From CIO to CX SVP, Cisco’s Jacqueline Guichelaar takes a road less travelled

“There’s just not enough money. There’s just not enough time. It’s just not possible”. Systems engineers can also become heavily invested in applications they’ve developed, meaning that scuttling them often presents certain “cultural challenges”.

Guichelaar stresses that being able to “pull back” from such a place requires “experience, foresight and governance”.

“You have to put some frameworks in place, otherwise you just end up with a flavour of everything and high complexity and no one wants that.”

She says it’s something many CIOs still get wrong, investing large amounts of time, energy and money building things they could easily buy for vastly cheaper and greater overall value.

“I’ve seen it time and time again in my career, in financial services, in telecommunications, even in banking”.

Yet getting it right is key to delivering better experiences, whether for customers or staff, Guichelaar notes, as it all comes down to “simplicity”.

It’s one of the many lessons she’s bringing from Cisco’s top tech job to charting her new course in CX in Singapore.

One of her customers there is a large American bank struggling with sprawling legacy systems across its entire international operations.

“It might sound basic but it’s difficult, and something many companies around the world are grappling with.”

“I feel for the team, because it’s really hard when you’ve got to figure out how to refresh. How do you get the investment? How do you support, how do you get the change window time? How do you get enough engineers?”

Technology needs to deliver value in the form of outcomes

When Guichelaar and her team went in and met with executives in the network space they soon discovered – much to the bank’s surprise – that it wasn’t utilising much of the value it had actually bought from Cisco. This prompted her to send in a “bunch” of CX engineers to help get everything back on track.

Another major bank Guichelaar is working with is transitioning to a hybrid cloud environment.

“They’re wanting to move out of their own data centres because it’s too costly and to figure out what workloads do [they want to] put on public cloud versus their own private data centre versus SaaS,” she says, adding that challenges like these are where great CX teams can really shine.

Ultimately, today perhaps more so than any time before, the raison d’etre of all technology projects – be they customer or staff facing – has to be delivering value in the form of ‘outcomes’.

“I was a customer of Cisco for decades so I know also what it feels to be on the other side,” Guichelaar says.

“And one of the things our [Cisco] customers are saying to us is ‘we want to see value from the hardware we buy, we want to know that the software is making an impact’.

“We want to be happy and we want to have a long term relationship with you”.

With decades of senior technology leadership under her belt, Guichelaar understands as well as any CIO that this is often simply a pipe dream, though, especially once the realities of deploying large-scale solutions set in.

Yet with competition in the tech sector as fierce as ever, and with the cloud driving prices and margins down to new lows, Guichelaar understands that her new CX role may end up being as challenging– if not more – than her four years as Cisco’s top tech executive.

“Time will tell the impact I will have with customers, but does it feel right?”

“It definitely feels like the right move for me and I’m glad I’ve taken all my tech background and experience and am doing something for our customers. And I do like to be with customers.”