
How IT works for an IT company
Gone are the days when IT was viewed as a cost center. Today, when used correctly, IT is a servant function and a strategic business imperative.
At Cisco, our IT mission is clear: to empower 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 empowering others and driving cultural change through technology.
One of my core beliefs is that your culture is the only truly unique thing you have. Over time, people can reproduce your technology, but it’s incredibly difficult to reproduce your culture, and the shortest route to delighting people is through what they have in their hand or on their desk. It is not trivial how well we do our job in IT and our strategy of leading with experience. It is 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 to create a role that reported directly to me on user experience and design to drive a future-proof workplace. Going forward, everything we create – be it an enterprise application, a mobile app, an email, or even a sign in the office – will go through this team. The Cisco IT design team is embedded with Agile teams from start to finish, ensuring that what comes out the other end looks and feels like something from your consumer life. We develop from experience, not from the IT department, and optimize for the employee and the experience, not for ourselves or the costs.
Our IT approach is about reducing friction and leading with experience.
Our IT approach is about reducing friction and leading with experience. We 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 continually improve and ensure that the quality of IT reflects what the company thinks and feels about its employees on a daily basis.
It is important to balance IT as a business enabler and strategic partner. We spend a lot of time thinking about and implementing this balance. Whether it’s the current state of AI moving from DevOps to AIOps to NoOps or evolving chatbots into agents that perform tasks on your behalf, we’re always preparing for the future. The development of IT from a cost center to a strategic partner is progressing. If we do our job well, having IT involved is good news for the business because it means the solutions are secure, scalable and integrated.
Our reputation depends on clarity about our team’s productivity, our priorities and the way our work gets done. Managing our budget, avoiding scary audit results, and keeping our promises creates the credibility we need to tackle larger, more complex, and transformative projects. This is a never-ending exercise, but it is critical to our success.
Being at Cisco is unique because we are customer zero – there is no one to turn to and ask for help, we are on the front lines. The great thing is that Cisco makes and sells everything needed to build and manage a large company, and I am a large company. 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 run a Cisco stack, and not just because I work here. It’s about making 100,000 people productive. Cisco is very good at advancing the way people and technology function in 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 route data eliminates the need for interceptions in all locations. Combined with Splunk, we have everything we need to build an end-to-end SOC to solve complex problems such as creating a future-proof workplace equipped with observability across networks we don’t own .
I love my job because it never gets boring. I wasn’t told I “had” to do IT. This is something I am passionate about because IT is always interesting, new and difficult. You can never know everything and you can do things that have never been done before. Being customer zero at Cisco means there are literally no other people to ask for help sometimes, but that’s okay. Ultimately, it’s about more than just technology. It’s about creating an environment where innovation thrives, where employees feel empowered and where the culture reflects our commitment to excellence every day.
Curious about the future of data centers and AI? I recently joined the Packet Pusher Heavy Strategy Podcast to discuss how Cisco IT
navigates through these changes. We’ve covered everything from how to use Splunk to much more. Listen to our podcast to find out more.
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