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Kathy Bries

Director, Technical Support

Platform & Technology

Kathy Bries, joined Learning@Cisco two years ago from Cisco's CDO (Chief Development Office)/Technology group to lead the Learning@Cisco operations team.

She brings to the team over 10 years of networking market knowledge, Business Unit P&L experience, product/engineering management and operations support, as well as cross-team project management leadership. She currently oversees Learning@Cisco’s operations, IT infrastructure investments and overall P&L management.

Kathy started out at Cisco in 1995 as Manager of Product Planning and Pricing, and helped build the foundation for Cisco's product management organization. She had successfully implemented Cisco's product operations, forecasting & pricing processes and rolled out Cisco's first EIS (Executive Information System). She went on to hold a variety of leadership positions.

Before taking her current role, Kathy was the Director of Operations for Cisco’s $6 Billion business unit -High end modular switching and the Datacenter Switching Security technology group. She worked with the General Manager in streamlining overall business unit operations driving both program and process discipline. Under her leadership, the Business Unit successfully passed both ISO and TL9000 audits, is on track to meet its multi billion dollar annual goal while surpassing overall profitability goals by 3%. She had managed the technology group’s overall planning, operational, R&D investments and strategy review process and was instrumental in implementing various Cisco-wide initiatives such as technology portfolio management, engineering best practices, core business acceleration programs, counterfeit protection, college recruiting & women’s leadership program.

Kathy also served as the Director of Operations for Cisco's Service Provider Business Council and helped create and communicate Cisco's overall service provider strategy, goals and long term business plans. She had taken several positions within CDO such as operations staff for the Chief Development officer managing his technology portfolio as well as Cisco's Gigabit transceiver (GBIC) product manager with annual bookings of $100 million.

Kathy graduated from the Harvard Business School. She volunteers for Harvard University and stays active on women and diversity issues. She is member of WAN, WTAN & WIT.

Articles

December 17, 2015

EDUCATION

From Career Connection to Collaborative Knowledge: How Cisco Built a New Breed of Knowledge, Learning, and Productivity …

2 min read

In Part 1 of this blog post, I described the circumstances that led to the creation and roll out of the Career Connection pilot and the formation of the Cisco Collaborative Knowledge digital workplace platform. Now I want to share more about the evolution of how all of this transpired. Career Connection, as you may […]

October 15, 2015

EDUCATION

From Career Connection to Collaborative Knowledge: How Cisco Created a New Digital Workplace Solution

2 min read

As we’ve observed, in today’s fast-paced digital age, enterprises must continually find new ways to reskill their workforce to remain up to date with technology, develop effective leaders, and innovate new solutions on behalf of their customers. Research from Bersin by Deloitte has found that average employee tenure has decreased from five to seven years […]