Rebecca Jacoby, CIO and senior vice president of Cisco Systems, has the ear of company chairman and CEO John Chambers—and vice versa—so much so that she describes the relationship this way: “to anticipate what John wants before he does and have the architecture in place to implement it.”

That’s a tall order, but at Cisco, IT stands tall within the organization, even as the company moves to an unusual committee-based management structure. IT is represented on all 60 committees on the new organization chart, which should help tie Jacoby’s top two initiatives— virtualization and collaboration—to the company’s strategic business goals of asserting leadership across an ever-growing roster of businesses.

What’s more, virtualization and collaboration paid big dividends during the past year of economic peril. Virtualization enabled Cisco to tap into more compute power while holding the line on new equipment, and collaboration technology enabled the company to slice off huge chunks of its travel budget while launching a new management strategy that’s based on the large number of new committees.

According to Jacoby, it would not be possible to successfully implement either virtualization or collaboration technologies without a rigorous architectural approach to IT management that focuses relentlessly on business results, not technology. As she puts it, “I’m the CIO. We’re responsible for delivering systems, not technology.”