Cisco’s alignment of IT with Business
October 27, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant
For many years, Cisco has grown through acquisitions. Since 1993, the company has assimilated more than 130 smaller firms, including five in 2008 and three so far in 2009. IT department’s role is to leverage the virtualized architecture and collaboration technology to quickly support each acquired company’s business processes. Thus, IT department of Cisco under the leadership of CIO Rebecca Jacoby, intends to lower the acquired company’s costs, while enabling it to add value to Cisco.
According to an article titled “Cisco: Collaboration Is Key to Business”, the ultimate goal of Cisco’s IT organization is to enable business growth and capabilities. IT plays a vital role within the organization, even as the company moves to an unusual committee-based management structure. IT is represented on all 60 committees on the new organization chart, which should help tie the IT department’s top two initiatives— virtualization and collaboration—to the company’s strategic business goals of asserting leadership across an ever-growing roster of businesses.
Virtualization: Cisco’s approach to virtualization encompasses both data centers and applications. By virtualizing servers in its data centers, Cisco is getting the same number of servers to do the work of many more. At the application level, a service- oriented architecture enables Cisco to deploy many applications across a common infrastructure via Web services.
Collaboration: Collaboration technology will be critical to successfully execute Cisco’s new organization structure, which bulldozes operational silos, replacing them with a matrix of committees, councils and boards. Cisco is taking a broad approach to collaboration—one that runs the gamut from social networking to video.
According to the article, Cisco’s IT organization is enabling the company’s push into the consumer products market. Manufacturing, distribution and retailing of consumer products is essentially an exercise in supporting a global supply chain and a global distribution channel.
Thus, with the focus on reducing both the acquization cost and time to market cost, IT department seem to be adding ‘strategic’ value at Cisco.
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Comments (1)
I was just talking with my coworker about this last week at Outback steak house. Don’t remember how we landed on the topic actually , they brought it up. I do recall having a excellent steak salad with ranch on it. I digress…