Two weeks ago I shared my interview with Sue Hunt, Director of Strategic Programmes at London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games on the subject of Inclusion and Diversity – what Inclusion and Diversity means to LOCOG and how they encourage it while faced with the challenge of an immovable deadline.
As part of our role as proud supporter and network infrastructure provider of London 2012, Cisco UK is involved in a couple of internal activities to encourage its employees to get involved in the Games. One of these activities is the Cisco Step Challenge, a 4-week challenge to encourage people to take the internationally recommended 10,000 steps per day. Providing you walked the minimum 70,000 steps per week, you were put into the prize draw for a pair of tickets to see a Paralympic Games event.
Employees across the UK joined together to formed teams and participated in the challenge. It wasn’t about fundraising or getting sweaty and struggling to find time to fit in extra exercise. It was about participation, improving your health and well being, team work and above all, having fun. A Facebook page and internal community was set up for participants to share words of encouragement and “top tips” for their fellow steppers such as park further away from your office building, use the stairs and not the lift, dancing burns more calories than walking and if you walk with children you walk more steps as you have to go back to get them every 200 yards!
The Step Challenge was very successful in engaging a large number of employees across the UK to participate in a sports challenge and raising awareness about how far you have to walk to achieve the recommended average of 10,000 steps. And one of the great things about it was that you could participate regardless of your age, gender, fitness levels, ethnicity, religion and belief or sexual orientation.
Inclusion and Diversity is a key component of Cisco’s culture and we believe that a truly inclusive and diverse workforce is critical to the success of our company and our people. The Step Challenge was advertised as “a challenge for everyone” and strongly encourage that everyone who wished to attend did so. Unfortunately we did not have anyone with a visual disability participate in the challenge and the team intends to look into this as a key area of focus for us next year. I think this is a real lesson for us all, that it’s not enough to open an opportunity to everyone -- we need to actively encourage Inclusion and Diversity and incorporate it into our strategy for success.
Just when we feel we are drowning in information, along comes Big Data to save the day. Big Data refers to a dataset so large it is beyond the capability of a typical database to manage and make use of the information. But a set of advances in hardware and software now allows us to rapidly capture, organize, and make sense of vast oceans of data, enabling us to apply the results to make better business decisions.
Big Data can give us a strategic advantage. For example, investors could see global trends in trading across sectors in near-real time; they could respond much earlier to a downturn in prices in a given sector, avoiding the steep losses incurred by taking later action.
Big Data can also create a richer experience for customers. Bloomberg.com gathers more than 100 data points from every page an individual reader views, processing the data with 15 algorithms to personalize recommendations. Algorithms that understand natural language and rich media and can reason make Big Data technology even more useful in decision making. Novel visualization paradigms, 3D, and gesture interfaces make Big Data understandable and accessible to everyone.
With so many consumer devices and tools creeping into our professional lives, our expectations as employees are changing. The result is increasing pressure on IT departments. To get a better sense for what that really means, we decided to do a quick and informal poll series on our corporate Facebook page to learn how people
View their companies’ IT departments when it comes to adopting consumer, social and mobile tools at work
Use these tools during their typical workday
How about the sample size, you might ask. Within a short amount of time, we received qualified responses from 132 to several hundreds of people, depending on the question. Here are some of the results:
It’s been a busy couple of weeks around here and we’ve got a fresh batch of newsfor partners!
In this week’s Partner Update newscast, Andrew finds out that even though an actual cloud can’t stream his music, Cisco’s new Cloud Partner Program offers everything partners need to capitalize on the growth of cloud, which is expected to reach $172 billion by the year 2014.
We also get to hear Andrew’s top video tips, find out why his suit needs to go to the dry cleaners, learn about networking myths, find out how one customer deployed VXI and virtual desktops, and we answer your technical questions.
Watch this week’s Partner Update newscast.
Keep reading for a transcript of what we covered, links to what we shared, and additional information. Read More »
Our expert on this topic is Andrew Phillips, co-anchor of our Partner Update newscasts and our Cisco Channels go-to video guy. Andrew knows his way backward and forward in Final Cut Pro. And, he’s staged and filmed countless videos that we feature here on the Cisco Channels blog and elsewhere.
According to Andrew, nothing can ruin a video more than poor setup. If you invest some time and thought in lighting, staging, and audio, your video will come out so much better than if you just shoot in front of a window without regard to your light source, or if you film outside with loud cars driving by that drown out your audio.
Want to put Andrew’s tricks to use in your videos? Here are his Top 10 Tips for Setting Up the Perfect Video.Read More »
