More than 20 years ago when INTEGRIS Health chose to invest in collaboration technologies, little did they know they were making a decision that would one day save lives.

With more than 16 hospitals and 9,000 employees throughout Oklahoma, INTEGRIS is the state’s largest health care system. An early adopter of telemedicine, they implemented video technology in the early 1990s. But what started simply as an effective way to connect hospitals has grown into a life-saving program that has decreased stroke mortality rates and increased access to health specialists.

What’s INTEGRIS’ secret? A team of top medical professionals armed with Cisco’s leading edge collaboration technologies. Solutions like Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Jabber allow two-way, interactive collaboration between doctors and patients to support INTEGRIS’ telehealth programs that treat everything from mental health illness and speech impairments to stroke and Hepatitis C patients.

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Tags: Cisco, collaboration, integris, medicine, telehealth, telemedicine, TelePresence, telestroke, video

Cisco is the official technology sponsor for the prestigious Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship (SWF) happening April 9 to 12 at the University of Oxford in England.

The goal of the Forum is to help advance entrepreneurial approaches to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. SWF is an annual event with 1000 of the world’s most influential social impact thought leaders, social entrepreneurs, and the people and organizations who fund them from 65 countries. It is co-produced by the Skoll Foundation and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School in Oxford.

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Tags: collaboration, skoll

This Monday is the beginning of Hannover Messe Faire noted by companies and organizations as the world’s premier industrial technology showcase.  This years Faire has a clear focus on core technologies and services that enable industrial production, innovation and efficiency.

As I mentioned in my previous blog,  Cisco will feature our industry leading technology and product solutions that empower “The Integrated Industry” in Hall 8, Stand D14.  In addition, there will be many Cisco Subject Matter Experts in attendance to discuss topics that are specific to your business and technology imperatives.

Integration and convergence is the core value proposition that Cisco brings to the market. The theme of our booth is “Cisco Is Making the ‘Integrated Industry’ Real Today.”  We will showcase how our customers are deploying:

• Integrated and validated architectures supported by a broad portfolio that works seamlessly and securely
• Integrated  industrial networks and information technology networks (OT/IT)
• Integrating machines on the factory floor, datacenters in the core, and applications in the cloud
• Integrating the entire manufacturing value chain from R&D, to supply chain, to operations and logistics

If you aren’t one of the 250,000+ attending Hannover Messe Faire from April 8th -- 12th….. not to worry.  We will be providing live updates from the show floor. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, “Like” us on Facebook, check out our videos on YouTube and join our LinkedIn group

Cisco is uniquely positioned to help customers develop a robust, resilient, secure, future-ready and cost effective converged network infrastructure for their factory and business applications. Our displays will demonstrate our differentiation, and Cisco’s ability to integrate the functions and applications throughout the entire manufacturing value chain.

See you at the show!

Tags: AP1552, Cisco Industrial Smart Solution, collaboration, Hannover Messe, IE2000, IE3000, Industrial Automation, Internet of Things (IoT), IoT, mobile

In my role as a Social Collaboration Architect, I see a lot of opinions about what it will take for social collaboration applications to take off within the enterprise. Analysts and sales people alike are constantly speculating on the business value — via increased revenue or decreased cost — that social applications will uncover and make adoption a simple sell. The expectation is that a more connected and conversational employee base will become more productive. It’s a start, but not the end of the value proposition.

Becoming more connected and conversational is only as good as the richness of the interaction. Are you solving a business need? Making a process more efficient? Adding value to a transaction? At the heart of these questions is how you factor your social collaboration solution into your business processes.

In the past, companies used business process re-engineering to cut out waste and make operations leaner. Today, companies Read More »

Tags: business process, collaboration, Collaboration Enabled Business Transformation (CEBT), social collaboration

I was in a brainstorm meeting about my team’s next-generation strategy last week, and we made a number of random connections that knitted together a pretty big idea — the kind of dot-connecting that only happens when people with different (and sometime conflicting) perspectives trust each other in the pursuit of an important goal.

Five of us worked on the idea, but only two of us were in the room physically together. Yes, I’ll say it out loud:  three people were working from home.

Much has been said and written recently about the value of working virtually, and I don’t think you can sub-divide mobility into “at home” and “on the road.” Social technologies, video and mobile platforms make it easy to work from just about anywhere.

But as leaders, we have to resist the temptation to confuse technology with change management -- despite our love affair with technology. Any time technology brings a sea-change transformation to the way humans do stuff, especially work stuff, we can’t forget that people work in organizations — and organizations are an amalgam of culture, processes and technology.

All of Cisco’s experience has taught us that Read More »

Tags: collaboration, culture, process, technology, Teleworking, virtual meetings, web conferencing