To thrive in today’s fast-paced digital age, organizations need real-time access to knowledge, collaboration, and a continuous learning environment both inside and outside of the organization to deliver rapid innovation. Today, Cisco is introducing Cisco Collaborative Knowledge, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed to help our customers transform their organizations and empower any employee with the digital tools and technology they need to access experts, learning, and knowledge in real time.
Figure 1: Cisco Collaborative Knowledge provides the digital
tools and technology every employee needs to access experts, learning, and
knowledge in real time.
In today’s evolving marketplace, organizations must develop innovative ways to train and update the skills in their workforce and share expertise both internally and with their customers. One of the greatest challenges facing organizations today is not only a shortage of people—it is also a shortage of key skills. With 90 percent of jobs expected to change in the digital economy1, analysts predict there will be an estimated shortage of 38- to 40-million college-educated workers by 20202. To be positioned for growth, performance, and productivity, organizations must transform into digital workplaces where knowledge sharing, learning, and talent innovation are able to occur in real-time, anytime, anywhere.
According to Cushing Anderson, program vice president for project-based services research, IDC, “Talent agility is essential to success. Organizations need to be able to quickly get everyone performing at a high level by adding new skills and sharing institutional knowledge. A collaborative knowledge solution can transcend the constraints of time and place by harnessing the collective intelligence of the workforce to achieve both individual and organizational success.”
Cisco Collaborative Knowledge integrates best-in-class consumer and business technologies to enable capabilities such as highly secure knowledge sharing, expert identification, continuous learning, social networking, and analytics into one complete and end-to-end enterprise knowledge exchange. With Cisco Collaborative Knowledge, workers are able to benefit from these continuous learning features, helping organizations innovate and solve real-world business challenges.
Figure 2: Cisco Collaborative Knowledge integrates best-in-class
consumer and business technologies into one complete end-to-end enterprise
knowledge exchange.
Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, vice president and general manager, Cisco observes, “In today’s fast-paced digital workforce, knowledge, speed, and flexibility are key for any organization to succeed. Teams that are empowered digitally with access to experts, learning, and knowledge in real-time are better equipped to solve business challenges anytime, anywhere. Building on a tradition of leadership in education, collaboration, and highly secure solutions for enterprises, along with our practitioners’ expertise in producing great outcomes for our own company, we are proud to introduce the tools and knowledge services our customers need to reinvent talent.”
With Cisco Collaborative Knowledge, organizations are able to:
- Mobilize their workforce with knowledge, speed, and flexibility to create a more agile, engaged, and productive organization. For example, with Cisco Collaborative Knowledge, a mobile sales professional who is engaging with a new prospect can quickly access learning modules that provide the information they need about a particular product, solution, or market right as they need it. Through knowledge that is available and sharable via a mobile platform, everyone has quick access to valuable resources to shape the way they work, learn, collaborate, and innovate together.
- Fast-track learning and knowledge sharing to foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation. By integrating formal and informal learning resources, organizations can effectively reskill their workforces, or specific departments, by providing job-specific knowledge and training through a comprehensive platform. For example, in an initial pilot, the Cisco Services organization reskilled 14,000 employees in just over a year to help transform Services into a consultative and outcomes-based solutions-selling organization.
- Tap into the collective knowledge of the entire organization to innovate and transform the customer and employee experience. With Cisco Collaborative Knowledge, employees have instant access to experts, enterprise wide repositories of collective knowledge and social learning, and collaboration tools that enable them to innovate in the moment to improve the customer and employee experience.
Michael Carter, vice president of Human Resources, Cisco says, “Emerging technology and the changing needs of the workforce are driving the need for HR to deploy solutions at the edge of the organization. Only by deploying the right HR infrastructure at the edge will businesses be able to develop a workforce with the agility required to meet the needs of their customers, and at the same time engage the talent in a way that empowers them to define, grow, and re-define their careers. Cisco Collaborative Knowledge grew out of an in-house pilot that was created to connect the evolving needs of the business with the skills and capabilities in the workforce in a way that made the business strategy relevant to how employees want to come together to connect, develop, and transform.”
Embracing proven Cisco collaboration technology, Cisco Collaborative Knowledge complements organizations’ existing in-house content management systems, social enterprise communities, learning investments, and HR systems.
Availability
Cisco Collaborative Knowledge is generally available in North America. For more detailed information, please visit: Cisco Collaborative Knowledge
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com.
1 OECD: Skills, Empowerment, Resilience—Skills and the Digital Economy
2 McKinsey Global Institute: The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5 billion people