Cisco restructured its organization from a decentralized model focused on specific customers to a centralized model focused on technology, marketing, and engineering. This was done to promote rapid innovation by eliminating redundant R&D efforts. Cisco also implemented a customer focus initiative to better understand and address customer needs through surveys, field interactions, and customer data analysis. While this increased collaboration and innovation, it also weakened some customer relationships and coordination challenges emerged. Cisco addressed this through acquisition of companies with complementary technologies and cultural integration of acquired employees to maintain customer-centricity.

1. CISCO SYSTEM:BUILDING
AND SUBSTAINING A
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC
CULTURE

2. ABOUT CULTURE
 Purpose of this case is to look into historic roots and
architecture of the company
 Core values are Empowerment, teamwork, open
communication and trust
 Analyses a company that deliberately decides to change its
structure
 Companies have to develop strategies
 Technology and customer orientation is more important

3. CISCO RESTRUCTING
 Shift from decentralized operation focused on
specific customer to a centralized one focused on
technologies, marketing and engineering
 Engineering was organized around eleven technology
groups -Three sales groups were retained
 New structure to promote rapid technical innovation
by eliminating overlap in R&D

4.  Products designed with more common parts
 Bought larger quantities of fewer parts
 Used interchangeable circuit boards resulting into
saving of $23 million
 Cisco gained market share due to restructuring

5. ADVANTAGES OF RESTRUCTING
 Reduced redundancy in development, marketing and
technology support
 Customer-touch point will not decrease substantially
 Marketing and sales managers will have a broader array of
products to meet customer needs
 Facilitating and testing new markets as potential growth
engines

6. DISADVANTAGES OF RESTRUCTING
 Re-organizing around technologies can weaker the customer
relations
 Centralizing marketing, sales and engineering can cause
problem of coordination

7. ACTION PLAN
 Practices requires for hiring
 Downsizing
 Introventions in human resource management
 Career development
 Team building
 Maintaining connection across functional group
 Customer focus initiative

8. Customer Focus Initiative (CFI)
 CFI was created to serve customers better
 CFI included :indepth analysis of customer info by managers
at all levels, developent of new business models ,designing
strategy to overcome tactical challenges
 Customer Response Program (CRP) was developed in 2002 to
solve customer problem

9.  Customers were touched in different ways through: Customer
satisfaction surveys ,interactions with customers in the field
on continual basis ,interactions with channel partners, targeted
surveys ,portal to capture all end user data
 All this data used to determine the top 10 issues with CISCO
as the co. felt that the customer information is the pulse to
know what makes them tick

10. ACQUISTION STRATEGY
 Focus on skills/technologies that Cisco lacked
 weighed the culture of its potential acquisition targets
 Only focussed on companies that solved the customer
problems
 Cisco treated the employees of the acquired companies as
great assets
 Did not lay off employees of the acquired companies
 Provided extensive cultural orientation to the new
companies.
 Cisco’s customer centric orientation and acquisition
aplomb helped propel its growth

11. CREATION OF COUNCIL
 Focus on customer
 Aligned around R&D
 An informal structure was changing
 Creates collaboration
 Potential for generating new ideas.

12. ADVANTAGES OF COUNCIL
 Reinforces focus on customer
 Re-organization made a parallel units
 Focus of council was on old customer
 Though they were into technology, there was no
technology religion
 Generates collaboration
 Cross functional silos focuses on customer segments
 Potential for generating ideas

13. DISADVANTAGES OF COUNCIL
 Council has another layer of bureaucracy which
slows down the process of decision making
 Council themselves had no formal authority
 Council were not having the authority to implement
but to recommend

14. CASE SUMMARY
 Both internally and externally should support
 Technology organization should not evolve from
technology orientation to customer orientation
 Aligned on the goal of customer orientation and
satisfaction
 Imprinting hypothesis
 Learns to critically oppose view points
 Deliberate attempt to change the structure that leads to
mis-alignment

15.  Demonstrates the impact of rapid growth
 Importance of company's culture on performance and
operation
 How company is to be maintained on maturity
 How the organization builds and maintains distinguished
culture from the beginning
 Structure without culture can implement each other
 Focus mainly on customer solution provider
 Most of the companies in the market thought about investing
on the product
 CISCO thought of technology as a means to end

16. THANK YOU