IMD business school and Cisco join forces on digital business transformation 03-31

IMD business school and Cisco join forces on digital business transformation Cisco will make a contribution to IMD valued at $US 10 million to develop thought leadership and address business challenges in digital transformation

March 26, 2015

LAUSANNE/SAN JOSE (26 MARCH 2015)—IMD, the top-ranked business school focused on executive education, announced today a contribution valued at $US 10 million from Cisco to become the world leading destination for research, innovation and leadership to drive digital transformation to all aspects of enterprises, in every industry.

Cisco intends to fund the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation and create the IMD/Cisco Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, to be located on IMD's campus in Lausanne, Switzerland, and fully operational by summer 2015.

The collaboration will combine Cisco's leadership in providing technology solutions for the Internet of Everything (IoE) with IMD's expertise in developing global leaders. According to Gartner Research, by 2020, 75 percent of businesses will be a digital business or will be preparing to become one, yet only 30 percent of these efforts will be successful due to lack of talent and technical expertise. Gartner reveals the number one reason companies fail in digital transformation efforts is a failure to re-imagine and reinvent the business from top to bottom before they begin.

The partnership between Cisco and IMD will combine original research and Cisco Consulting's open innovation approach in order to generate practical insights that executives can apply directly to their businesses. By conducting original research, the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation will work to define digital business transformation, what it means for companies today, and how to stay relevant in today's competitive marketplace.

The Global Center aims to become a world-leading hub of research and innovation, helping executives take advantage of digital opportunities and neutralize digital threats. Employing full-time researchers from both IMD and Cisco, the Center will produce cutting-edge thought leadership and organize learning events. It will also collaborate with Cisco's existing network of innovation centers around the world.

QUOTES

Dominique Turpin, IMD President

"IMD has had an excellent relationship with Cisco and its top executives for many years. We are extremely grateful to Cisco for funding this new initiative so generously, and are excited about the research to come. I would like to thank Cisco's leaders for the trust they have put in IMD, particularly Thierry Maupilé, an IMD MBA alumnus and Head of the Strategic Ecosystem Group at Cisco, for his crucial role in making this happen."

Michael Wade, Professor of Innovation and Strategic Information Management at IMD

"This new Global Center will operate at the intersection of technology and organizations. Its main goal is to help executives who are struggling with the 'how' of digital business transformation. These executives know that they must change and adapt to digital opportunities and threats, but they don't know how."

Edzard Overbeek, Senior Vice President, Cisco Services

"We are excited to be partnering with IMD, the prestigious school of business management, which attracts thousands of executives to its campus each year.IMD stands out among the top global business schools because of its unique applied model of management education, which will be instrumental as we seek to help our customers manage through rapid market changes due to digitization.Together, Cisco and IMD will 'write the book' on managing transformation in the new digital age."

Stephan Strauss, Division President, DB Schenker, Germany

"As a business leader in a traditional industry who needs to take his company on the journey of digital transformation, it is a challenge to take the best route.How to leverage digital technologies to create sustainable competitive advantage? In which way transform our business model and what should be the focus? How can we transform our culture and take our organization with us on that journey? What is the right pace?The IMD/Cisco Global Center for Digital Business Transformation will be a most valuable asset to work on addressing these challenges."

Frank Vivier, Richemont Group Director of eBusiness, Switzerland
Thomas Lindemann, Richemont Group HR Director, Swizerland

"Richemont (the owner of several luxury brands, including Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Piaget, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Montblanc, etc) congratulates IMD on its new Global Research Center on Digital Business Transformation. The digitization of the luxury goods industry worldwide is presenting significant change management challenges and opportunities. IMD's digital research and education initiative will provide a very timely contribution to the development of organizational competencies and leadership skills to both local and global luxury groups, thus benefitting the industry's competitiveness and growth."

Tom Touchet, CEO, Smart City Media, USA

We are in a period of prolific and profound change, driven by digital disruption and accelerated by the Internet of Things. That opportunity is the focus of virtually all business leaders. Understanding and leveraging and leveraging the impact of these new business models and their competitive dynamics is instrumental to our success. The creation of the Cisco-IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, which is dedicated to tackling these issues, and to creating roadmaps for organizational change, is an important step towards this goal.

Aparna M. Dogra, Temasek Management Services Pte Ltd, Singapore

We are very excited to hear about the new IMD-Cisco partnered research centre on Global Digital Transformation. Forward looking companies that invest in new technologies and embrace digitally driven processes and business models are better positioned to compete in the fast paced digital age. We are confident that the cutting edge research coming out of the IMD-Cisco Research Centre will serve companies well in making such investment decisions and transformational changes to ensure that their businesses stay relevant and competitive.

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The New Analytics Imperative 12-29

The New Analytics Imperative

Cisco today announced a data and analytics strategy and a suite of analytics software that will enable customers to translate their data into actionable business insight regardless of where the data resides.

With the number of connected devices projected to grow from 10 billion today to 50 billion by 2020, the flood tide of new data — widely distributed and often unstructured — is disrupting traditional data management and analytics. Traditionally most organizations created data inside their own four walls and saved it in a centralized repository. This made it easy to analyze the data and extract valuable information to make better business decisions.

But the arrival of the Internet of Everything (IoE) — the hyper-connection of people, process, data, and things – is quickly changing all that. The amount of data is huge. It’s coming from widely disparate sources (like mobile devices, sensors, or remote routers), and much of that data is being created at the edge. Organizations can now get data from everywhere — from every device and at any time — to answer questions about their markets and customers that they never could before. But IT managers and key decision makers are struggling to find the useful business nuggets from this mountain of data.

As an example, take the typical offshore oil rig, which generates up to 2 terabytes of data per day. The majority of this data is time sensitive to both production and safety. Yet it can take up to 12 days to move a single day’s worth of data from its source at the network edge back to the data center or cloud. This means that analytics at the edge are critical to knowing what’s going on when it’s happening now, not almost 2 weeks later.

The case for analytics at the edge is not solely driven by bandwidth constraints. In many cases the data being analyzed simply has a useful life shorter than the time it takes to send the data to a central place for analysis. Location-based information is a perfect example. When someone (or something) is on the move, location-based information is only valid for a brief point in time.  Much of this data today is never analyzed at all because centralized analytics can’t provide insight quickly enough.

This scenario – repeated continuously in companies around the globe – has led to what I call “the Analytics Imperative” – the ability to extract meaning and outcomes in a world where 99.5% of the data collected is never analyzed.

Organizations need new strategies for analyzing these massive data sets. It is no longer viable to move 100% of your data to centralized data stores for analysis, as the examples above illustrate. Instead, customers today need solutions that enable real-time analysis to take place anywhere from the data lake or data warehouse to the edge of the network, including data in motion. The reality of IoE is that turning massive volumes of data into useful information will require analytics from the cloud to the data center to the very edge of the network.

Data and analytics will be the means by which value is extracted from the Internet of Everything. This explains why Cisco has entered the business of data and analytics in a big way with the introduction of Connected Analytics, pre-packaged analytics software ready for integration into existing Cisco infrastructures to enable powerful industry solutions. Why Cisco, you may be asking.

• Connected infrastructure: Only Cisco has the connected infrastructure from the cloud to the data center to the edge to enable analytics everywhere
• Agile pervasive data access: market-leading data virtualization capabilities  to leverage even the most distributed data

• Real-time, streaming analytics at the edge: streaming analytic capabilities built right into our industrialized routers

• The ability to leverage your existing infrastructure:Distributed analytics can be done either in NEW infrastructure or in EXISTING infrastructure. Using the intelligent Cisco infrastructure already in place dramatically reduces deployment and ongoing costs and significantly decreases time to deploy

• Deep domain infrastructure expertise:  Nobody can understand network data better than Cisco; pairing that data with enterprise data can provide insights that aren’t possible without the network data, and THAT is where Cisco has created strength in our analytics.

• Intercloud integration of private/public
•  clouds:

• Enables organizations to draw insights from data stored in both private and public cloud environments

• Broad ecosystem of partners: 

• Strategic partnerships have been critical to Cisco’s success over the past 30 years and continue to be so in the data and analytics space; from Hadoop partners to analytics partners, our customer solutions leverage a full stack of best-of-breed technologies from Cisco and our partners

Cisco approaches big data and analytics in a way no other company can, leveraging our strengths in hardware, software, services, and partnerships to embed powerful analytic capabilities from the data center to the cloud to the edge, providing insights across the most distributed and remote data.

The Analytics Imperative? We get it. And we are here to help you extract value from your data in ways no other vendor can. To learn more about Cisco Connected Analytics for the Internet of Everything, visit this site.

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Students Connect People, Process, Data, and Things to Help the Blind 09-15

See how Students Connect People, Process, Data, and Things to Help the Blind.

As cities build sensors and data systems into infrastructure, a team of innovative engineering students realized that a blind person’s white stick could become a smart stick. With mentoring and support from Cisco, they developed a prototype device to transform the urban experience for people without sight.

When devices, data, and people connect

The next wave of technological innovation will come from the connection of people, process, data, and things to the Internet: the Internet of Everything. For students today, the opportunities and potential for innovation are limitless and daunting. How to create something truly new and innovative?

A group of Cisco France employees involved in Corporate Social Responsibility hoped to stimulate innovation in France and support the GenY entrepreneurial spirit through a competitive contest and employee mentorship. A team led by Guillaume Desveaux and coordinated by Natacha Comar launched Le Défi Cisco, a challenge to apply technology to social and environmental issues.

Students in an entrepreneurship class at University of Lorraine in Nancy, France were stumped when their professor told them about Le Défi Cisco. No one had an idea, until Lucie d’Alguerre thought of her uncle, who is blind. She imagined a fully connected city that could transmit information to the white cane many blind and visually impaired people carry. Her professor connected her with 4 other Cisco Networking Academy students to develop a pitch for the contest.

A formidable team of engineers

Thirty teams competed in the first round of Le Défi Cisco. On Team Handisco, Florian Esteves and Mathieu Chevalier took the lead in developing the technology. Lucie used her connections to build partner relationships with the City of Nancy and Valentin Haüy, an association for the blind. Jonathan Donnard managed communications with Cisco, while Nicolas Frizzarin took responsibility for the financials and the business plan.
“Our idea is to really integrate all current technologies inside one single cane,” said Mathieu. “That’s where the innovation lies, to really allow blind people to move more independently but especially more safely within our cities.”

 One of 6 teams to advance to the final round, Team Handisco met weekly with their technology and business development mentors from Cisco to develop their social innovation. Remi Philippe, a Cisco solution architect involved with the startup community in Paris, guided the team as a technology mentor, and Remi Sedilot, a Cisco sales manager, advised them in business plan development. They both were impressed by how well the team worked together.

“They’re engineers. They got excited about connecting the city with 5000 access points,” explained Remi Philippe. “We pushed them to define investment, timelines, and look at potential competitors like Google and JCDecaux who are looking into connecting cities. A startup has limited resources. No other company is focusing on the white stick, so they could get traction and solve a true problem using existing infrastructure.”

A true social innovation

The team refined their pitch and prototype. A traditional white stick uses physical contact to convey information: It only “sees” what it can touch. The Handisco stick uses proximity captors with ultrasonic waves like those in a car bumper that emit a sound when backing up. The waves sense a wider spectrum of area and convey the information to the user through vibration. GPS technology provides local guidance, prioritized for real time conditions and a sightless traveler.

“I’ve seen 50 or 60 startup pitches, and no one did anything like this,” said Remi Philippe. “It’s the best example I’ve seen of the Internet of Everything. It’s a dumb device that becomes smart when it connects to all the other data and devices around it to make a real difference for the user.”

    Cities have begun to include tagging systems as part of the municipal infrastructure, and making the data available in an open system. The smart stick gathers data from traffic lights, bus locations, road work sites, cross walks, and even weather conditions to provide real-time navigation. Tagged sensors at shops convey  what the shop sells, where the entrance is, and business hours, making it easier for a blind person to discover a business district. They plan to include a security alert system to connect the stick owner to police, in case of emergency.

In the final round of Le Défi Cisco, the Handisco team received the top honor and a €70,000 award. “During the presentation to the judges, everyone said this is really innovative because the white stick has remained unchanged in the last 20 years, despite a period of profound change in society due to the Internet,” recalled Remi Sedilot.

From student to startup

What began as a class project has become an innovative startup enterprise. The 5 students barely knew each other and now they are business partners. With the prize money from Le Défi, they founded Handisco and began to pitch the company to investors. The team has developed a sustainable distribution and pricing model to move into other markets such as the elderly. In June 2014, the group received the Pepite Award, a National Prize for Innovation from the French Ministry of Education, and were honored to meet with French President François Hollande.

  Remi Sedilot believes they won the contest and will continue to succeed because they are solving a real problem with a true innovation that builds on existing infrastructure. “They were very precise and consistent about what they would like to do,” he said. “They are proposing to help blind people gain autonomy and benefit from services created for other purposes.”

See the team in action:

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Connecting everything: A conversation with Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior 06-07

Connecting everything: A conversation with Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior

Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer describes how the exponential growth of connectivity between people and devices, both mobile and network, will change commerce, business systems, and individual behavior.

Despite two decades of increasing connectivity between people and devices over high-tech networks, only 1 percent of what could be connected in the world actually is, argues Padmasree Warrior, Cisco Systems’ chief technology and strategy officer. As the level of connection swells over mobile and other platforms during the next decade, she expects sweeping changes in how consumers shop, businesses handle data, and individuals grapple with the data available about themselves. This interview was conducted by McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland in Davos, Switzerland. What follows is an edited version of Warrior’s remarks.

Interview transcript

Connecting everything

We believe that today only 1 percent of what can be connected in the world is actually connected. As an industry, it took us about 20 years to connect 1 percent of the world. And in the next ten years, we believe that number will go up dramatically. We’ll make significant progress in connecting the 99 percent that’s still unconnected. That will be people, that will be devices, and that will be a lot more information on the network.

So when we say “the Internet of Everything,” we mean an intelligent way to connect processes with data and things. Not just the Internet of Things, not just connecting the devices onto the network, but how can you use the information that’s being collected to drive better processes, better decision making for businesses, and better lifestyles for users and consumers? And we mean more efficient ways to analyze that data through analytics from the network—which is our expertise—to make every single vertical (manufacturing, retail, transportation) significantly different than what it is today.

So if I drill deeper into this, one of the things that I think we find to be inevitable is that there will be a lot more connectivity, and there will be two kinds of connectivity. One kind of connectivity will deliver very rich media experiences to us, through video. Video will be much more prevalent than it is today.

There will be another set of data or implications, which is all of these sensors that will connect— not necessarily high bandwidth data, but low bandwidth data, continuous streaming of low bit-rate data. And the patterns in these two kinds of data and applications are going to be very different.

Think about retail, for example, how people shop today. Now, that’s dramatically changed with the mobile platform and the e-commerce platform in the first evolution of the Internet. In the last 20 years, with the Internet, and now more recently with tablets, the data actually now says that people shop more on a tablet than they do on a smartphone or on a PC. And so the commerce and how we make purchases and the shopping experience in the entire retail vertical has changed, and it will continue to change. And how might it change? This is perhaps an example of the “Internet of Things.”

If we can enable location for people, when you walk into the store, we will know which aisle you are going to. We know you were in this aisle, but you didn’t purchase something. And so if we can analyze that data and tell you when there’s a sale going on, that benefits you as a user as well as the retailer. And so that could be an example where there may be sensors. There will be sensors for indoor location (think of it as GPS for indoor location) and knowledge of your preferences.

So it’s really a combination of a recommendation engine, or a preference engine, of a coupon or a discount engine, and a loyalty program, combined with indoor location. So it’s a combination of all these things—which today are very discreet applications—that will make retail a very different experience in the future.

Changing IT

We think IT in the future will really be a different IT industry than it has been in the past. The first differential is what I call the experience differential, and that’s actually being driven by consumers. We did a survey recently of people between the ages of 18 and 32 across multiple countries, multiple geographies.

The interesting thing in that data is that two out of five kids, or young people, basically said they would take a lower-paying job than work for a company that doesn’t allow them to bring their own device or allow them access to their favorite social network. They think the Internet is more important than having a car. So it’s just a very different workforce that we will see. They demand a very different experience. It’s the consumer experience that you want in the enterprise.

The second differential is a velocity differential, and that’s actually driving the shift to cloud computing. Businesses now demand a much faster way to bring up IT infrastructure applications to be delivered, for capacity to be provisioned. They’re not going to wait. You, as a businessperson, will not wait a year for a data center to come up and for the capacity to be delivered. You would rather consume that as a service. And this is where companies like Amazon and others are making forays. So that’s creating, for the IT organization, a velocity differential that has to be solved in the future.

And the third differential is a data differential. And that goes to the fact that there will be more and more things getting connected, and so we have to deal with the question of “What do we do with this data?” It’s not just enough to store all the data; we have to use the data. People talk about this in the context of big data, but it’s the analytics. It’s not just the analytics, actually, but how do you apply the analytics to make the business process a better process? That is the third problem that the IT company of the future has to solve.

Opting in, opting out

The scale of change, even in the next five years, will be dramatic. And I think everyone has to get ready for it, and I think we as users have to get ready for it. I’m a technologist, and I have to get ready for it because a lot of things will happen that we don’t even anticipate today.

In the next three to five years, as users we’ll actually lean forward to use technology more versus what we had done in the past, where technology was just coming at us. That will change everything, right? It will change health care; it could even change farming. There are new companies thinking about how you can farm differently using technology; sensors connected that use water more efficiently, use light, sunlight, more efficiently.

So I think there are multiple aspects of the human life that will be touched by how dramatic this change will be. I mean, who knows what we’ll see in the next ten years. But at least we can see somewhat into the changes that will happen in the next five years.

Data. Usage of data. Do we opt in? There’s a lot of discussion about, let’s say, the data that is available about you. Today you don’t even know what data is about you. If it can predict and prevent some illness that I may be getting because of my gene analysis, and I don’t know about it, then I can’t do anything about it. In that case, I’d actually like for that data to be used in a constructive fashion in a health-care situation. But if it’s being used in such a way that it’s going to drive my insurance higher, then I have an issue with that. I’d like to know about that.

So far, we’ve focused around data on, “Do you opt in or opt out?” In the future, there’s going to be a lot more work that has to be done that gives me a choice on, “When do I opt in, when do I opt out?” And I may want to change my mind. I may opt in at the beginning but as I find what that data is being used for, I may opt out. So all of this requires very sophisticated analytics—a different way to present that data. Again, up until now, it has not been the problem most creative people have been handling.

Until now, we’ve mostly been creatively centered around the user experience. Just the experience of how information is moving, not how it’s being presented back to you. So I think there’s going to be lots of shifts in the way we deal with technology in the next three to five years.

About the authors

Padmasree Warrior is the chief technology and strategy officer of Cisco Systems. This interview was conducted by McKinsey Publishing’s Rik Kirkland.

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