Assessing Asset Sustainability

I was brought onto the team to carry the Sustainability concept from 0 to 1 within the CX Cloud.

Currently at Cisco, there are either no good solutions or not enough awareness of such solutions for customers to evaluate and improve the sustainability of their portfolio. Thus, our customers did not feel a need to prioritize sustainability, especially because their main need is to operate and maintain their network. 

Since this project was ambiguous and highly conceptual, I had the opportunity to define the direction of my project. My part within the team of data scientists and designers was to focus on specifically the sustainability assessment of a customer’s assets.

How can customers assess their asset sustainability and improve the sustainability of their portfolio?

A lot of my early explorations are idealistic, skeletal sketches of how I see the data visualized. After talking with our data science and engineering counterparts for feedback, some capabilities got shaved down for the near future. For example, I imagined a map where a customer could visualize the physical locations and impact in each area, but the map feature was not supported in the coming months and we were looking to show something then. So, my designs after the feedback display data in different methods.

I leveraged user research to inform the direction of the project and garner stakeholder buy-in.

51% of customers interviewed said that they reported their organization was not investing in sustainable solutions.

62% reported their organization was not working to reduce carbon emissions. ​

According to the research done in the US, a majority of customers were not investing in or prioritizing sustainability. The care is there but the cost, time, and effort outweigh the benefits. This data told me that the average customer was not seeking high-effort sustainability revamps of their portfolio or to be overwhelmed with potentially negative statistics. My approach was to pursue the opposite - I wanted to promote lower-effort, embedded sustainability practices and pull interesting, illuminating data about the customer’s portfolio.

“I want to reduce waste and all that good stuff, but it's just not a part of my decision making matrix or whatever you want to call this. I'm not going to go Juniper because they have less packaging than Cisco type of thing.”

- Customer at Cisco Live! focus group, 2023

I developed a design strategy to target our main business problem in this project — customer adoption of sustainability practices and products.

Sustainability is not seamlessly ingrained into Cisco products and services, and as a result, customers are less likely to put the effort and resources necessary.

I formulated a three-pronged approach that balanced my organization’s values and goals with the needs of our customers who have yet to embrace a fully sustainable approach to their portfolio.

(1) Integrate Sustainability into throughout the customer experience

This is a simple yet the most important prong, where we embed and integrate sustainability into the existing system, so it is at the same level of importance as other metadata. Within the CX Cloud, I proposed elements that fit on top of and scale seamlessly with the original designs. At each level of the architecture where the context made sense, I included a point to sustainability. I expanded on the Assets page filters and data columns, added an action-oriented header at the Hardware End-of-Life level, and placed a banner for Takeback program at the individual Asset level.

Beyond the scope of the project, I advocated for including relevant sustainability metadata in a two other initiatives that planned to rebuild the data flow and asset aggregation and re-design the e-commerce experience.

(2) Drive user adoption of current Cisco sustainability services

We found in our research that customers find ways to get some value out of their retired hardware by reusing or reselling. If the hardware truly has no value, then it gets donated for parts or recycled. When passing off the hardware, they tend to go to third-party sellers or recyclers. Our researcher surmised this was due to a lack of awareness of the Takeback Program and its incentives. Cisco does a free pick-up and return, whereas third-party resellers or recyclers will charge a fee.

I saw an opportunity here to (1) drive adoption towards the Takeback Program by aligning it to their ESG goals (2) and bridge our customer service platform with a direct integration to the free Takeback Program.

(3) Bring awareness to customer’s portfolio sustainability performance and potential improvements

In collaboration with our data science team, I began to define sustainability and how it can be measured. I devised a sustainability performance visualization to show “scores” for each Product Family. Customers focus on Product Family and ID when assessing things like EOL and asset replacements, and this visualization offers a quick way to understand which Family to dig into.

Our customers told us that the most important metric they wanted to track was power efficiency, so I definitely wanted customers to have a dedicated perspective that was appealing and easy to understand. Drawing from the fact that 1% of the world’s electricity comes from data centers and that that number is predicted to double due to the upward trend in AI and cryptocurrency, I framed the customer’s need to understand their power efficiency into the lens of the most pressing environmental issues.

Following the vein that our customers prioritize energy efficiency as a top metric and goal, a common method that within the industry is tracking through energy efficiency scoring systems, such as EPEAT, Energy Star, and Green IT. As part of my strategy, I wanted to include familiar and well-established programs for not-yet-sustainable customers to get their start in meeting specifications, such as ones set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Reflection

This ongoing project remains a priority in our organization and I want to continue researching and testing these concepts with customers, collaborating with product managers to drive adoption towards Cisco programs, and utilizing data as a tool to educate and bring awareness to businesses.

Some next steps:

  • Collaboration with engineering to power the necessary data flow

  • Research into motivations for non-sustainability customers (targeting executives and other leadership) to advocate for and start sustainability initiatives

  • Global comparison of sustainability performance (e.g. US vs EU)