Project Manager

Question: What was the most critical issue at Cisco that hindered corporate turnaround or changes? What were the main reasons behind? How would Cisco prevent this from happening?

In order to make corporate strategy succeed, one of the most important conditions would be the alignment between IT and corporate/business strategy. If IT system is effectively aligned with corporate strategy, it would work as a critical tool for management team for their major decisions. An effectively-designed IT system would also facilitate organizational changes and help people move in a desired direction. On the other hand, it would be a waste of resources if IT system doesn’t effectively support what business is aiming for even with highly sophisticated functionality. From my past work experiences, I’ve seen a number of cases that functional managers were complaining that IT system itself was not well supporting business (e.g. marketing, sales, or HR) and just ended up with giving extra burdens and complexity on top of daily works. In addition to this, I often saw executive management team was also quite upset when they were being reported with a number of different set of standards due to decentralized reporting system. Cisco in this case was also struggling with misalignment with business strategy and decentralized IT system.

There are some reasons behind this misalignment between business strategy and IT system in this case. First, there are multiple, non-integrated IT programs within one organization starting from Peter Solvik, Boston’s predecessor. The Peter Solvik’s policy of decentralized, flexible IT system (e.g. client-funded project system etc.) was somewhat effective in the era of its expanding business and, Cisco was able to experience extensive infrastructure build-up and client relationships. With IT budgets and flexibility, respective projects were given discretion in its IT implementation and customization. However, this became a serious