Cognizant and ReD Associates Executives Talk About Their Exclusive Strategic Partnership and the Importance of Human Sciences in Digital Technologies

On April 28, 2016, Cognizant announced an exclusive strategic partnership and the acquisition of an ownership interest of 49 percent in ReD Associates, a leading strategic consulting firm specializing in the use of human sciences to help business leaders better understand customer behavior.

As part of this exclusive relationship, strategy experts, behavioral economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers from ReD Associates will work with digital strategists, designers, technologists, and data scientists from Cognizant Digital Works to help businesses connect more closely to real-world consumer behaviors and experiences.

Gajen Kandiah, Executive Vice President, Cognizant Digital Works, told ZDNet that “while it may sound counterintuitive, ‘being digital’ also means being more human.”

“Companies involved in digital transformation projects are increasingly using social sciences to inform decisions,” ZDNet noted.

“If we get a better understanding of human beings, we will develop better technology,” Christian Madsbjerg, Co-founder of ReD, told CRN. “Understanding human sciences deeply and articulately is the way forward.”

Before the exclusive partnership with Cognizant, Madsbjerg said, ReD’s anthropologists, sociologists and ethnographers would make recommendations about how human beings would interact with cutting-edge technology, such as self-driving cars, but lacked the digital and technological chops to build what they were recommending. ReD therefore had to hand their work off to other companies for the implementation phase, which was less than ideal and could sometimes result in miscommunication.

“It’s frustrating to look at the future of the car or the bank without the ability to implement it in a way that's right,” Madsbjerg said. “Cognizant’s technology capability gives us the ability to build the work we see when we look at people.”

Madsbjerg said pretty much every IT consultancy or management firm was interested in acquiring a stake in the company. But ReD opted to go with Cognizant, Madsbjerg said, because the company’s digital capabilities are core to how the company does business, rather than an add-on, as is the case at some other advisory firms.

“They feel like a company of the future, and I think it’s quite exciting," Madsbjerg said. “They respect that understanding people is part of evolving technology.”

Cognizant’s Digital Works division had a little human sciences expertise before the ReD partnership, but ReD’s decade of experience and rigorous methodologies and processes for deriving meaning from data set them apart, Paul Roehrig, Global Managing Director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, told CRN.

“They are talent magnets for some of the top social scientists that have an inclination to work in business,” Roehrig said.

The customer bases for Cognizant and ReD already have some overlap, Roehrig said, with ReD tasked with setting the strategy and informing product design while Cognizant provides the actual technological services. By pairing ReD’s insights with Cognizant's technological muscles, Roehrig said, he expects the company to develop a more consistent approach to building out digital processes and technologies.