Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance

4

WHERE SOCIAL MEDIA

HAS AN IMPACT

Catherine hung up the phone, locked her computer screen,

and slid her chair away from her desk. She grabbed her

purse and headed down the hall to meet her friends for

lunch. She had just completed a two-hour live webinar, and

was excited about the information she had received and the

homework she would complete with two colleagues, one in

her office in Galway, Ireland, and another located outside

of London, England. They were all members of Cisco’s

Development Organization (CDO), and they were learning

about the latest social computing technologies. This was

the second of four two-hour webinars that Catherine and

her colleagues would participate in over the course of four

months. She loved the exchanges that always ensued as her

Western Europe colleagues shared their questions and ideas.

Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking software, hard-

ware, and services, has been using social media to create

customized learning solutions for their employees. As a large,

fast-moving global company with employees dispersed across

the globe, it is a challenge and a business imperative to

enable employees to continually refresh their skills. Social

computing technologies have played a key role in employee

development. Web 2.0 and collaboration are woven into the

TRAILBLAZER

73

74 SOCIAL MEDIA AT WORK

fabric of Cisco’s learning and development culture, and Cisco

sees its use as a model of running a sustainable business.

Social media has been utilized in learning and develop-

ment at Cisco for four primary reasons. First, it is part of

the company’s corporate culture and critical to its strategy.

CEO John Chambers has encouraged the use of these new

technologies with a focus on collaborating and connecting

with customers, partners, employees, and communities. With

Web 1.0, Cisco claimed to be the first company to do support,

case management, and orders online. Web 2.0 is viewed as

a market transition, impacting the way businesses are run.

Cisco desires to be at the forefront of this transition and

is heavily investing in making it happen smoothly. Greg

Brower leads Cisco’s curriculum planning and deployment

in the Cisco Development Organization (CDO). His group

is responsible for enabling the learning and development of

approximately 40 percent of Cisco’s key talent. Among them

are the software and hardware design engineers. He explains,

‘‘We are there to partner with the business units to identify

high value opportunities, try it, shake it out, and use it to

effectively run the business.’’

Second, social media is cost effective. The smart use of

social media helps to cut expenses and reduce the opportu-

nity cost associated with travel for traditional instructor-led

training. Through social media, experts have access to more

affordable ways to design learning experiences.

Third, social media scales more effectively to meet a

global audience’s training needs. In the past, instructors flew

across the world for face-to-face training in small groups.

With social technologies, time zone boundaries are no longer

a barrier to sharing complex knowledge with huge groups

of distributed employees. Through CDO’s ‘‘Nerd Lunch’’

program, the company routinely uses telepresence technol-

ogy to enable the technical transfer of information from

TRAILBLAZER

WHERE SOCIAL MEDIA HAS AN I MPACT 75

Austin, Texas, to large audiences in San Jose, California,

and beyond.

Fourth, social media engages employees in sharing knowl-

edge and expertise. Says Greg Brower: ‘‘We believe that the

more engaged the employees are, the more satisfied and

productive they will be. For CDO, it’s about enabling engi-

neers to share the very thing that makes them come to

work—knowledge and innovation. Engagement is a smart

thing to do, and Web 2.0 is a critical way to do it.’’ Brower’s

comments echo the support that social media has at Cisco,

far beyond its learning solutions.

The course that Cisco’s pursuing has resulted in a plethora

of creative design, development, and delivery techniques

using social media technology. Cisco’s CDO group incor-

porates Web 2.0 into their solutions, learning as much

as possible about social computing to ensure that it can

stay ahead of the competition. When traditional instructor-

led training failed to meet the organization’s requirements

for low-cost speed of deployment to a global audience,

CDO’s technology executives approached Brower’s Curricu-

lum Team, challenging it to find a way to incorporate Web

2.0 technologies into its curriculum development process.

In partnership with the voice technology group, the cur-

riculum team came through with an exemplary approach.

A wiki was used to gather training requirements and create

a proposal for executives. The actual curriculum design was

completed through a wiki as well with contributions from

subject matter experts on discussion forums, video links, and

question-and-answer dialogues using WebEx virtual confer-

ences. In essence, the curriculum design process became a

structured conversation using Web 2.0 tools. In this man-

ner, the team was able to quickly and effectively share

project information, identify training requirements, design

an effective solution, and make their executive proposal.

TRAILBLAZER