Mint: Cognizant’s Executive Vice President of Consulting Says Strategy Without Technology is no Strategy

“Strategy without technology is no strategy at all,” says Mark Livingston. “Now as digital becomes default, clients are simply not buying strategy alone from top-tier consultancies. Every great idea has to have technology as a backbone. This explains how we win in more than 70% of times competing against the top consulting firms. So we are using consulting to help accelerate growth of delivery (of our technology offerings) because we can implement the idea, we can quickly develop a prototype, using design thinking and other things and that is what has helped us.”

He adds, “We have created a unique and highly operating successful model that you could say is the magic sauce behind Cognizant recording massive numbers for the last five years.”

“Cognizant’s three-in-a-box approach means the company has at least one consultant, along with a client partner and a delivery director, for each of its large clients,” writes Mint. “The client partner manages the operations part while the consultant advises a client on how to improve its current business operations,” the paper notes. “They are tied to the hip,” says Sandy Gopalan, Vice President of Consulting at Cognizant.

“Our consulting practice is not standalone,” says Livingston. “In our model, consultants are more like software delivery sales guys. It’s a matrix model where the consultancy organization reports to the vertical in the business and report to me. So it’s aligned with delivery and we go jointly to market.”

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