CISCO's John Chambers is on a mission. He penned an op-ed piece in San Jose Mercury news calling for more spending on broadband and another one in the WSJ calling for re-wiring of work. An earlier piece in Fast Company describes how the company has become more collaborative than a command and control enterprise and how better deicions are getting made faster. While all this seems like a ploy to sell more CISCI stuff :-), he may have a point here. The current crisis calls for organizations to be more innovative in finding revenue sources and growth opportunities. How can we create organizations that can source talent globally and serve global markets? The old model was to find a solution for our market and then take that solution global. This doesn't work anymore as consumers are demanding customized solutions that cater to their context. In addition, expertise is globally distributed and we have to tune our infrastructure to connect and exploit that.
Broadband is necessary for the new reality but not sufficient. How do we adjust our processes and workflows to do global work? John Chambers mentions TelePresence (a CISCO product) as an example of how a product can help with this transformation. While this product is a cool innovation, what we need to hear more about are case studies of how it has been used. For example, how did CISCO move from a command and control based organization to a boards and councils type of arrangement? Would this work for small enterprises? Careful study and analysis of collaborative enterprises would go a long way in inventing the future that John Chambers is talking about.