Appointed as CIO of Cisco Systems in October 2006, Rebecca Jacoby drives the IT and Cisco technology throughout Cisco on a global basis, enabling productivity and operational excellence across all business functions. During her 11-year tenure at Cisco, Jacoby has built a strong reputation as a focused and innovative business leader. She has held a variety of leadership positions within Cisco including VP (Customer Service and Operational Systems) and VP (Manufacturing). Jacoby oversees a staff of 1,800 people worldwide while managing the IT strategy and operations for approximately 50,000 Cisco employees globally. In an interaction with Sudesh Prasad of Dataquest, Rebecca Jacoby talks about the challenges and other issues she faces as a CIO at Cisco. Excerpts:

Cisco as an enterprise is known to be saving around $1 bn annually by implementing its own technology. Please share with us the secret of your success.
IT is the enabler of Cisco's business strategy. Our vision is to enable everything we do with IT, which means to be successful as a company, we must align IT with the business imperatives at multiple levels. By enabling business operational functionality, business capabilities, and growth strategies, IT at Cisco sets the standard for increasing productivity not only by reducing operating expenses, but also through enabling revenue growth.

How do you measure the impact of IT in your organization? What are the key measurement metrics and methods for tracking accountability?
We have always measured the impact of IT from a productivity perspective, expecting at least half of our productivity to come through systems innovation. At a company level, Cisco measures productivity as simply revenue per headcount, or expense to revenue for operational functions. In recent years, we have found it useful to measure process and transaction cycle times, as well as revenue enablement. These measures help us to be more selective when prioritizing projects and more effective at measuring the success of a project. As IT becomes more aligned with the business and moves up from offering operational functionality and business capabilities to enabling strategy we are now also measuring the time it takes to produce or scale required capabilities.

"The pace of change really highlights the real power of building upon a services oriented architecture, which allows IT to be as agile as the business demands"

What are some of the challenges you face in implementing the latest IT and communication technologies, considering they are changing really fast?
The key is to add value as fast as the business' needs require it and at the same time to balance the risk. When making changes to the business architecture and the system architecture simultaneously, often, we must decide between making incremental changes or creating something new-and taking advantage of more flexible technologies.

The pace of change really highlights the real power of building upon a services oriented architecture, which allows IT to be as agile as the business demands. Managing the power of these technologies requires ever tighter alignment with business strategy.

Enterprises in India, in general, are reluctant to adopt IP and wireless technologies for doing their business. What do you think could be the reason?
I do not think that this reluctance is unique to India. Many customers are facing these same concerns: Is the technology mature and available? Is it secure? Also, realizing the full value from technologies requires tight alignment with business strategies. Many enterprises are worried about their processes and skill-sets to manage the new technology. These are issues we address with our customers daily. This is a great opportunity for competitive differentiation.

Are you in favor of enterprises outsourcing their IT infrastructure to managed service providers? What are the challenges enterprises face when they outsource?
In general, I think it is appropriate to outsource work that is not core or mission critical to the business. A common challenge with any infrastructure is maintaining its ability to add new technology or applications as they are needed for the business. This flexibility can be compounded if the network has been outsourced and not closely managed.

How has the CIO's role changed over the years, and what role do you see the CIO playing in the long term?
The role of the CIO has evolved into becoming more of a strategic partner with the business and less of a traditional technologist. The successful CIO today must first and foremost understand the business and have the ability to use technology to grow that business. The very successful CIO will drive business and systems architectures that simplify risk management and enable strategic agility.

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