Upgrading a critical enterprise call processing system to a completely new virtualized server platform sounds pretty tricky. Doing it from 5,000 miles away, in the public square of a sleepy Spanish village using your laptop and a VPN connection over the free municipal WiFi service sounds … well, maybe a little crazy. Recently, I did just that, migrating our Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) cluster in Johannesburg, South Africa to the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform from the small village in Spain where I was vacationing.
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Tags: anyconnect, change management, cluster, coc-collaboration, deployment, UC, UC on UCS, UCS, unified communications, virtual server
Today, we are featuring a guest post from Sara Roberts, President and CEO of Roberts Golden Consulting, Inc. She is known for her expertise in large-scale transformation, particularly in driving culture change for enterprise innovation and collaboration, and has provided strategic guidance to dozens of the world’s top global companies over the past 15 years.
Navigating in today’s workplace can be disorienting. It seems that the minute we reorganize, restructure, merge, shift… we need to do it yet again to keep up with new demands. We lament, when are things ever going to be normal again? Things are changing so fast. We can’t possibly keep up!
In our organizations, we often point to ‘agility’ as critical to our success – yet the ironic part is that our organizations are still trying to command and control our way into being more nimble.
What exactly is going on? For starters, witness the last twenty years. There’s been an explosion of vastly more information, globalization resulting in larger and farther-flung teams and, not to mention, greater competition coming from unexpected and untraditional sources. Think: NetFlix and how Blockbuster didn’t see it coming. There has been a serious tectonic shift and our companies are at the epicenter.
In our organizations, we often point to ‘agility’ as critical to our success – yet the ironic part is that our organizations are still trying to command and control our way into being more nimble. Often times we don’t fully realize that these old hierarchical structures, we’re holding steadfastly to, are unable to process information quickly enough to make the necessary day-to-day business decisions. We think we can simply optimize to do it better, faster and cheaper but in reality, we need a transformation in our workplaces.
As I was writing this last paragraph, it made me think of a cognitive behavioral theory I recently read about, called “path dependence.” This term refers to the notion that “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.” For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.
Let’s ask ourselves: do we really want to be stuck with qwerty organizations?
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Tags: business, change management, Cisco, enterprise social software, quad
