At Cisco we raised unified communications to a strategic imperative about three years ago. This allowed us to take a holistic look at how our communication systems come together, and do it in a way where we are not just pushing technology on people, but letting them interact with it. We invited people from outside IT to test our collaboration platform and tell us which collaboration and communication technologies they find useful. We knew we didn't have strong expertise in this area [unified communications] so we used the technology to invite employees in to help us learn.

Employees gave feedback on how they could apply UC technologies in real working environments. We set up a board with reps from every part of the company. It allowed us to customize our collaboration platform for specific business units such as customer service, engineering and manufacturing.

Interoperability is a huge priority for us internally and for our customers. As a CIO, complexity costs money. So it's important to be interoperable. IT organizations produce a lot of the costs from integrating and testing technologies. Communication systems need to be seamless, and the convergence of data and communication networks with voice and video is making it seamless.

We created a platform with Cisco Quad that allows you to see who your people are, what information you are working on and what communities you are associated with. The platform allows plug-in apps, and is relatively interoperable with the types of apps people use. That's critical to how it moves forward.