BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION - CHANGE LEADER IN FOCUS


www.comms-dealer.com Cisco’s big reformation


Cisco has undergone a major business transformation. Andy Brocklehurst, Regional Sales Manager UK & Ireland, discusses the process behind its strategy.


T


he need for business transformation for every


business generally falls into two areas, points out Brocklehurst. The first is to be able to provide a superior customer experience through innovation enabling competitive advantage and consequently increase your revenues. The other area is to become a productive borderless organisation effectively getting more from less and reducing the operating costs. “Cisco was no different,” he said. “We try and avoid making redundancies from the workforce so when the economy strengthened we would come out of it faster and stronger. That said we had to reduce costs from somewhere, and these were made through stripping out costs such as internal travel of which we removed over $0.5 million in one year. Overall we reduced our costs by $1.1 billion.”


The big changes were centered around culture. Cisco had always had a command and control management style where one or few people would agree the direction of the business. Now the organisation has moved towards a far more collaborative model. “Instead of two strategic priorities we now have


over 30,” commented Brocklehurst. “To enable this you have to create boards, councils and also environments for groups to share ideas and reach decisions. This would be both virtually and face-to- face so we had to create more meeting rooms and extend our telepresence capability internally.”


The first area of focus in Brocklehurst’s transformation strategy was communication. “People are our business, and the people within it needed to understand that we had to change the way we work and also the reasons for that change,” he said. “Our own technologies helped with areas like show and share – our own corporate YouTube – being used to send video messages right across all 70,000 employees so everyone had a consistent message even if there were difficult subjects to address.”


The key enablers of change proved to be the blend of direct messaging and communication with the ability to execute and address pain points with technology. This meant that people could see results quickly. “As a business we did what we said we would do and the consequences were quantifiable,” noted Brocklehurst. “However, there isn’t really a point when you can say we have transformed to what we want to be. Things are


Andy Brocklehurst: “You need to create an environment where people can express views and feelings”


moving at such a pace that this almost becomes a constant state of change.”


Change can be difficult and Cisco did have to amend some of its policies/ benefits to employees. “We created environments such as forums, wikis and blogs where people could air their views anonymously and without fear of retribution,” added Brocklehurst. “This was a great way for other employees to provide a balance without all the answers appearing to come from the business, creating a ‘them and us’ culture. Over time people could see that we were not making redundancies and were remaining financially strong.


“Another more difficult challenge was for more remote workers to still feeling part of a team. Earlier within the change the pendulum swung too far to the cost reduction side


and we had to readdress this. But, employees felt they could raise their concerns and feelings openly and team meetings were encouraged to try to make sure motivation within geographically dispersed teams remained high.”


The focus on people within Cisco has always been ‘phenomenal’, observed Brocklehurst, highlighting a feeling of trust that exists across the organisation. “I suppose a by-product of the new way of working is that far less time was spent travelling between Cisco sites, most of which is dead time. The challenge with Cisco was whether people give this time back to themselves or reinvest back into the business. The type of people we employ quite often means the latter,” he said.


Brocklehurst says that an important lesson learned is that business transformation has to touch process,


culture and technology, not just one of these areas. “Sometimes there needs to be some governance to force the pace of change even if it can be a little uncomfortable in the beginning,” he said. “Finally, you need to create an environment where people can express views and feelings either to one another or to the management team without being worried about management reactions.”


To become a business process management company, Brocklehurst suggests that resellers should perhaps undergo some kind of transformation themselves. “It always helps if you can illustrate change and talk about difficulties as well as how wonderful everything will be. Most people know there will be pain, it just helps them manage that process if they understand some of the areas it will come from and suggested remedies.” n


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42 COMMS DEALER JANUARY 2011 www.comms-dealer.com


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