Making Every Experience Human for Me, You, and Ferris Bueller.

There are so many definitions for Digitization out there, all trying to convey the same concept with varying degrees of loftiness and specificity. My own is simple – make the best use of the latest tech to excel in your business.

And all of us need to do it…Cisco, partners of all types and customers alike. If Ferris Bueller thought life moved pretty fast in the eighties, I’m sure he’d be uncharacteristically flapped as a middle-aged man in today’s business world. Any business person who considers the current pace of commerce “pretty fast” will have already lost. It’s pretty much “digitize now or get left behind,” as you and I well know.

Now imagine you’ve fully digitized already…

You’ve got the best of cloud, mobile, IoT, analytics, and any other technology you need with security embedded throughout (More on that in our series before, during and after an attack). You’re making the most of your data and feeding new insights from analytics straight into your business processes. So you’ve done all of that, but the employees, partners and customers involved in your business processes still have to engage using outdated, conflicting communications platforms from multiple vendors. You haven’t fully digitized after all.

Point is, most business processes involve good ol’ humans like you, me and Ferris. And even if your business were a 1961 Ferrari 250GT California all souped-up with a mix of turbo fuel from all the other technologies, it might as well be wearing a set of snow chains without Collaboration.

Collaboration is the Digital Human Experience

Cisco SVP and General Manager of IoT and Applications Rowan Trollope has said that connecting people is the first step towards a company’s digital transformation. With the benefit of all of our new insights and optimized processes, the latest Collaboration technologies enable all of us involved in those business processes – employees, partners and customers – to connect faster and easier than ever before. Face to face. To innovate, create, proceed, complete, resolve. To go faster.

Bringing Business Outcomes Home

As Cisco partners and distributors, you’ve heard us talk a lot about delivering business outcomes through digitization (and you’ll hear much more at Partner Summit – Register for VPS here). Those outcomes are the result of transforming the Workforce Experience, Customer Experience, Business Operations and Risk Management (Cisco SE Bill Dyrek has a great piece highlighting this here). Our shared customers are largely competing in the marketplace on those first two categories, which are patently collaboration-centric. Nevertheless, collaboration is the human element in all of them and it represents the last mile in realizing the business outcomes enabled by digitization.

For Partners and Distributors

So, as our customers are trying to digitize themselves, it’s critical that we help them not only invest in the latest Collaboration technologies from Cisco, but that they successfully adopt and integrate them into their business processes. You as partners and distributors should too, as you digitize your own businesses.

Below are some key resources to help you do so. Anyone? Bueller?… Bueller?… Bueller?

Resources

Get the digital benefits of Cisco Collaboration for your own business:

Cisco Unified Workspace for Partners (CUWP) Program – Use It, Know It, Sell It!

Help your customers migrate to the latest Cisco Collaboration solutions (cloud, on-prem or hybrid):

refreshcollab.cisco.com

This is the year we move Collaboration to the Cloud. See how easy it is to become a Cisco Spark partner.

cisco.com/go/sparkpartner

Join us at Partner Summit. Not attending? You can keep up with all the action by registering for (and watching) Virtual Partner Summit. And follow @CiscoPartners for updates and opportunities to join the conversation.

Connect with me on Twitter: @OrenCisco. And, feel free to leave any questions or feedback in the comments below.

*Several images were taken from online web sources and are not property of Cisco