On a Monday morning in March of 2004 Brad Boston, CIO of Cisco Systems, was preparing for a
meeting with the six other members of Cisco’s Business Process Operating Committee (BPOC). This
group of senior executives met twice each month to review and prioritize key initiatives that
impacted the entire company. Since its first meeting in 2002, BPOC had focused its attention on
several major enterprise-wide projects such as upgrading the company’s enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system and developing a comprehensive customer database. As these projects started to wind
down, the committee began considering new proposals that typically fell into one of three categories:
“one-off” programs with specific short-term goals, “must-have” programs mandated for regulatory
purposes (such as Sarbanes-Oxley compliance), and bigger enterprise initiatives that had to be
prioritized relative to other projects with high resource requirements. Although BPOC did not fund
the projects it approved, the committee’s recommendations deeply affected Cisco’s overall
commitment to various IT initiatives.
As Boston thought about the projects that were going to be covered at the next BPOC meeting, he
knew that one request had the potential to generate a great deal of discussion. Cisco’s customer
advocacy group was proposing an overhaul of Cisco’s call center processes—the group wanted to
build a state-of-the-art customer interaction network that would centralize all incoming calls into a
globally managed set of contact centers. The proposed international network would use Cisco’s
technology to route and escalate calls in an efficient manner, with the goals of improving the
customer experience while reducing expenses associated ...