Cisco – Jeff Cheek – 2010

Goals 

Jeff Cheek spent his summer as a Climate Corps fellow at Cisco Systems’ world headquarters. Cisco Systems designs, manufactures and sells Internet Protocol (IP)-based networking and other products to the communications and IT industry worldwide. Cheek is currently pursuing his MBA at Melbourne Business School in Melbourne, Australia. Cisco employs almost 70,000 people in offices spread all around the globe, thus changes that can be made on a company-wide scale can have a far larger impact than just one project at one facility. With this in mind, Cheek’s major work focused on improved standardization of the systems for proposing, tracking and communicating energy efficiency projects across the company’s portfolio of buildings.

Solutions

Cheek built a financial model designed to standardize financial analysis and project selection metrics, as well as provide a single location for project data to be stored, tracked and compared. In addition, Cheek prepared case studies to be distributed internationally to gauge best practice implementation rates, and designed a strategy for all tools to be merged onto the network.

Potential Impact

The tools Cheek developed for Cisco are hoped to drive more widespread implementation of energy efficiency, spark collaboration among facilities and decrease the effort required to communicate the message to Cisco’s global workforce.