Working at Cisco is a new experience for me, as far as the size of the company. Prior to Cisco the largest company I worked for was around 5000 people. Lately I have been thinking of the advantages of being a big, well-known company, and how those advantages can be leveraged in new ways. I have found that there are many things a startup can do that a larger company simply cannot because of size, but there are opportunities larger companies have to leverage their brand which are closed to smaller companies.
The one thing that a startup can’t duplicate is company brand and history. Brand equates to automatic relationships and trust, especially from a business perspective. There’s a certain amount of latitude and respect that you get automatically when people recognize and respect the brand of the company you’re working for. That’s been a very interesting thing to observe at Cisco.
There’s one use case for this trust that I haven’t seen explored much: Cross-business social analytics. Daydreaming about this, I can see some very interesting opportunities for a trusted intermediary to become a clearinghouse for metrics and industry insight. By having access to individual companies’ data and being trusted not to share it, competitor data could be aggregated and individual companies could compare their metrics against the industry average, without anyone’s data being exposed. The only thing required is that each of the individual companies trust the clearinghouse with their data.
Personally, I think it would be incredibly useful to see how my company’s issue resolution rate compared to my competitors, what my conversion rate is compared to the industry average, etc. By consolidating this over time you could even look at industry trends against your individual metrics etc.
It would be interesting to see how open companies are to this. If it was actually successful I can see several interesting offshoots such as the clearinghouse becoming a "credit rating agency" for the industry, providing reports that verify that the company is in fact in the Top 10% for a given metric against the industry.
The one real drawback I can see is companies might become excessively metric-driven. For example, if software development managers started comparing a BS metric like lines of code to the industry average, that would be an extremely bad thing.
