As chief information officer at Cisco, Rebecca Jacoby admits it’s both challenging and a lot of fun staying ahead of the game

AS THE PERSON responsible for co-ordinating information and technology policy and strategy across one of the world’s biggest technology companies, Rebecca Jacoby has a daunting job – but one she also describes as “fun”.

The chief information officer (CIO) for Cisco, she runs a ship that has 64,000 employees, numerous global locations (only half of the company’s operations are around its Silicon Valley headquarters) which took in $30 billion in revenue in 2010.

She has spent 17 years at Cisco and close to 30 in the Valley (with a background in the complete manufacturing and supply chain area, she says). She stepped into the CIO role five years ago, one of the few women CIOs in the business.

“I got recruited into the CIO position – even though at the time I felt I didn’t fit the qualifications on paper,” she notes.

But she certainly did, and has held the role since in a company that, very unusually – especially for a global tech player – has two women in its senior executive ranks, Jacoby as CIO and Padmasree Warrior, as chief technology officer (CTO).

She thinks the role of CIO “plays to women’s natural strengths – collaboration and multi-tasking. And you have to be able to put ego aside, although you also have to have a strong enough ego to be confident in the role.”

She describes her job as one of “bringing technology to bear for the business” – whether internally within Cisco, or in talking to other companies about Cisco products and services. In London last week for its Cisco Live conference, she was busy meeting with CIOs and business leaders.

So what is she out talking about right now with other CIOs? “BYOD – bring your own device – it’s the euphemism for having more than one device, and bringing your own personal devices from home, into the workplace. It’s how employees communicate globally, and home is where they set their expectations. For CIOs, it’s about trying to control that because they have the responsibility for a lot of risk management.

“The same thing is happening in the core of companies – it’s what cloud [computing] is all about. Companies want to deploy their own infrastructure, but also leverage other companies’ services.”

The corporate move to using cloud computing may also bring “the sense that maybe I don’t need the IT guys. But you need someone to mitigate risk, you definitely need somebody to do that,” she says.

Do CIOs feel daunted by the range of technologies on offer in the corporate market these days?

“Some may live in fear, but most recognise that it offers opportunities. There’s a spectrum of CIOs. You have the fundamental traditionalist – what I would term the lower end – at least 50 per cent of them, who are really just trying to do risk management, control costs, and serve the company. At the higher-end, you have the CIO who was hired to be a business partner. They go all the way from ‘tactical and barely holding on’ to ‘very strategic and very business oriented’.”

HOW RESISTANT ARE they to bringing in technology and managing change?

“I would call it more like denial than resistance,” she says with a laugh. “The choice is not really whether you stop it happening; it’s do you embrace it. There are opportunities and challenges in technology, and you get CIOs still afraid of technology.”

No doubt, because it takes a lot of work, self-education, and strategic thinking on a CIO’s part to stay on top of technology trends and make the right decisions for their company.

“You can spend a lot on technology and not get anything out of it,” Jacoby agrees. “You’ve got to be fast and agile. You have to have a strategy that says ‘how do we maintain competitiveness?’ And the more in sync your team is, the faster you can move.”

She says Cisco uses its own technology across the company, and these installations help create case studies and proofs of concept for customers to better understand what they might do with Cisco products.

The core technologies are the network and the data centre, she says. Cisco has 300 “IT service assets” – products and services which include applications tied to a business process, data services, and communication services for collaborative work, all of which can be demonstrated via the company’s network and data centre.

In addition, she says that 70 per cent of Cisco’s applications in-house “are essentially operating in a virtual cloud. That brings tremendous cost savings. We’ve had over a 30 per cent reduction in costs by doing this. We’re also more agile. It takes 15 minutes to install a new product, rather than days.”

One Cisco product area that she’s excited about is its growing offerings in telepresence and video communication. Cisco has developed a very high-end line of telepresence rooms using state-of-the-art video and sound technologies, which more than 1,000 large enterprises have now installed, replacing a large chunk of corporate travel and long-distance meetings.

“It’s a tremendous product that we started deploying four years ago. It’s such an authentic experience and we know that if the video quality is good, you can establish trust. You can’t do that with a phone call.”

They also provide the WebEx video conferencing product, which is also used extensively by Cisco itself “for everything from keynotes to engineering meetings and sales meetings”.

Cisco has completely replaced its annual big sales meeting with a virtual meeting using WebEx for three years now.

“This is the first year the virtual meeting outscored the physical meeting in terms of the response of attendees,” she says. The first year, everything was entirely new, but by the second year “we learned a lot about how you really bring the human interaction in”.

What does she enjoy most about her role? “Using the technology to solve business problems is fun,” she says.

“I’m not a technologist by training, but I can hang with the tech guys. It becomes a very strategic and impactful role. Done well, IT impacts in a positive way, on every aspect of your business, and I think IT people [in Cisco] really relate to that, so it’s a very fun organisation to lead.”

And what is most challenging? “The complexity of the technology and the risk to the business. People really just expect it to work, but it’s a challenge to make it work. It’s easy to get caught up with the technology and forget the experience of the users.”