Cisco Webex Social

In November 2010, Cisco introduced its own software-based enterprise collaboration platform: Cisco WebEx Social which combines a foundation of video and unified communications with personalization and relevant features, applications, and services on the network, integrating them with business and management systems.  One of the early adopters of WebEx Social is the IT Regional Leadership team that is present in four regions around the world.

As part of Cisco’s globaI region IT model, IT shares important information such as roadmaps and global content from IT service owners, infrastructure owners, and other corporate stakeholders with the IT Regional Leadership team and its members. Therefore, consistent communications are critical for its success.

Traditionally, communication between these groups has been relationship-based and most often done through email.  But there was a necessity of improving the outbound communications and the flow of information and the solution needed to be operationally and technically feasible to implement and maintain.

In January 2012, they launched the IT Regional Leadership (ITRL) community on Cisco's internal enterprise collaboration platform, the Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) which gave them a new way to manage information flow offline that would provide all IT stakeholders globally with consistent, predictable communications.

IWE Solution and Benefits

• It consolidates relevant, cross-regional information and makes it accessible to IT service owners, regional IT leaders, and their teams providing an intelligent source of information out to the regions and back to corporate IT.
• The information flow helps to ensure timely, consistent communications and alignment among the corporate and regional IT teams and facilitates stakeholder collaboration and questions, ideas, and issue resolution within the community.
• It has helped with streamlined, more effective communication flow between the IT groups, service owners, corporate teams, and leadership and clients in region.
• It helps to save time since service owners do not get multiple isolated requests for the same information. Regional IT users do not have to spend time looking up contacts and initiating requests via email.
• It provides a common environment to share information relevant to each region via posts, with functionality for contributors to collaborate and provide their input collectively.
• It helps project teams to share ideas, collect feedback and lessons learned, and brainstorm on solutions to ease the pain points through the use of posts and discussion forums.
• It gives users an instant, unified environment for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Multiple emails (with cumbersome attachments) to multiple recipients on the same project are eliminated.

As we can see, IWE allows employees to more effectively connect, communicate, and collaborate with subject matter experts, colleagues, and communities, as well as share information to help accelerate growth, encourage innovation, and create sustainable productivity.

To read additional information about Cisco’s implementation of IWE powered by Cisco WebEx Social, visit: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ciscoitatwork/collaboration/iwe_powered_by_cisco_webex_social.html