collaboration

Cisco’s Warrior on collaboration, innovation and bathtubs

It’s pretty clear that Cisco is serious about the principles of connectivity and collaboration put forth during Networkers. I just got back from Orlando and discovered both a Twitter and a Facebook connection invitation from two different Cisco employees. I also don’t think I’ve ever sent or received so many text messages in my life as during the conference. But more on that later.

I wanted to write a little about Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior’s keynote address, which took place Wednesday. Warrior opened by recounting the legend of how, while taking a bath, Archimedes invented his method for measuring the volume of an irregularly shaped object. Supposedly, the great mathematician had to come up with a way to measure the purity of a golden crown, and realized during his bath that submerged bodies displace an amount of water equal to their volume. Then, versions of the legend claim, Archimedes leapt from the tub and ran naked through the streets, shouting “Eureka! I have found it!”

Warrior went on to explain that while we can’t discount this idea of the lone genius having a sudden spark of inspiration, she believes that “ideas get stronger when shared” and that collaborative, collective genius is the way humanity will persist.

She also talked about a phrase she has coined, “brainforming,” which is her take on brainstorming. Without getting very specific about how technology would enable brainforming, Warrior explained that in brainforming, we start to select ideas while we collect them. Collaboration, she said, should be a culture, not a function, and is going to become a persistent global conversation.

Of course, innovation and collaboration aren’t worth much without execution, and Warrior emphasized that in her keynote as well, saying “I strongly believe that without execution, there is no vision.” Her words echoed those of another great inventor, Thomas Edison, who once said that “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Now, I have to admit that I’m a fan of the genius in the bathtub idea, and don’t put too much stock in group intelligence. We all have seen the unfortunate products of “design by committee,” which seem all too prevalent in both computer software and business culture — ideas that lack focus, products that are needlessly complex, unproductive meetings that only spawn more meetings, and so on.

I was thinking about the example of Linux creator Linus Torvalds this morning. On one hand, Torvalds basically came up with Linux one day in his bedroom in Finland — supporting the “bathtub” model of genius. On the other hand, Linux didn’t become what it is today until Torvalds put the fledgling OS out there and let the open source development community hack away — supporting the collaborative model.

I discussed Warrior’s keynote with two attendees: Brad Fox, a network manager and security engineer at Black & Decker, and Peter Perreault, senior network engineer at Tullett Prebon (a financial inter-dealer broker). Peter put things into perspective by saying that even if there’s a lightbulb going on for the guy in the bathtub, great ideas are always built on the shoulders of giants — so collaboration technology, at its best, perhaps gives that genius a larger pool of giants to draw from.

Brad said, “Just don’t take your laptop in the bathtub.”

Cisco’s collaboration strategy: Adding vision to social networking

Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers welcomed attendees of Cisco Live 2008 (a.k.a. Cisco Networkers) at his keynote address in Orlando Tuesday morning with the message that the network will become the platform for all communication, and that Cisco will be the leader in providing the connectivity.

After an opening segment with loud music, colored lights and 11 screens displaying attendees’ favorite sports teams (on which they “collaborated” via text message), Chambers got down to talking about Cisco’s ability to stay abreast of market transitions. He explained that Cisco will leverage their position as the market leader to facilitate “any device, any content” communications and collaboration, which he sees as the market transition that is happening now.

Major components of this collaboration scenario, according to Chambers, are social networking and video — in fact, he said that “visual networking is the future.” But Chambers said Cisco plans to add vision to social networking, putting structure behind Web 2.0-type tools like Twitter or Facebook (he alluded to the way “kids” use social networking tools here), validating their use as business tools.

A highlight of the session was the demonstration of WebEx Connect and how Cisco’s latest and greatest collaboration technology (brought about by Cisco’s recent WebEx acquisition) will enable us to communicate differently. Jim Grubb — jokingly dubbed “chief demonstration officer” — joined Chambers on stage for the demo. They showed off one-touch meeting functionality and something called “casting,” which I captured in this short video.

Chambers reiterated the theme of his March VoiceCon keynote that the focus of online video collaboration (a.k.a. telepresence) is not only about cutting down on travel costs or “going green” by reducing associated emissions, but also, and more importantly, about changing business models to increase productivity.

As proof that Cisco is eating their own dog food (so to speak), Chambers gave some statistics about the growth of social networking use at Cisco, including blogs, wikis, discussion forums, and something called C-Vision, which he said was like “YouTube for the Enterprise.” (Later in the day, Chambers also answered user questions online in Second Life, underscoring his company’s interest in using social networking tools for business. Somewhat ironically, a glitch in the program made Chambers’ avatar’s virtual pants render as sort of an “image loading” error message.)

Other prominent themes of the keynote were Cisco’s focus on innovation, as evidenced in their I-Prize program, and on virtualization — not just in the data center or server, Chambers said, “virtualization in everything you do.” An example of this was Cisco’s virtual launch of their ASR 1000 product.

Of course, I’m always skeptical, and wondered whether the network having to deliver all communications is really going to be such a good thing. One, there’s the increased reliance on technology — which, let’s face it, no matter how good Cisco makes the product, can still fail. Two, there’s the problem of user integrity; virtual tools only work really well when users take the time to create fully-fleshed out profiles and enter all their contact information — and social networking tools enable the delivery of not just productivity, but lots of twittering about our cats, poking and ROTFLing. Then again, I’m not so sure that’s completely different from real life collaboration.