In my previous blog post, I talked about how adding a social support layer enabled the IT Mobility team within Cisco to realize cost avoidance of $650k, which was leveraged for new, innovative projects.

Benefits were also seen in Cisco IT’s Email and Calendaring WebEx Social community. Since it’s launch in Q4FY12, the Email and Calendaring Services community has seen more than 33,000 visitors and 300,000 views spread across collaborative wiki posts and discussion forums. The discussion forum alone has over 500 individual discussions through moderated support and user contribution, resulting in a self-service model for those who may have a similar question or issue. Read More »

Tags: calendaring, Cisco IT, cisco on cisco, Cisco WebEx Social, coc-collaboration, collaboration, email, Exchange 2010, IT, mailboxes, office 2010, WebEx Social

Why does top talent choose to join a company? Then, once they are employees, why do they stay?

At Cisco, one factor is consistent among our diverse, global workforce: the flexibility of our telework program and the Cisco technologies that enable it.

Recruiting the Best Workforce

As a global company, we know that talent lives everywhere in the world, but not always near a Cisco office. Our telework program helps us recruit the right employees because they won’t need to make a hard, long commute or face the life and family disruption of a relocation.

One employee wanted to raise his family in Illinois where he could be close to his extended family. Cisco supported his choice by allowing him to telework – one of the first employees to do so at Cisco – and was able to keep this valued technical employee with the company.

Other employees tell me that working from home enables them to work much more flexibly, and this motivates them to work even harder for their team, manager, and Cisco. The motivation produced by flexible working appears to play a role in our employees’ performance, with a higher percentage of mobile and remote employees receiving the top two performance evaluation rankings compared to traditional office workers.

Flexible work arrangements are also very important to the millennial generation that is now entering the workforce. Data in our 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report indicates that a majority of today’s university students value unconventional work schedules and believe they can work more productively away from the office.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco IT, cisco on cisco, coc-collaboration, recruit, Recruiting, telework

The Cisco telework program has evolved over the years from a convergence of top-down company practices with bottom-up changes in employee expectations. From our experience we have learned how several factors can make flexible work a success for everyone.

Clear policies and company culture. Cisco has adopted a flexible policy that enables many employees to telework, based on their job requirements and their manager’s approval. Where necessary, this policy is customized to reflect country-specific laws and employee entitlements. Also important is creating a company culture of trusting employees to work responsibly, strong performance management practices and finding the right balance of autonomous and collaborative action.

But a successful teleworking program requires more.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco IT, cisco-on-cisco-collaboration, culture, telework

In this great article on Cisco’s Private Cloud: Pain and Profit we learn some of the real life lessons of one of the most successful private cloud deployments in the industry.  The detail of how Cisco IT increased agility, lowered costs, and enhanced security with the use of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud for this deployment is located here.  I like using Cisco IT’s experience in their journey to cloud to give us insight into what a private cloud looks like 18 months after first deployment.  Morphing as planned from the first use case of Infrastructure as a Service to being an “Enterprise Store” across multiple service delivery towers is a key theme I predicted and continue to see,  across many customer deployments.  In the image below, we see a typical Service Taxonomy, where Cloud is just one of the icons in the total service catalog.

IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) with underlying automation is bubbling up as critical for corporate IT strategies.  As IT shops increase their level of comfort with  a service catalog, self service and orchestration for compute, virtualization, network, and storage; the attention shifts to other areas such as applications, virtual desktops, and other technology domains such as collaboration technologies.  Let’s take a detailed look at where the Cisco IT eStore and Intelligent Automation for Cloud have gone in those 18 plus months since ignition.  The home page of the eStore shows the current catalog of some key services being offered and other services being migrated over as we speak.  We immediately see Virtual Desktops, and Home & Remote Access in addition the beachhead of IT Infrastructure and Platform Services

Read More »

Tags: Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, Cisco IT, IaaS, ITaaS, private cloud

Private cloud is surrounded by its own mythos--some folks believe it doesn’t exist and some folks believe its something that will only be enjoyed by future generations.  So, Cisco IT is living proof that private cloud is something that is very real.  This week, tomorrow in fact, John Manville SVP for Cisco IT, will be presenting a session at Gartner Data Center on Cisco’s private cloud environment, Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services or CITEIS.  John will explain how Cisco has woven together all the elements (compute, network, storage, automation, orchestration, provisioning, etc) into a cohesive offering that serves our production workloads.  John will also share the TCO savings captured to date and how he sees CITIES evolving over the next few years.

Diagram  from the white paper “How Cisco IT Automated End-to-End Infrastructure  Provisioning In an Internal Private Cloud”

If you are at Gartner DC in Las Vegas this week, be sure to check out his session, The Programmable Cloud, tomorrow (Dec 4) at 1:45pm in Titian Ballroom SPS 28--he’ll also be at the Cisco booth (#432) after the session to answer questions.

If you are not at Gartner DC, stay tuned for a coming interview with John Manville, and meanwhile you  may want also to take advantage of our coming webcast o see how industry peers are doing to solve the very challenges Cloud adopters face. Tune in to the webcast UCS : Foundation for Cloud on December 6 at 9:00 am PST  to hear from Cisco UCS customers Xerox and FICO Corporation, about how and why they used it in their Cloud environments.

Tags: Cisco IT, CITEIS, cloud, data center, private cloud