In return, employees can use the devices they want and can change devices more often than a typical IT department can accommodate. But there are trade-offs. They will need to share the costs and do a couple of things to make sure we can secure the device, such as installing our security client, and they have to use our support model.

This option to choose device extends to laptops too. Twenty percent of our employees use Macs. We have a support community for Macs within Cisco, and IT makes sure that community gets managed properly; but it's not the traditional call center support that we have for Windows. It's important that we educate users on what the trade-offs are for the devices they use so we can manage costs while giving them a choice.

When I talk to my organization and we ask ourselves what we need to work on the most, the answer is always "communication." IT people can get caught up in IT-speak. Which is fine -- it's familiar to that group and efficient to get the work done. But when talking to the business side it's critical to use a different language to address what they care about. This is especially important today with the rise in cloud services. Cloud services make it appear that there is now an alternative to IT. It's become more important than ever for IT to communicate how they are delivering IT services, what they cost, what value they bring, how long it will take, and what the risks and trade-offs are. This is what the business cares about.

Figuring out what the salient points are when talking to the business side is critical if you want to be an effective communicator. The business side doesn't need to know everything about the way the technology works, but they do need to know about the specific benefits and risks.