for possible Cisco sponsorship—and the winning concept involved using Cisco WebEx collaboration tools to improve learning in the region. Documented in a video and a feature on News@Cisco, the story of how Elfrink’s encouragement and a team of Cisco mentors helped three young Indians set up the Lakshya Network in Chhindwara is one that should interest educators and entrepreneurs worldwide.
Cisco’s emerging markets operations area spans over 130 nations, representing 2.3 billion people. Some of the countries Cisco is working in include Lebanon, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and Egypt. It’s a lot of territory to cover, that’s for sure. With this in mind, Cisco has established a clearly defined process for driving its business in emerging countries focused on building out Cisco’s coverage and establishing replicable business models that provide synergies across industry verticals and between countries.
All of these initiatives are focused on the the company’s long-term strategy of “country transformation,” which is Cisco’s concept of providing communications equipment and technology assistance to help a country reach its social and economic development goals.
Paul Mountford, Cisco’s president for the Emerging Markets theater, provided an overview of some of the key highlights across the theatre in this video from our Q1 earnings in FY10:
For an overall perspective on our first quarter FY10 earnings, you may also be interested in this Q&A with Cisco chairman and CEO, John Chambers and Cisco CFO, Frank Calderoni.
“The fundamental social problems faced in the 21st century are shared global problems that do not respect national boundaries. The solutions require the engagement of all of humanity in its full diversity.”
Successful social innovation begins at a local level where it often remains isolated; subsequently good ideas are fragmented, often trapped in small communities. Current mechanisms for diffusion beyond the community of origin are limited, and because “one size does not necessarily fit all,” the spread of new ideas is often uncertain and slow.
Despite countless attempts to capture and share knowledge, we have yet to figure out the “secret sauce” that results in an ongoing process of collaboration to solve critical challenges. And despite billions of dollars spent every year in well-meaning gifts and programs, our social problems keep getting bigger: 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty, 10 million children under the age of 5 dying annually, 1 billion people with no access to clean water, 2.5 billion people without access to basic sanitation, two-thirds of the world’s countries without universal primary education for children, only 22 % of the world’s fisheries now sustainable, and dropping every year—and the list goes on.
As a rule rather than an exception, solutions are ‘reinvented’ time and again across the globe due to our inability to fully interact. There is a growing realization that to scale and sustain any efficiency and effectiveness of social programs that the answer lies in different approaches and working smarter -- and making more effective use of shared and tacit knowledge to drive innovation.
