Reading 1: Reorganizing a company to increase performance
Cisco Systems, Inc. was founded in 1984 by a small group of scientists from Stanford
University in the USA. Since then it has grown into a major enterprise with 300 locations in 90
countries. Cisco has 46 data centers and server rooms supporting the 70,000-plus employees; 14 of
the data centers/ server rooms are production or customer-facing and 32 are used for product
development. Cisco is a worldwide leader in systems for the Internet.
Like most IT organizations of large enterprises Cisco's Network and Data Center Services
(NDCS) used a traditional divisional structure. The original organizational model included regional
network teams and regional voice teams that were responsible for all aspects of implementing and
operating their environments and services. This led to a lot of duplication across the organization,
which most employees were unaware of.
Cisco IT's NDCS organization needed focus. It asked Cisco Advanced Services' Network
Availability Improvement Services organization (NAIS) to identify the areas that needed to be
changed and how they could make these changes. The result of the report that was prepared
showed John Manvillle, Vice President of IT NDCS that 'The Network and Data Center organization
could not accommodate the kind of growth and technology evolution that Cisco and Cisco IT were
expecting. The existing resources were not structured to support this, and there was significant
duplication of work and processes. These would likely be strained, possibly to the breaking point,
with even a minimal amount of growth.'