Gone are the days when IT was seen as a cost center. Today, when done properly, IT is a servant function and a strategic business imperative.
At Cisco, our mission in the IT department is clear: to make it possible for everyone else at Cisco to do the best work of their lives. This philosophy has guided my approach to IT, both here and in my previous role as CIO at IBM. It’s about enabling others and driving cultural change through technology.
One of the core beliefs I hold is that your culture is the only truly unique thing you have. Over time, people can replicate your technology, but it’s incredibly difficult to replicate your culture, and the shortest path to engaging people is through what’s in their hand or on their desk. How well we do our jobs in IT, and our strategy of leading with experience, is not trivial. It’s central to creating a high-performance culture where talented people want to work and where we can attract and retain the best talent.
When I joined Cisco, one of the first changes I made was creating a function that reports directly to me for user experience and design to drive a future-proofed workplace. Going forward, anything we create—whether it’s an enterprise application, a mobile app, an email, or even a sign in the office—goes through this team. The Cisco IT Design team is embedded into the agile teams from start to finish, ensuring that what comes out the other end looks and feels like something from your consumer life. We engineer from the experience in, instead of the IT department out, optimizing for the employee and the experience, not for ourselves or cost.
Our approach to IT is about reducing friction and leading with experience.
Our approach to IT is about reducing friction and leading with experience. We’ve developed an employee friction index, a balanced scorecard of various inputs, to prioritize our backlog based on how often and how many people experience a task, and how important that experience is. This helps us continuously improve and ensure that the quality of IT is a daily reflection of what the company thinks and feels about its people.
Balancing IT as a business enabler and a strategic partner is essential. We spend a lot of time thinking about and executing on this balance. Whether it’s the current state of AI moving from DevOps to AIOps to NoOps, or chatbots evolving into agents that perform tasks on your behalf, we’re always preparing for the future. The evolution of IT from a cost center to a strategic partner is ongoing. If we’re doing our jobs well, it’s good news for the business when IT gets involved because it means the solutions will be secure, scalable, and integrated.
Our reputation hinges on clarity around the productive capacity of our team, how our priorities are set, and how work gets done. Managing our budget, avoiding scary audit findings, and delivering on our promises builds the credibility we need to tackle larger, more complex, transformative projects. This is a never-ending exercise, but it’s crucial for our success.
Being at Cisco is unique because we are customer zero – there’s no one to turn to and ask for help, we are at the forefront. The great thing is that Cisco makes and sells everything needed to build and manage a large enterprise, and I am a large enterprise. This close relationship with our product teams allows us to influence features and capabilities, making our products more competitive. It’s better to hear feedback from friendly internal users than from the market.
I’m running a Cisco stack, and it isn’t just because I work here. It’s about making 100,000 people productive. Cisco is very good at powering how people and technology work across the physical and digital worlds. We make everything needed to build and operate a large enterprise network, from VPNs to observability tools like ThousandEyes, MFA, WebEx, and AppDynamics. Using Cisco products that pass data around eliminates the need for taps all over the place. Combined with Splunk, we have everything needed to build an end-to-end SOC, solving complex problems like creating a future-proofed workplace equipped with observability across networks we don’t own.
I love my job because it’s never boring. I wasn’t told I ‘had’ to do IT. It’s something I’m passionate about because IT is always interesting, new, and difficult. You can never know everything, and you get to do things that have never been done before. Being Cisco’s customer zero means there are literally zero other people to ask for help sometimes, but that’s okay. In the end, it’s about more than just technology. It’s about creating an environment where innovation thrives, where employees feel empowered, and where the culture is a daily reflection of our commitment to excellence.
Curious about the future of data centers and AI? I recently joined the Packet Pusher Heavy Strategy Podcast to discuss how Cisco IT
is navigating these changes. We covered everything from our use of Splunk and so much more. Listen to our podcast to learn more.
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