Cisco's Organizational Change
Cisco IT Case Study Organizational Change and Advanced Services for Operational Success
How Cisco IT Implemented Organizational Change and Advanced Services for Operational Success
New organizational framework greatly improves operations.
Given today’s pressing need to optimize IT services and resources while reducing costs and improving organizationwide productivity, the Cisco lifecycle methodology offers the framework needed to make operations more efficient and responsive. Cisco IT Network and Data Center Services (NDCS) changed from using a traditional organizational model to Cisco’s own lifecycle model, with substantial operations improvements across five different metrics. This case study describes Cisco IT’s internal infrastructure, a leading-edge enterprise IT environment that is among the largest and most complex in the world.
“By moving from a traditional technology, silo-based organizational structure to a lifecycle-based model, we were able to improve our operational metrics considerably. Our number of cases decreased by approximately 60 percent, and our time-to-repair to get clients back up and running has decreased by almost 70 percent.”
John Manville, Vice President, IT Network and Data Center Services, Cisco
BACKGROUND
An enterprise with 300 locations in 90 countries, Cisco has 46 data centers and server rooms supporting the 65,000-plus employees. Fourteen of the data centers/server rooms are production or customer-facing and 32 are used for product development. Like most IT organizations of large enterprises, Cisco IT used a traditional siloed organizational structure, with staffers doing both implementational as well as operational work, often having to drop operational projects to complete deployments. With the traditional organizational arrangement, there was much duplication of effort and lack of focus across the organization. In many cases, employees were unaware of the duplication that existed across the organization. The
How Cisco IT Implemented Organizational Change and Advanced Services for Operational Success
New organizational framework greatly improves operations.
Given today’s pressing need to optimize IT services and resources while reducing costs and improving organizationwide productivity, the Cisco lifecycle methodology offers the framework needed to make operations more efficient and responsive. Cisco IT Network and Data Center Services (NDCS) changed from using a traditional organizational model to Cisco’s own lifecycle model, with substantial operations improvements across five different metrics. This case study describes Cisco IT’s internal infrastructure, a leading-edge enterprise IT environment that is among the largest and most complex in the world.
“By moving from a traditional technology, silo-based organizational structure to a lifecycle-based model, we were able to improve our operational metrics considerably. Our number of cases decreased by approximately 60 percent, and our time-to-repair to get clients back up and running has decreased by almost 70 percent.”
John Manville, Vice President, IT Network and Data Center Services, Cisco
BACKGROUND
An enterprise with 300 locations in 90 countries, Cisco has 46 data centers and server rooms supporting the 65,000-plus employees. Fourteen of the data centers/server rooms are production or customer-facing and 32 are used for product development. Like most IT organizations of large enterprises, Cisco IT used a traditional siloed organizational structure, with staffers doing both implementational as well as operational work, often having to drop operational projects to complete deployments. With the traditional organizational arrangement, there was much duplication of effort and lack of focus across the organization. In many cases, employees were unaware of the duplication that existed across the organization. The