I recently spent time in San Jose with Angel Mendez, Cisco’s senior vice president and a keynote speaker at last year’s Supply Chain Executive Conference. Along with members of his team, including Kevin Harrington and Karl Braitberg, Mr. Mendez gave me a look at Cisco’s new Customer Value Chain Management organizational structure and strategy.

While there was no shortage of traditional supply chain stuff to talk about—inventory, supply chain applications, S&OP, etc.,— what kept emerging was a whole new supply chain. Consider some points of radical difference from the traditional approach:

• Customer value teams as the organizing framework for order management—This is an organizing framework for collaborative planning, customer order management, and service to take care of strategic customers the way they need to be served: different for each, yet all benefiting from Cisco’s global-scale advantages.

• A Web 2.0 collaborative workspace that is somewhere between Facebook and Outlook in appearance and function—Admittedly, this application is still in design stage, and questions like master data management loom large, but its usability and value could dramatically disrupt the traditional enterprise applications business.

• Heavyuse of super video conferencing—TelePresence is Cisco’s brand, and it is impressive. The experience is transformative for distance collaboration in ways that cannot be fully appreciated until you see it with your own eyes. It obviously can slash travel (and therefore cash costs, CO2 emissions, and personal wear and tear), but more importantly it can increase tenfold the amount of iterative learning accomplished by people just doing their jobs. TelePresence, in effect, offers a much steeper learning curve than any of us are used to. The technology does have a solid competitor in Hewlett-Packard’s HALO system, which I have also used and is also fantastic.

Cisco is rapidly building a whole new supply chain. In fact, the explicit use of the term value chain calls out the organization’s ambition to transcend the old-school idea that supply chain is a cost center. It will be built around multi-disciplinary jobs that reward creativity as much as reliability, which is something Daniel Pink would appreciate.

We continue with some more thoughts on IP and the supply chain at our blog. Let us know what you think there in “A Whole New Supply Chain.”

AMR Research® is a registered trademark of AMR Research, Inc.