Cisco Helps Companies Transform Business

At the recent Cisco Collaboration Summit, Vishaka Radia discusses with UCStrategies' Blair Pleasant how Cisco's Customer Business Transformation group works with customers to identify use cases for collaboration that help customers succeed at meeting their business goals.

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Cisco Collaboration Summit - What's UC?, (UCStrategies Views article) by Jon Arnold
• Cisco Continues to Help Customers Transform Their Business, (UCStrategies Views article) by Blair Pleasant
• Cisco Getting Serious About Developers, (UCStrategies Views article) by David Yedwab
• Clouds and Sun in Miami - Cisco Collaboration Summit 2011, (blog) by Nancy Jamison
• UCStrategies Experts Discuss the Cisco Collaboration Summit, (Industry Buzz podcast) by Blair Pleasant

Blair Pleasant: Hi this is Blair Pleasant and I'm at the beautiful Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami at the Cisco Collaboration Summit. With me is Vishaka Radia. Vishaka is the Director of Customer Business Transformation for Cisco's Collaboration and Communications Group. Vishaka, thanks for joining us today.

Vishaka Radia: Hi Blair, thank you, it's a pleasure.

Blair: Vishaka, tell me about the Business Transformation Group and what it is you do.

Vishaka: Certainly Blair, it's great to be here. The Customer Business Transformation Group works directly with customers, to look at how communications and collaboration technologies can address some of their critical business pain points. And then what we do is quantify the business value. We do this through a process called "use cases," looking at the problem, the solution, and the business value. Once we identify these use cases, that becomes the foundation strategy and plan for an organization to implement. We have this collection of use cases for not only unified communications, but also some of our new innovations, like Quad, and Cius, and Social Minor. What we are able to do is then use these use cases and put wrappers around them in order to scale what we do to the field. What does this mean? It means our field is able to reach far more than just the IT networking buyer. They are able to reach multiple levels of buyers up to the CIO as well as, get themselves sponsored over to the business side in order to really drive the business conversations that are needed, the business engagements in order to service business budgets that are needed, to drive investment and collaboration and communication.

Blair: And what does this mean to your customers?

Vishaka: To our customers, what they find very powerful about unified communications and collaboration is that they get three sources of business value. It is always about reducing costs, but it's also about productivity; productivity of their people, imagine nurses in a hospital. Or whether it's really changing their experience for their customers; imagine improving the patient experience. These three sources of business value are very powerful. But what we found in our work, with hundreds of customers over the years, is that it's the transformational benefits that deliver 10 to 15 times the value. And therefore, from a customer perspective they are able to achieve so much more benefit if they think through not just the technology from just a cost-savings standpoint, but from how it is going to impact their business.

Blair: So can you give me an example of a typical use case?

Vishaka: Yes, there's a typical use case we've done just recently here - I'll go back to the health care provider. We were brought in to look at cutting costs, that is what every CIO looks at. But this happened to be a very strategic CIO. And by the way, we are finding more and more that CIO's are not just looking at taking care of operations, but that CIO's are being asked more and more to be strategic. So what the CIO asked us to do is go to the business side and work with them in a workshop situation and actually surface the collaboration pain points. So we did workshops with nurses and doctors and others to surface those with communication and collaboration problems. We weren't looking at every scenario and every problem, but we were looking at where they were having the most trouble with communication and collaboration. Then what we did was we brainstormed with them - we showed them some use cases that may be relevant to the ones they have. Then working directly with the customer, we actually created the use cases relevant to them, whether it was better tracking of equipment or resources or it was the fact that their nurses had to be productive while they were mobile. These are the kinds of benefits that we were then able to quantify. So when it comes time for the CIO to justify an investment in technology, he or she is able to do it not just based on cost-savings, but being able to demonstrate to the business that here are the additional benefits you'll achieve.

Blair: Great - thank you very much, Vishaka.

Vishaka: Thank you, Blair.