Background Noises
>>What have any or all of you seen around, the way we should organize around these, the new social platforms tools? I mean, at last count, I think there were over a thousand, you know, social media platforms tools, etcetera, so, Jeanette?
>>Jeanette: Yeah, that's been a big focus for us, because how do we collaborate amongst all of the groups across Cisco, with 75 thousand employees, we want to make sure we can rally the troops and get people organized. One of the things we've done is have very few select boards and councils, that have brought that together, so, for example, we deployed a communication and collaboration board, internally, that was lead by our head of IT and our head of corporate communications and really strong partnerships with IT and marketing as well. And so, one person from each functional group was on that board, so there were about 30 members, they'll be a head of, you know, manufacturing and finance, they all had a seat at the table, to say, "What are these new tools? How is it impacting my employees? How can I be more efficient and more productive?" So, that's helped driven, when we Yammer usage internally. We ended up acquiring a company called Jabber, which is incorporating our social software suite now. So, really having everyone have a seat at the table, even if you are in a different group to say, you know, "How is the Yammer affecting the way we work? How do employees want to engage with each other?" So, that has really helped drive that accountability into each organization.
>>Simon, how about in engineering, I mean, you know, that's so important to what you all are doing, obviously.
>>Simon: Yeah, I mean, when we started the Yammer activity, we were really expecting that people out in the field would be, kind of, posting comments about, I just went to see this customer or I just saw this thing, and actually, what we've seen is great adoption amongst our engineers. No, we don't have 75 thousand employees or anything like it, we're running, you know, a modest two thousand, but they're still spread around the world, you know, I have a team here in San Jose, I have a team in Bangalore, and that is worst time zone difference to work across. So, people are, and as a result of that, you see a lot of inefficiency, and I think this is common across all organizations. There is wheel reinvention going on right now, across ARM, across Cisco, across all organization, and I think there's a lot of scope for these tools to prevent that. People don't, you know, they don't know who to go and ask about a problem they might be facing, but they're pretty sure it's already been solved before, somewhere in our company. And, I think there's a lot of scope for getting some further efficiencies by using these tools, and just sharing people's experience, providing forums that they discuss issues and just learning from each other. Now, I'd say we're on the very early stages of that, Yammer has been very popular but it's been quite unstructured, you know, we put it out there, people started using it, we've seen some interesting results so far. And I think, you know, what we're doing right now is looking at, okay, how do we put some structure behind this, driving some cross functional teams, looking at these problems and working out how to do it in a slightly more ordered way, but early stages for us right now.
>>Michael, have you seen any best practices emerging?
>>Michael: Well, I don't know if they're best practices yet, you know, this is probably to copy a phrase or set of next practices that are coming, I mean, I want, let me pick up on the thread that Simon mentioned, which I think is pretty interesting, as we looked at it, often times, you know, they, as we looked at organizations that we're adopting social media, often times, the senior leaders of the company didn't know ahead of time, or their hypothesis ahead of time were about where it would be most used, actually wasn't correct. And so, we do have, there's the fact that it is a bit of a bottoms up technology, often means that it is difficult to know where the greatest value is going come, and organizing around it, you know, might not be easy to do ahead of time. I don't know if you've found a similar type of thing, but it does require support from senior management that this is important, this is going to be valuable, but you often don't know where the values going to come from. Background Noises
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
