How Cisco IT implemented Organizational Change and Advanced Services for Operational Success Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

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Introduction

Cisco is an organization which offers a package of infrastructure services including design, build, and management to assist organization to achieve benefits. These benefits include costs reduction, increased productivity. It also assists organizations to improve end-user productivity and provides ways to reduce risks applicable to them.

The company implements complex network upgrades. It allows company to improve their network availability and the performance. After design, the company manufactures and sells networking equipment. The business operates with 300 locations in 90 countries. It also has 96 46 data centers and server rooms supporting the 65000-plus employees. Fourteen of the data server rooms are production or customer facing and 32 are used for product development.

Currently, it works with siloed organizational structure. In this structure, staff do both implementation work as well as operational work. The original organizational model included regional network teams and regional voice teams that were responsible for all aspects of implementing their environments and services.

Identification of the Problem

Due to the traditional organizational structure, the organization has faced many problems. Most of the time, employees have to drop operational projects to complete assignments at deployments. Duplication of work had become a norm at the business place and employees even did not know that they are doing same efforts which are undertaken by other employees. There was no clear segregation of duties due to which employees did not have focus on the work they are good at.

In the present system, there were approximately 150 client-impacting incidents per quarter. There was also outage duration of 1000-plus hours per quarter and a defective root cause percentage consistently over 40 percent. Therefore, there was a need to have a new structure to meet the demands of the market on time. The new system should be simple, which can enhance the communication and the collaboration process to bring every employee on the same platform.

The life-cycle methodology was proposed to solve the issues, but it was a challenging task to apply such a methodology to the entire organization.

Case Analysis

Organizational Structure is something that keeps on changing with the needs of the company which are influenced by the customers’ requirements. The resource allocation of Cisco was not efficient anymore, therefore, the feedback from customers was also negative.

In order to implement, it is necessary to consider the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities for the change. The SWOT Analysis is used to analyze the strength of a company’s external environment. It is a review of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as they are linked to Cisco.

The SWOT analysis allows a company to achieve a better understanding of the business organization. In this way, the company can assess whether an immediate action is required or not. It also allows the management of Cisco to determine the steps to improve the strengths of the business organization.

Strengths of Cisco include that it has a big market share and a well-known brand. The new structure should be such that the strengths of Cisco are maintained. The weaknesses include that there was duplication of resources and the research and development process. Moreover, there seems to be a lack of cooperation between the departments (Al-Harbi, 2013).

The opportunities for the company include the changes that have affected the internet technology. These changes are very sensitive for innovation and Cisco is considered to be a pioneer in innovation. This should be most important attribute of the new structure (Al-Harbi, 2013).

The threat includes that competition is increasing. Therefore, there are chances that Cisco, if it does not develop new structure, will not able to maintain its market share and satisfy customers (Al-Harbi, 2013).

It is not easy to change the organizational structure. There are many problems faced by the organization especially when the organization is such a big one. One of the issues is the resistance to change. This may occur because many employees would not like work in new ways. They have been addicted to old process and do not prefer new ways.

How Cisco IT implemented Organizational Change and Advanced Services for Operational Success Case solution

One of the failures of the top management in the implementation of change is the failure of communication about the change. Cisco seems to have communicated the objective of change to employees. It is also important to collect data about the present systems.

Therefore, the management of Cisco interviewed business and IT leaders to gather technical information about technical process, tools and organizational documents and templates. After an assessment of the current state, NAIS outlined a detailed remedial plan to achieve business goals and prepares an achievable mission and roadmap..................

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