Collaboration is Hot … Very Hot (How Collaboration at Cisco Resulted in Email Reduction – A Case Study)

By Sheila Jordan | April 13, 2011 at 12:34 pm PST

Picking up on my blog last week about how Cisco’s own collaboration solution, our Integrated Workforce Experience or IWE, is showing tangible results of business value, I’d like to talk today about another great example at Cisco. This particular case shows how IWE significantly cut down email volumes.

My colleague Lance Perry, who leads Customer Strategy and Success IT, has been an active user of IWE in his organization. Lance has been well ahead of the collaboration curve. When IWE was launched, he instructed his team to use IWE exclusively in place of email through the establishment of two IWE communities.

The results were impressive. IWE effectively replaced mostly internal email messages that were sent and received, with the result being nearly an 82 percent reduction in overall email traffic within this group. In addition, there was a significant drop in the total email size within Lance’s team.

Like many active work groups, Lance’s organization regularly sent massively-sized PowerPoint documents back and forth for review in preparation for executive presentations. This volume dropped almost completely. Presentations and documents are now stored within the community instead of being attached to email messages. As you might imagine, this allows for more knowledge sharing and discovery, and less email storage of multiple copies and versions.

Lance says it best: “Things that took seven steps take two. Things that took five steps take one. It’s getting so simple.”

The benefits are telling: increased productivity, faster document sharing, improved connecting with colleagues, and collaboration on document content.

So, while this is a small organization within Cisco, it nonetheless demonstrates the business value of IWE:

• Cost avoidance
• Time to capability cut to more than half

What’s also impressive is how Lance managed to get his team to radically change their behaviors – that is, to stop using emails for document sharing!

If you’d like to read more, check out this link.

I’ll blog more next time about how other Cisco functional groups are using IWE to make our operations more streamlined and efficient. I’d love to hear your stories as well.

Happy Collaborating!