Individual Case Study #1 -­‐ Cisco (1) According to Cisco’s CIO Pete Solvick, “The application didn’t provide the degree of redundancy, reliability, and maintainability we needed. We weren’t able to make changes to the application to meet our business needs anymore.” The reason for this was because top management maintained a centralized structure within the organization. The CEO John Morgridge, believed that many Silicon Valley firms decentralized too quickly and therefore lost appreciation for the proven ability of the organization to grow without sacrificing control. Management at Cisco wants to grow the company to a $5 billion plus size, but does not want to settle for an upgrade of their current software version. Therefore, Solvik decided to keep Cisco’s strong tradition of standardization and require all functional areas to use the common architecture and databases. By doing this, a new system design was nearly impossible to achieve because of strong legacies of the old system design. Upper management continued to ignore the shortcoming of the existing system believing that the budget would be too large and the time it would take to implement would be too long.

Solvik states this clearly, “Anything we did would just run over the legacy systems we had in place. It turned into an effort to constantly band-­‐aid our existing system. None of us was going to throw out the legacies and do something big.” The company was disappointed and ready move on from their original program, but was hesitant to pull the trigger on such an expensive and time consuming project. The complacency of upper management also did not allow the company to be flexible and upgrade their software to a better more lucrative system. (2) Cisco’s management team understood that in order to implement a new program that meets the business needs, it could not just be an IT-­‐initiative but that it would also need to include the business community in the decisions. Solvik stated, “We pulled people out that the business absolutely did not want to give up.” Cisco also knew the importance of having strong partners that could assist in both the selection and implementation of whichever solution the company choses. Their strategy was built on leveraging the experiences of others including large corporations and the “Big Six” accounting firms. The team learned that the project would be driven primarily by manufacturing and therefore selected Oracle for their vendor since they were better equipped in manufacturing than other vendors, they promises regarding the long term development of package

functionality and they were local. Once