Guiding the information technology operation of a Fortune 100 company can be a challenge even when times are relatively stable. Throw in the transformation of Cisco Systems Inc. from being a network hardware company to one that capitalizes on advances in software and artificial intelligence, and you have new challenges, particularly building a staff with the right skill sets.

“How do you cultivate the best people and talent so you can move up the stack?” asked Guillermo Diaz (pictured), chief information officer and senior vice president of Cisco. “That thing you provided in eight weeks now has to be provided in eight minutes. It’s not easy for someone who has been hugging routers for many, many years.”

Diaz spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. They discussed the need to retool Cisco’s information technology operation to match business need and the important role of a chief data officer in the company. (* Disclosure below.)

Reshaping the enterprise infrastructure

The challenge for Diaz and his fellow executives is to reshape the company’s IT operations in much the same way that Cisco is transforming the business of its customers. Operators become coders to solve problems proactively, and the IT staff must stitch together network, compute and storage with automated monitoring tools to gain a full view of the enterprise infrastructure.

“In order to do that, we’ve taken our operations team and deployed them into our development teams,” Diaz explained. “It’s called DevSecOps, because at the same time we want you to have a mindset of security first. Its continuous innovation, continuous improvement, continuous learning.”

Over the course of its transformation, Cisco has also recognized the evolving importance of data for its business. The company has a chief data officer, although this position moved around the organizational chart as business needs changed.

“In 2015, we actually brought data up to the CIO level,” said Diaz, who realized that the role of business information was going to become a key strategic pillar, so the function was subsequently moved under Cisco’s COO. “We believe that data is such a critical asset. It’s the oil and the fuel of the business.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE