In addition, Cisco launched their first e-commerce website during this period which quickly grew in importance and also provided opportunities for the company to learn extensively about how their products and services would compliment their customers' e-commerce strategies as well. Cisco also concentrated on marketing through the web and supporting the first iterations of Virtual Private Networks (VPN). In short, the ERP and Web-enablement strategies led to many valuable lessons learned for Cisco in creating their new generation networking products. To what extent does it contribute to the Cisco strategy?

As is the case with their strategic infrastructure plan Cisco defined for the realigning of systems, Cisco also views it as an enabler of business processes first, and a utility second. It is seen as a business process enabler and expected to know not only the key technologies for streamlining processes, it is also expected to know how best to redefine the processes themselves. The concept of it as business analysts who can redefine any number of processes and then re-align...

Since their success with this approach, it has been emulated widely throughout many industries.
How would you characterize the role of Pete Solvik as CIO? To what extent do you think this affected the success of the projects?

Pete Solvik is an atypical CIO because he first focused on being a strategist, looking at how it could deliver greater value to the line-of-business objectives first. He is also focused first on the strategic infrastructure plan from the standpoint of how to ensure that line-of-business strategies stay in place yet the centralization of data brought about the ERP installation leads to a more responsive and market-driven company. Pete Solvik's role is also unique from the standpoint of concentrating on the methodology of acquisitions Cisco used very successfully during the period of time of this case study. Mr. Solvik was responsible for integrating these acquired companies into the company, further extending his role as a business strategist over being a pure technologist.