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.