Boom Live: Executive Vice Chairman of Cognizant India Says Technology is Disrupting and Changing Lives at a Fundamental Level

“If I look at the way we live and operate, I see disruption everywhere. Things are happening so fast,” says R. Chandrasekaran in an interview on the sidelines of NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2016 in Mumbai. “Today, the world’s largest accommodation provider is not a hotel chain, but airbnb. The largest fleet owner is Uber. If it continues this way, tomorrow we may see hospitals without doctors or colleges without teachers. Fundamentally everything that we know of is likely to witness a radical change and we need to adapt ourselves.” Excerpts:

“Any change is difficult. One important aspect for any organization is to embrace change whenever it happens. It’s not a one-time phenomenon. Change is constant. As an organization, you have to be agile and flexible, and have a structure that can adapt to a changing environment. Those are the things one needs to focus on. In Cognizant, we have done that. That has helped us wade through changes. Whether the Y2K wave, the e-commerce wave or now the digital wave, we’ve been able to seize every opportunity that presents itself.

The type of change that we’re seeing is not just about applying a technology front-end to some of the legacy systems. Digital revolution is in radically changing everything we do. We need to think differently. Fundamentally, you have to rethink and redefine your business processes and apply technology.

You need to have a digital strategy in place. You cannot have a planning and execution phase. Things are changing so rapidly. You need to be at it right from the word go. In today’s context, application development and deployment are all happening real-time. You need to create an architecture, which can incrementally keep adding. It’s like changing tires of a running car. That’s the kind of agility we want in IT solutions that we take to customers today.”