11 December 2008 - Executives flew in from around the globe when Cisco held an operations review meeting at the company's San Jose, Calif., headquarters last June. But eight of the 98 attendees "skipped the journey and participated in the meeting through Cisco TelePresence" sites in India, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, the company stated in its "2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Report" released last month.
"For just this one event, Cisco estimates that remote conferencing offset more than 19.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (mTCO
2e). But more important, the executive meeting proved that virtual collaboration can be a successful alternative to travel even for top-level management teams," according to Cisco's fourth annual CSR report. Each of the remote systems was active an average of 16 hours during the four-day meeting.
As the owner of TelePresence high-definition virtual meeting technology, as well as WebEx and other conferencing tools, it is in Cisco's best interests to use and tout the benefits of such innovations. But it also is in keeping with the corporation's 2006 Clinton Global Initiative Carbon-to-Collaboration commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from business air travel by 10 percent from the fiscal year 2006 baseline. In June, Cisco promised as a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Climate Leader to reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2012, based on a 2007 baseline.
When Cisco, along with Virgin Group and Interface Inc., joined the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006, Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers said his company would invest $20 million in collaborative technologies to "reduce the need for physical travel" and attempt to cut its travel budget by $100 million.
While both headcount and revenues have increased at least 40 percent since 2006, greenhouse gas emissions from air travel rose just 5 percent from the 2006 baseline. Cisco in fiscal year 2008 generated 221,092 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions from business air travel, less than 1 percent more than a year earlier. But when those emissions are calculated per million dollars of total net sales, or normalized by the growth, emissions actually declined to just 5.6 mTCO
2e per million dollars of total net sales, down from 6.3 mTCO
2e per million a year earlier.
Cisco said it had updated its "data collection and analysis methodology" after it realized that previous reports omitted emissions from "several large acquisitions and several countries."
To "improve our tactical decision making regarding air travel," Cisco adopted a nonproprietary TRX Airline Carbon Emissions Calculator. "In addition, we obtain air travel data from a custom report run using the American Express Axis@work application. By aligning this report with our travel financial accounts, we can track the percentage of air travel captured by the Cisco Travel Network. Our goal is to track 100 percent of the travel," the CSR report stated.
To verify the value of virtual collaboration, Cisco also has "created models comparing our GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from air travel to emissions from the generation of electricity used to power the network that supports the collaborative technologies," Cisco said.
To support standardization and benchmarking across companies, Cisco said it uses the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to help calculate business air travel. However, the report acknowledges that the Greenhouse Gas Protocol considers only the length of the flight, not the type of aircraft, flight load or class of service that also affect emissions and their allocation to an individual traveler.
Even so, "Cisco's collaborative technologies have had a measurable effect on carbon emissions within the company by reducing business travel, and they promise to have a positive impact for our customers as well," Cisco stated.
While it provided no documentation of the following benefits, Cisco said it found that organizations that take "full advantage of remote collaboration rather than require face-to-face meetings enjoy some added benefits: people make decisions faster, cross-cultural communications is improved, feedback from stakeholders and customers is disseminated better within the company, scarce global resources can be shared more effectively among projects and products move to market faster."
Since it was introduced in October 2006,
TelePresence has become Cisco's "fastest-growing emerging technology with more than 100 customers globally" and more than 750 deployments, including internal, customer and philanthropic organizations.
In its fiscal year ended in July, Cisco installed for internal use 165 TelePresence rooms in 116 cities and 39 countries. It also created 94 "executive and executive briefing center units" in 19 cities in 12 countries last year. That's in addition to the 110 such rooms it equipped in 80 cities in 2007. As of April, the company also "ordered or installed at customer sites worldwide" 500 TelePresence units "further increasing the size of the network and reducing overall air travel." Utilization of the units "remains near 50 percent based on a 10-hour day, and many individual units are booked at over 100 percent during the 10 hours," the report noted. "Use is especially heavy during the time when business days in the world's regions overlap."
In addition to TelePresence, Cisco owns Web-based collaborative technology firm WebEx, which has 35,000 customers and more than 2.6 million registered users, Cisco said. Cisco also offers to enterprise customers a product branded Unified MeetingPlace that integrates voice-, video- and webconferencing.
The report also noted "major challenges" as employees balance use of the technology against the need to make face-to-face sales and customer service calls to grow revenue. "About two-thirds of Cisco employees who regularly travel by air are in sales and field service organizations," the report indicated. To help them balance objectives, Cisco's Communications Center of Excellence provides employees with instructions on how to use collaborative technologies by sharing experiences and best practices across job functions."
"Replacing business air travel with remote collaboration (virtual meetings) is not simply a matter of installing the equipment," the report stated. "Business processes, management practices and corporate culture must all change if employees are to adapt well and take full advantage of the technologies. We expect the need for travel to continually decrease over time as virtual collaboration becomes more available and prevalent in the company and among our customers and partners."
In the sustainability report, Cisco details ways it has used collaborative technologies to alter the standard practices of its corporate culture. For example, in 2008, about half of "internal audits are conducted virtually. That represents a 20 percent increase in virtual internal audits." Cisco also uses the technology to recruit, interview and conduct orientations to "avoid the time, expense and carbon emissions involved in travel." On college campuses, Cisco conducts "virtual information sessions," in which potential hires hear a presentation by a Cisco executive and then go to a virtual room to meet with a manager from a specific business unit. For executive candidates, Cisco uses the high-definition TelePresence. "Since January, about 40 candidates for executive positions have participated in approximately 250" such interviews. "Each candidate took part in interviews with several Cisco executives remotely, simplifying and shortening the hiring process without requiring the participants to take significant time off from work."
For its Cisco Live user conference in Orlando last June, the company developed an online presence for those who couldn't attend the networking and training in person. Non-attendees could view online keynote videos or customer video blogs and search program and exhibitor content.
"Cisco even recruits in cyberspace. To attract the next generation of collaboration technology workers, Cisco has a recruiting presence in Second Life, the Web-based virtual world provided by Linden Lab. In this three-dimensional virtual environment, Cisco 'avatars' host technical talks, resume-writing seminars and question-and-answer sessions with Cisco executives," the company said.
