Enhancing Collaborative Learning: Cisco's My Services Connect Initiative (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: And how is that done? Can you give us an example of some of these initiatives and programs? One of the things that we found is that just creating a community isn't enough. You have to provide ways that they can engage better. And so it's beyond the normal chat, the normal blogging. It really is the ability for people to find experts they wouldn't otherwise know about in the community. And they'll be able to tap into that expertise both through the digital trails that they have, the information that they share, but also through literally just tagging them and asking them to have a conversation with you about something and serving up an immediate video feed that allows them to engage in the moment while they have a question. So we really think about learning as a complete collaborative experience. I think collaborative learning or collaborative knowledge, which is the platform that we also use for this, is the path of the future because it is about leveraging all the information you have, but also the people that are at your disposal by letting people find easy ways to find each other. So anytime you have a topic that you want to learn or anytime you want to engage somebody on a question, you can instantly get access to those resources. So we first started, you know, we have a large services organization inside of Cisco. And one of the things that we realized is being in the technology space, having the need to constantly reinvent ourselves, people needed to learn new skills every single day. And so we said, well, let's try it here. Let's try it first on the most challenging space that we know we have where things are changing the most. And so what we did was we created something called My Services Connect, and we invited everybody to participate. We got a number of key players, some of our most distinguished people in certain topics. So we got subject matter experts to sign up and, if you will, champion this whole engagement process. And then we put them on this really leading edge platform, collaborative knowledge, and asked them to first, you know, get themselves set up, put in their profiles, and then start posting and blogging on certain topics that were really top of mind. And then what we were able to do is, from that, start generating communities of interest. And then the individuals that were engaged in this and involved in this could then easily find each other. They could easily engage. They can learn on the fly. And then if they found something really spectacular they wanted to share with a push of a button, they could share it with all the people that were interested in that topic. So we created a really rich, dynamic environment for people to learn. And, of course, we started off with the people that needed to learn the most, the fastest, and then we continued to work through the whole enterprise organization through that mechanism. So it's a combination of tools, best practices, content, seating it up with some important content, and then providing ways for them to engage.