Cisco CIO: Rebecca Jacoby

Sumi Das: Rebecca, we are so glad that you joined us today.

Rebecca Jacoby: Thanks for having me.

Sumi Das: We're all familiar with Cisco. We know that it's a giant in the networking industry, it has over 66,000 employees and locations worldwide, but what is your slice of that pie? Tell us the size and scope of your responsibilities.

Rebecca Jacoby: Well, Sumi as you know I am the CIO at Cisco, and so of course that means that I have functional responsibilities for the IT organization at Cisco, which includes all of the technology architecture that the business runs on. We have a fairly broad charter as the CIO of Cisco and our charter is to enable every move Cisco makes with IT. It's a broad responsibility, it covers every business process in the company, as well as every communication process that an individual or an organization might use to add value to the business everyday.

Sumi Das: Let's talk a little bit about collaboration, because that is something that Cisco has preached for quite some time. Cisco jumped onboard early with Web 2.0 and collaboration tools. Is the company truly using them as a tool as opposed to just as a novelty?

Rebecca Jacoby: The answer is yes. I think that we are taking it well beyond a tool. We believe, I believe and my organization is working towards this vision, that the collaboration technologies that are available today--Web 2.0 and, in particular, video technologies and how you can use video technologies in the communications process in your business--they're offering us an opportunity to use technology to be able to really create an entirely different globalized environment for using human resources to come to bear to solve these kinds of challenges, or to go after new innovative processes in the business. We're doing this essentially in every aspect of our business processes today. Things as fundamental as finance, but as really interesting as: how do we actually bring product ideas to the table and turn them into business units that we can actually turn to real value both for our selves and for our customers?

Sumi Das: Can you give us an example of how these collaboration tools have been used to innovate?

Rebecca Jacoby: One of the best examples I have for bringing value to our company with these collaboration technologies is really TelePresence. If you are familiar with the TelePresence technology, it's really a whole different level of video communications, where you can bring together with a high-definition screen and based on our Unified Communications platform--we can bring people together to have the kind of interaction you would normally only be able to have in person. It's a completely different type of experience. So we have used the TelePresence technology to become closer to our customers. I have a deployment of over 230 TelePresence units globally today. Using TelePresence technologies and other collaborative technologies, every part of our sales force over the last year has been able to drop travel expenses by over 20%, and has actually been able to increase their customer interactions upwards of 30% in every part of the world. That is just a huge value to the company and a value to our customers. Where somebody like me, who really isn't a sales person, can actually spend time with the customers and give them my personal experience using these technologies. So that is one example.

Sumi Das: How do you measure the return on investment on collaboration tools, because typically things like knowledge management and information sharing are hard to quantify?

Rebecca Jacoby: The way that we do it, and I always recommend this when customers ask us the same question, is this is cool and we intuitively know what the value of this is, so there are a lot of collaboration technologies. I am talking everything from Web 2.0 technologies, to our WebEx technologies that really allow a different sort of a meeting process, and TelePresence and different kinds of video communications. What happens is, it's not necessarily an easy thing to do to quantify at a large company level metric. But when you really address them to address specific business processes, like your sales process--or for us we are using these technologies in our services process, we are even using them in our fundamental finance shared services processes--the business value gets measured relative to that particular process and what you are trying to achieve and what value you are trying to achieve in that process. If I can shorten sales times or if I can increase customer contact while decreasing my expenses then that is a very tangible value add. We actually do that. We work with individual business processes to implement the technologies while we build an enterprise scale architecture that makes that scalable. That not only brings huge value to the enterprise, it also brings the whole community into the processes they use in these collaboration technologies, which is really what they are all about. That is really how you get the value from them.

Sumi Das: Cisco is a large company, but it is also continuing to grow with acquisitions happening fairly regularly. How much of the integration of those acquired companies falls into your lap?

Rebecca Jacoby: It really depends on the acquisition. You're right, we do a lot of acquisitions and they fall into different categories, what type of an acquisition they are. So what we do from an IT standpoint, is we try to look rapidly at what should we integrate, and what shouldn't we integrate, and when? I will tell you that it starts with the communications processes. Similar to we have been talking about in these collaboration technologies, the communication processes are really the key processes to integrate right away so people can connect to each other and we actually start to get the synergy out of the acquisition that was the probably intention of the acquisition to begin with. When you acquire a company, you expect that they are bringing something to the table and that the power and scale of Cisco can actually make that a synergistic acquisition. We start with the communication processes, and we are obviously interested in getting them onto our network and so those things are obviously in the bailiwick of the IT organization. Then we need to make some specific decisions about critical processes, starting with financial processes and HR processes, but also moving into our ordering processes--who is our customer constituency? Is it the same? Are they different, and do we need to make a common experience for our customers? What does that mean we have to do from an application integration stand point? What are the compensation models? Do we need to integrate those or not, and when? IT is actively involved in all of those planning sessions and then, depending on how the plan turns out, we're involved in the integration aspect of it. So it's really critically important to do the communications processes upfront.

Sumi Das: Let's talk about research and development. Cisco spent 4.5 billion dollars on R&D last year that's more than 10% of its revenue. How does that trickle down to IT? Does that help your organization's efforts?

Rebecca Jacoby: First of all, innovation is the life's blood of a technology company. It's important that we continue to innovate. I believe that we innovate in multiple ways, both in our own R&D and through acquisition, and through partnerships as well. This is a critical thing for a technology company and, as someone who actually uses the technology and implements the technology, there are some very promising directions around virtualization of the data center and continued use of these collaboration technologies that can really change business models for corporations--and they can even change models for countries that are developing and so on in the future. This is, I think a critical place for us to continue to innovate because all of the answers aren't there yet, and what we see is sort of an increasing speed of people being able to understand that they are going to use technology to move forward, and then the technology responding, and then people responding to that and creating new business models. That is critical for us, I think we are good at it, and we have a lot of fun doing it as well.

Sumi Das: How you go about establishing your network infrastructure for the future? How do you make sure that it's compatible with your business down the road?

Rebecca Jacoby: That is a great question. I think this is a challenge for IT organizations if they want to be leading edge, you need to sort of separate the business requirements into two categories. General business requirements--where is your business going, what are the requirements for scale, what are the requirements for change, what are your requirements for speed? These are some of the things that are critically important and you need to build a base architecture that allows you to adapt to that as detailed business requirements come into play. The detailed business requirements that are close to the user every day, people want them now. For you to be able to respond to that, you have to have an ongoing architecture that allows you to be able to respond when the details of those changes are there. You need to be built for speed and scale and the ability to add business capabilities rapidly into your business. I think the future of that in technology is really about virtualization of your technological resources.

Sumi Das: Finally, you once described yourself as one of the most extroverted CIOs. What did you mean by that?

Rebecca Jacoby: I am a very extroverted person period; I think that I am more extroverted than the average person, not just the average CIO. But in the IT industry, people primarily have a technological background and I think that there are a lot more introverts than in some other parts of the business. It's a challenge sometimes--you have a lot of very wise people with a lot of very smart ideas, and some of the fun of it is to bring that out as an extrovert, to be able to really bring it to bear into a business process, where people might be naturally a little more vocal and extroverted in terms of the way they exchange ideas. I think from a technology standpoint, I'm a little bit more extroverted that the average technology person.

Sumi Das: Rebecca, thanks for talking to us today.

Rebecca Jacoby: Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure.

Sumi Das: I've been speaking with Rebecca Jacoby, CIO of Cisco. For CIO Sessions, I'm Sumi Das, thanks for watching.