Cisco celebrated forty years of history in Amsterdam with the EMEA version of its flagship customer conference, Cisco Live!
During the event, Cisco positioned itself as a “unique” partner for customers facing challenges “from the changing nature of the workplace to the revolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in data centers and network infrastructure or the need for digital resilience,” said Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s vice president for EMEA. The challenges and changes Cisco has faced over four decades “will give us the ability to survive, and even thrive, the next 40 years,” Tuszik said.
In an interview with CIO Spain, Fletcher Previn, CIO and board member, talked about Cisco’s roadmap, discussed AI regulations, advocated for balance among legislation, innovation and risk, and revealed how he approaches shadow IT in his own organization. Previn emphasized organizational culture, an intangible that guides him when executing his plans. “Culture is the only thing you really own about your company. They can steal your technology, but not your philosophy,” Previn warned.
Weaving the IT strategy
With organizational culture in mind, Previn is in charge of laying the foundations for a tactical IT plan. The roadmap is based on three fundamental pillars, with a goal of achieving an agile organization with a capacity for innovation and operational resilience to face the uncertain future that is looming on the horizon.
The first of these pillars is related to user experience. “This was one of the first changes I made when I took on the CIO role at Cisco. I created a function that would report directly to me from our design and user experience department, which would provide me with information to integrate with the development teams,” Previn said. In this way, he said, “everything we build, from an enterprise application to an email that goes out to the business, goes through this team.”
The second leg of the plan has to do with business agility, which requires understanding this dynamic from a dual perspective: how employees are organized at Cisco and how they go about their work. “In terms of organization, we were looking to create stable, well-trained and agile teams, that is, between six and ten people with all the skills needed to develop an innovation and put it into production,” Previn said.
Finally, as has become the norm over the last year, there’s the AI pillar. On this topic, Previn differentiated between AI to make employees productive, AI as a business enabler between Cisco and its customers and partners, and Cisco’s own centralized AI infrastructure. “We’re building a lot of infrastructure for AI, we’re pushing out new capabilities for use cases in the AI cluster like noise cancellation for Webex,” Previn said.
“Engineers and technologists are really going to be essential in building the infrastructure of tomorrow. It’s very important to prioritize them. We live in a time of overhaul. You don’t have to look at IT as a cost center that you wish you didn’t have. It’s a very critical business enabler.”
Technology legislation: safeguard or brake?
On the topic of technology legislation, Previn said: “It is not something exclusive to the Old Continent, it is happening all over the world. Countries are imposing more and more laws and regulations around residency and data privacy.” As a result, “we’re thinking about what workloads make sense on the public Internet, in hyperscale environments or in the cloud, and what workloads make sense to keep running in our on-premises and our own data centers.” This, he predicted, is a trend that is here to stay, “it’s very likely going to continue.”
As far as regulation is concerned, there is a gap between the way Europe and the United States legislate, the former being much more conservative than the latter, which has raised some hackles in a technology industry that complains that the Eurozone only exports legislation instead of taking the opportunity to foster innovation or catch the AI wave.
Considering that Cisco is an American multinational that also operates on European soil, the issue came up in the course of the conversation. However, Previn, displaying the communication skills that a good CIO is expected to have these days, shrugged it off. “We are a global company and do business in more than 100 countries around the world. We focus on our business, on developing technology and selling it, adapting to each of the market’s requirements.” In the organization, he said, they have a division called access to market that is in charge of ensuring that the product sold has all the certifications and regulations required for a particular market.
Balancing innovation and regulation
Continuing with the debate between innovation and regulation in terms of AI, Previn advocates proportion. Like almost everything in life, it is a matter of balance. “At Cisco, we have a responsible AI area that works with our ethics staff and our legal team to make sure that any development is consistent with Cisco’s policies, our values and local laws in any particular country,” he explained. “Before we launch any capability, even if it’s internally for employee use only, we work with local governments to ensure an alignment with local laws.”
The trade-off between the opportunity of AI and the intrinsic risks of embracing it also gives the CIO pause for thought. “The average human being lives about 77 years, so they spend about 144 months on the job. Of those 144 months, a person spends on average 60 months carrying out administrative tasks, 44 months of meetings, and 75% of your time is spent doing something other than what you said you would do when you were older. [This technology] has enormous potential to give us back time to spend on what we really want, but it also confronts us with new risks. Language models can become corrupted, technology is trained with biases, and the pace of technological change is much faster than the ability of humans to develop skills,” Previn said.
Part of the IT team during Cisco Live! in Amsterdam.
Cisco
How to combat shadow technology
Another major risk that is once again highlighted by the eruption of AI within corporations is shadow technology. “I have worked in large companies like Walmart and IBM before Cisco, and I have realized that every organization has a certain amount of shadow IT; the problem occurs when there is a gap between what the company wants and what it is delivering.”
In this sense the executive tries to have an open conversation with the corporation, to rethink the relationship between technology and the organization so that people improve their trust regarding it. “My approach is usually based on the premise that if the employee is able to promise that, through technology, he will be as good or even better at his job, I will gladly give it to him. Rather than limiting, I try to convince that it will improve their quality of life and productivity.”
Evangelism is crucial for Previn. “When you’re the CIO it’s very easy to spend all your time on complicated and ambitious projects like ERP, Oracle or SAP, but it’s the quality of life issues for the workers that will lay the foundation for your credibility. If they can’t even fix my laptop, why would I let them take over the transformation of my line of business?”
Bridget, a business success story
At Cisco, Previn says, “our people are our most important asset; our purpose in the company is to enable everyone else to do their life’s work.”
He shared a business success story with a clear focus on people via a project called Bridget. “Bridget is a digital assistant who, in the form of a technology partner, has worked at Cisco for 40 years and knows the answer to any question about the company. You can go to Bridget as an employee and ask her a question and she will answer it with whatever public or private information is available,” Previn said. Asked about the adoption by his colleagues at Cisco, the CIO said: “It’s been very quick and successful.”
On the challenge of working in IT, Previn said: “Working in IT is like being a neurosurgeon, it’s never boring, it’s always exciting, you’re always constantly changing, it’s always a challenge.”
“IT is designing the future of work. Engineers and technologists are really going to be essential in building the infrastructure of tomorrow. It’s very important to prioritize them. We live in a time of overhaul. You don’t have to look at IT as a cost center that you wish you didn’t have. It’s a very critical business enabler,” Previn concluded.
Source:: Network World