As I’ve had the opportunity to work with business technology leaders, several main themes emerge. The rapid pace of change, managing the transitions to new models, and analytics. A major theme that emerges in these discussions always tends towards “how do I transition my existing teams, and enable them to adopt these new skills?”.
This isn’t a simple cut and dry answer. Many large organizations won’t be able to avoid needing to recruit new talent to inject fresh thinking into their organizations, especially for mode 2 type initiatives. But at the same time transitioning existing teams to implement new capabilities while supporting existing business functions, is critical as they support the contribution margin funding all type 2 development. It’s not just “keeping the lights on”. The “lights”, are the business.
To do this we worked within Cisco to perpetually outreach to our customers and local communities. We work with mentorship opportunities in high schools, foster initiatives with underserved demographics in our communities, and perpetually host initiatives to transition our partners, customers, coworkers, and friends, for the next decades of their careers.
With this we have been putting together suites of free training to help customers through the entire lifecycle of development. From learning compute 101 to advanced diagnostics of complex systems, we provide all content available for free streaming via the online portion of ciscolive.com.
When you take this and watch a video you can learn how these things work. But just learning, doesn’t really teach the complexity and nuance of the underlying components. Hands on practice is critical to mastery of the tools which we use to build the information superhighways, and maintaining the applications that run on them. Cisco has created a plethora of massive lab environments available to our customers via dcloud.cisco.com.
Tying this all together, once you have mastered how to do something, you would obviously want to have the ability to do an infinite amount of replicas of said awesomeness, prescriptively, and without manual efforts. (Humans are great at creative problem solving but not exceptional at maintaining coherence, at scale). So we have fully curated labs for automating all of our equipment available with complete scripted walkthroughs.
These are some of the critical pieces we are working on evangelizing with our teams to help solve our customers key business problems, and transition their teams to the next generation of the secure digital workforce.
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