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Cisco CEO to Enterprise IT: 'Our Time Is Now'Cisco CEO to Enterprise IT: 'Our Time Is Now'

During his keynote address at Cisco Live, CEO Chuck Robbins rallies business customers to take charge in digital transformation.

Zeus Kerravala

July 12, 2016

4 Min Read
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During his keynote address at Cisco Live, CEO Chuck Robbins rallies business customers to take charge in digital transformation.

In yesterday's opening keynote at Cisco Live, the summer camp for geeks, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins struck an optimistic tone... and why not? In his first year as CEO, he has accomplished a great many things, including a corporate restructuring and acquisition of 15 companies.

That said, Robbins directed most of his optimism toward the audience of 28,000 live attendees and more than 100,000 viewers watching the live video stream. At one point, for example, he emphatically stated, "our time is now," meaning the network's role has changed. Instead of viewing the network as "plumbing," many of the enterprise IT professionals comprising the bulk of the Cisco Live audience now consider it a strategic enabler of business change.

The rise of digital transformation has driven the change in sentiment, and that has allowed Cisco to flex its muscles and become a much more strategic partner to the business. All of the building blocks of digitization -- collaboration, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, security, automation, and analytics -- are network-centric in nature. In other words, the network has become the foundation for the digital enterprise.

Come Together Now
To support digital transformation, Robbins urged IT departments and lines of business (LoB) to come together on using technology to drive business change. He referred to an interesting data point, that being that 84% of customers view technology as the biggest enabler of digital transformation, and gave a simple example of a bank that put video endpoints in every location. In doing so, it has enabled communication between customers and experts about offerings like mortgages, investments, insurance, or any other topics local branch personnel could not handle. Traditionally, the bank's customers would have had to schedule in-person meetings with bank representatives to get their questions answered.

Another example comes from the New Jersey State Police, which is working with Cisco on a video solution for arraignments and bail hearings. Today, this requires multiple people to get together to meet live in a process that can take several days, said Chief Chris Wagner, who past president of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police and spoke as part of a customer panel on digital transformation. The time required, he added, can have a significantly detrimental impact on lower-income people who may lose their jobs if the process takes too long -- and job loss, of course, could have other negative effects. By digitizing the process, judges, attorneys, police officers, defendants, and other participants could participate in video calls, even on weekends.

These and other examples are fine and dandy, but most business leaders aren't even aware of broken processes or what technology capabilities exist. Yesterday I asked a number of enterprise IT attendees what methodologies they have in place for evaluating business processes and the potential impact of applying digital technology to them. Most said they have no such methodology but rather take the lead from Cisco and the solutions it brings to them. While this is great for Cisco, and it certainly highlights the value of its end-to-end approach, enterprise IT needs to be able to ideate their own solutions on an ongoing basis if digital transformation is to succeed.

The Time Is Now
Enterprise IT professionals who embrace this challenge do indeed have the opportunity to make this time "their time," as Robbins has said. IT leaders not only must collaborate with LoBs but also lead business leaders to these solutions. Cloud, IoT, and mobility buzzwords and hype aside, most LoB managers aren't really aware of how to apply these in ways to streamline or redefine business processes.

To accomplish this, IT must take the time to learn how their companies' business processes work. It must start with processes that have high amounts of human latency and then use digital technology to remove those points of delay.

This worked for a regional bank CIO, who shared with me how went on the road with field service people for about a week to understand how they worked. He carefully documented how long certain tasks took, and then used this information to build a mobile application that streamlined their work processes. As a result, the bank reduced mortgage approval times from about two weeks to a single day, as needed.

Cisco's new "Never Better" brand campaign is meant to tell companies that the time for going digital has never been better. The underlying message is that Cisco itself has never enjoyed a better time to be in networking. Like the "Force," it binds all, connects everything, and transforms.

So this is certainly "our time," but enterprise IT professionals must bring solutions to the business leaders and, in so doing, become their advisors and partners. They must not wait for the business to come to them.

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About the Author

Zeus Kerravala

Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research.

Kerravala provides a mix of tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate and long term strategic advice. Kerravala provides research and advice to the following constituents: End user IT and network managers, vendors of IT hardware, software and services and the financial community looking to invest in the companies that he covers.

Kerravala does research through a mix of end user and channel interviews, surveys of IT buyers, investor interviews as well as briefings from the IT vendor community. This gives Kerravala a 360 degree view of the technologies he covers from buyers of technology, investors, resellers and manufacturers.

Kerravala uses the traditional on line and email distribution channel for the research but heavily augments opinion and insight through social media including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Blogs. Kerravala is also heavily quoted in business press and the technology press and is a regular speaker at events such as Interop and Enterprise Connect.

Prior to ZK Research, Zeus Kerravala spent 10 years as an analyst at Yankee Group. He joined Yankee Group in March of 2001 as a Director and left Yankee Group as a Senior Vice President and Distinguished Research Fellow, the firm's most senior research analyst. Before Yankee Group, Kerravala had a number of technical roles including a senior technical position at Greenwich Technology Partners (GTP). Prior to GTP, Kerravala had numerous internal IT positions including VP of IT and Deputy CIO of Ferris, Baker Watts and Senior Project Manager at Alex. Brown and Sons, Inc.

Kerravala holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.