Fortune: Cognizant’s Executive and Consulting Leadership Talks About Building a Globally Integrated Consultancy and Reimagining the Organization for the New Era of the Wired Corporation
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Francisco D'Souza, Mark Livingston, Lakshmi Narayanan, R. Chandrasekaran, Malcolm Frank, Mahesh Venkateswaran, Sandy Gopalan, Steven Skinner |
“Cognizant is reimagining itself for the new era of the wired corporation,” writes FORTUNE India in the cover story of its Vision of the Year special issue. “The company wants to be known as a globally integrated consultancy—and has taken rapid strides, giving pause to traditional consulting firms.” It notes, “Interestingly, most of CBC’s [Cognizant Business Consulting] engagements have ushered in large transformational deals for Cognizant’s core IT-services business.”
“Consulting becomes the first point of engagement for clients to define problems and opportunities,” says Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza. “Historically, business planning was thought of as a five-year strategy, which translated into a three-year plan, and then a one-year plan. Along the way, you thought of technology strategy to support all of that. In that world, [pure-play] strategy firms helped with one piece of that journey, and technology firms with another. Technology and strategy are now two sides of the same coin. Today, there is very little of business strategy or operations that is not technology enabled. So you have this tight coupling of technology and strategy,” he adds.
“The fastest growing area of consulting will be technology-led businesses. Tech will force a fundamental change in industry after industry,” avers Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President for Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant. He adds, “Clients should sense that we’ve probably seen [a] problem at least 50 times. We should take all those best practices and capabilities to them. That is where the scale has value. Equally, clients have their own culture, history, and change path. So knowledge of the individual traits of customers is very useful.”
“We realized early that if we had to be about customer focus and relationship building, it wouldn’t be complete without consulting,” says Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman, Cognizant. Narayanan recalls a 2004 meeting of the company’s board with a few customers. “The board recommended that consulting merge with all the solutions we build and offer, and that the customer must see one Cognizant selling and building relationships, not many units directly selling to one customer,” he says.
D’Souza believes Cognizant’s consulting-led project approach has come of age, because the client sees one Cognizant. Consulting could turn out to be the differentiator for Cognizant now, the magazine observes. “In this backdrop, D’Souza’s vision—and Cognizant’s consulting march so far—is truly novel,” it adds.
“Time will prove our approach is the right approach,” says Mark Livingston, who heads CBC. “The essence of a consulting business hasn’t changed. Clients want you there; to be successful, you have to be on site, working with clients. You can’t just show up with process flowcharts and methodologies to say you are a good consultant. Small consulting assignments help us sell bigger ones later on because they have more confidence in us. We have to earn our way up for projects, and then it is a matter of nurturing the relationships.”
“Unlike the past, where large firms produced a big survey or report, organizations are looking today for a consulting partner who can practice apart from preaching,” says R. Chandrasekaran, now Executive Vice Chairman of Cognizant India. “Customers don’t take consulting seriously unless there is an execution capability.”
In the context of Cognizant’s Emerging Business Accelerator (EBA) and its focus on building ‘future-ready’ innovations, Mahesh Venkateswaran, global head for SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) at Cognizant, cites the example of a sales planning solution called iAlign, which began with the EBA identifying the business problem, then solved with industry knowledge from partners of CBC’s pharma practice. “Often, the best ideas emanate from people who are closer to the customers,” says Venkateswaran. “Our analytics team in EBA came up with the idea of developing a product that will help track the effectiveness of [medical] sales representatives by region and incentivize them. Today, 40% of the pharma sales force in North America uses iAlign, and our revenue is based on the number of people who use the product. We hold the IP, and the customers get the benefits.”
Stating that D’Souza’s vision has been to make Cognizant a large-scale, end-to-end firm (from strategy and solution-building to implementation) that can build and demonstrate winning business models, the magazine cites the example of Cognizant helping an insurance client to create a car policy framework, wherein clause applicability can change in real time, depending on the policyholder’s driving habits. “This is possible because the car industry is moving to an era where car engines are linked to a command center, and driving patterns can be recorded,” explains Sandy Gopalan, Senior Vice President of CBC. Referring to Cognizant’s networked ‘intelligent store’ solution (or IntelliStore) to help brick-and-mortar retail companies compete with their online counterparts, Gopalan adds, “There are incredible nuances to it…The human interaction is going to be there via mobile, but supply chain and stores will still matter.”
“Our company can be your consultant and advisor. If everything has a technical answer, then there is no value,” says Steven Skinner, Senior Vice President, Retail Business Consulting, Cognizant. “In the end,” says D’Souza, “the customer is going to go for the best idea and best thinking. The battle is [won by] who has the best idea.”
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