All enterprise social collaboration platforms include gathering points whereby people can unite with others around a common goal; for example, a program or project, social interest, organization, market segment, product, corporate initiative, technology, etc. Within Quad – Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform and product – these gathering points are referred to as communities. The longevity of any given community will vary based on several factors, which include temporal needs, relevancy, and usefulness. Some communities will be required for a long time while others may only be needed for a short time. Without clear mechanisms to identify the usefulness of each community and manage those that reach end of life, a social collaboration platform can become difficult to manage from a community governance vantage point. The performance of the platform can be negatively impacted by excessive community clutter resulting from orphaned or unused communities.
The gathering points for any enterprise social platform are the spaces or communities. These are the containers that are created for users to find and share the information they care about and collaborate with people who have like roles, interests, etc. Ever since we launched a social platform a few years ago, now known as IWE (Integrated Workforce Experience) powered by Cisco Quad, a hurdle for IT has been wide user adoption. Our challenge hasn’t been due to a lack of stakeholder demand for new communities but the speed at which IT can provision communities to keep up with the insatiable demand.
Cisco’s collaboration solution is now deployed internally to 110,000 employees and contractors worldwide. As the future of work continues to evolve to be more collaborative, business transformation is a must. At Cisco, that means continuing to break down the silos and bring teams closer together. Enter the Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE), the next generation of Cisco’s intranet. IWE enables employees to connect, communicate, and collaborate with each other. IWE is also one of Cisco’s enterprise-wide investments that will, over time, result in a best-in-class employee experience.
In keeping with the focus on using Cisco’s technology, the company has transitioned IWE powered by Cisco Quad collaboration software and has made it available to all employees and contractors. Cisco Quad, an enterprise social collaboration platform, is one of the company’s newest additions to its collaboration portfolio—and customers are purchasing it today.
I am thrilled to blog today about the deployment of Cisco’s own unique collaboration solution across our enterprise to 110,000 employees and contractors worldwide!
This is the culmination of a multi-year project which started as a business process and IT initiative, and evolved as a business unit endeavor after our CEO John Chambers said: “product-ize it.” So, I’m grateful to my colleagues in the business unit – namely Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform – for taking ownership of the product and improving upon it. Congratulations, too, to my team in Communication and Collaboration IT, and to the Collaboration Business Technologies team whose vision, innovation, long hours, perseverance and creativity made it happen.
As some of you have heard, IWE on Quad has been officially announced, which marks a major milestone in Cisco’s history, as we deploy our enterprise social software platform company-wide to over 100,000 employees, contractors, and suppliers.
As a member of IT, I have had the privilege to both work on developing IWE, and use IWE since its inception. Among other Cisco software and products, IWE has been developed using the agile development method with early alpha and beta releases available to select groups within Cisco. As my colleague Bram alluded to in his blog post, “Rolling out web 2.0 in the Enterprise”, this early release strategy has not only improved the development process of IWE but has created “champions” or IWE advocates within Cisco who have helped encourage widespread adoption in the latest release.
