In anticipation of their co-presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Charlie Martin, Director, Advanced Services at Cisco, and Robert Thacker, Director, Solutions Engineering at iGrafx, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out their interview in relation to their BBC co-presentation entitled, Unlocking Value by Leveraging the Internet of Things.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: Cisco’s Business Outcomes Consulting group is developing techniques to ensure Cisco customers’ investment in technology can have an unambiguous alignment to the success of their businesses. A key technique being driven by our group is the use of structured business process modeling, and the leveraging of these business process models for continuous improvement, cost optimization, and quality assurance.

Q: Describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities for your organization?

A:  It’s often difficult to find the time to address foundational issues that underlie many of the challenges we face. We find ourselves coming back to the same challenges over and over again. Though it sometimes causes short-term pain, we are prioritizing foundational work ahead of some of the firefights that come up day-to-day.  Obviously, we can’t do this across the board, but we are finding that the firefights are fewer and farther between the more aggressively we are able to correct the root causes of our key challenges.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A:  As an organization, our ability to be agile is enabled by the skills and capabilities of our team members. Training and knowledge sharing have always been an important part of how we do business. We are doubling down by providing more training and job tools in the process management area. This will provide team members the support they need to jump into a greater variety of projects with shorter lead times. With this approach, we are able to bring this value to our customers more rapidly and at a lower cost.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: Today’s workplace environment often consists of distributed teams. We see this both within Cisco and with our customers. The opportunity to work through business challenges in a common war room environment has virtually gone away. We’ve had to find new ways to collaborate across geographies and time zones.

We felt that the most effective way to attack this problem would be through our business process management toolset. We’ve made an investment in iGrafx. Their hosted solution has allowed our team of analysts from around North America to effectively collaborate with each other and with customer stakeholders in the development of critical IT processes. Not only has it helped in elicitation, but is being utilized for both root cause analysis and for continuous improvement.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: The Internet of Everything is changing how we do things and we are only at the beginning of this transformation. In the same way that electricity replaced steam-powered factory, the Internet of Everything opens transformational approaches to how we do business. Every day there are new capabilities available to us through the Internet of Things. To maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of our processes we need to be aware of these capabilities, and identify ways to take advantage of them.

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Don’t miss Charlie and Robert’s co-presentation, Unlocking Value by Leveraging the Internet of Things, at Building Business Capability on Wednesday, November 2, 2016 from 10:25 to 11:25 am. Click here to register for attendance.