How company philosophy transcends tech at Cisco

Earlier this month, Cisco celebrated 40 years during its Cisco Live! event in Amsterdam. The San Jose-based company positions itself as a unique partner to provide solutions to the challenges of its customers, from the changing nature of the workplace to the revolution of AI and the need for digital resilience. In this context, as Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s VP for EMEA, said, the changes they’ve faced over the decades gives the ability to not just survive but thrive.

By achieving such an ambitious milestone, Fletcher Previn, the company’s CIO, added that the company’s culture-centric IT strategy has been key. “Culture is the only thing you really own about your company,” he says. “They can steal your technology, but not your philosophy.” 

Structuring IT strategy

On the basis of this organizational culture, Previn is in charge of fine-tuning a tactical and holistic IT plan, with the capacity to innovate and maintain resilience to face future uncertainties. And it’s all structured around three fundamental pillars, the first of which consists of the user experience. “This was one of the first changes I made when I took on the CIO role at Cisco,” he says. “I created a function that would report directly to me from our design and user experience department, which would give me information to integrate into the development teams.” In this way, he says, everything Cisco builds, from business applications to emails, goes through this channel.

The second pillar has to do with business agility and how work is carried out. “In terms of organization, we were looking to create stable, well-trained, and agile teams between six and 10 people with all the skills needed to develop an innovation and put it into production,” he says. For work methodology, Previn refers to practices of engineering and process automation.

The third pillar focuses on AI, where Previn differentiates it to keep employees engaged while using it as a business facilitator among customers and partners. “We’re building a lot of infrastructure for AI,” he says. “We’re bringing forward new capabilities for use cases.”

Technology legislation: safeguard or brake?

Taking advantage of European technological legislation, Previn points out that it’s not something exclusive to the region, as it’s happening all over the world. “Countries are increasingly imposing laws and regulations around residency and data privacy,” he says. “So 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 on-premises and in our own data centers.” This, he predicts, is a trend that’s here to stay.

When it comes to regulation, there’s a gulf between the way Europe and the US legislate, with the former being much more conservative than the latter, which has ruffled feathers in an industry that complains the Eurozone only exports legislation instead of encouraging innovation or fully embracing AI.

Considering Cisco is an American company that operates in Europe, the issue is never far from the surface. “We do business in more than 100 countries,” Previn says. “We focus on our business, on developing technology and selling it, adapting to each market requirement.” Within Cisco, he adds, they have a compliance division called Access to Market, which is responsible to make sure products sold have all the certifications and regulations required for a particular market.

A question of balance

Previn is an advocate of approaching innovation and regulation like AI in the right proportion. “We have a responsible AI function that works with our ethics staff and our legal team to ensure that any development is consistent with Cisco’s policies, values, and local laws in any particular country,” he says. “Before launching any capacity, even if it’s internally for the exclusive use of employees, we work with local governments to achieve alignment with local legislation.”

The dilemma between the opportunity of AI and the intrinsic risks of embracing it also gives Previn pause. “The average human lives to about 77 and spends about 144 months on the job,” he says. “Of those 144 months, a person spends on average 60 months carrying out administrative tasks, and 75% of time is dedicated to something other than what they said they’d do. AI has enormous potential to give us back time to dedicate to what we really want, but it also confronts us with new risks. Language models can be corrupted, technology can be trained with biases, and the pace of technological change is much faster than the capacity of human beings to develop skills.”

Evangelism and communication to combat shadow tech

Another big risk of AI is shadow technology. “I’ve worked at large companies like Walmart and IBM before Cisco, and I’ve realized that every organization has a certain amount of shadow IT,” says Previn. “The problem occurs when there’s a gap between what the company wants and what it delivers.” In this sense, he tries to have open conversations and rethink the relationship between tech and the organization so people improve their trust in it. “My approach usually starts from the premise that if an employee is able to reach a certain outcome through technology, he’ll be as good or even better at his job, so I’ll gladly encourage that. Instead of limiting it, I try to convince that it will improve their quality of life and productivity.”

As the CIO, evangelism is crucial for Previn since it’s easy to dedicate time to complicated and ambitious projects, but it’s the quality of life issues for workers that lay the foundations of credibility.

Bridget, a business success story

Previn understands that people are the most important asset, and the purpose of the company is to encourage everyone else to excel. With such a clear focus, the division he leads promoted a business success story named Bridget, a digital assistant and tech partner that’s been part of Cisco for 40 years and knows the answer to any question about the company. Someone can go to Bridget as an employee, ask her a question, and she’ll answer it with all the public or private information available. According to Previn, adoption by colleagues has been very fast.

“Working in computer science is always exciting,” he says. “It’s shaping the future of work and you’re always challenged and in constant change. Engineers and technologists are going to be essential when it comes to building the infrastructure of tomorrow, so it’s important to give them priority.”