Businessworld: Cognizant President and CEO Sees Agility as the Killer Behavior in a Volatile Market

“When you have increased volatility, for organizations the killer behavior becomes agility,” says Francisco D’Souza. “If you can embrace that volatility, understand how to find the ability to uncover trends and find solutions for them, then opportunities can be significant.”

For Cognizant, he says, agility has been the disrupting factor in the past two years. “It has forced us to change, to organize ourselves around this notion that if we can be more agile than our competitors, there is tremendous advantage.” He cites the example of new service offerings. “Over the past 18 months, we have launched more solution offerings in the marketplace than in the past two to three years. Internally, we have taken actions to keep offerings on the lines of what is happening in the marketplace, how we can organize ourselves to take advantage of those opportunities, and at the scale we are at, how we can continue to remain agile and move fast to respond to those threats.”

“The market has evolved significantly over the past 4-5 years,” observes D’Souza. “In our business, clients look at three broad categories: the kind of content we bring to the table; the delivery we have; and the price or cost point.” He says that the playbook on these has changed significantly. “On cost, labor arbitrage is a given at this point. Clients are saying you have to show me true productivity, inherent underlying productivity and process improvement, using things such as Six Sigma to drive efficiency in what we do,” says D’Souza.

In content, he adds, clients are looking for true cost leadership. “It’s not just enough to bring technical content, it is also important to bring the domain expertise. You have got to bring true thought leadership to the table and be able to drive the client through that leadership. That’s why our management consulting business is so important.” And delivery, according to D’Souza, has moved beyond SEI and CMM certification. “Firms are saying you have to take us on a journey to show how the best firms in the world are doing. So, in this playbook of cost, content and delivery, clients get all three on one platform. That is differentiating because of the investments we’ve made over the years.”

D’Souza notes that the economic environment is spreading the pie so clients are willing to move to a global delivery model. “Over the past 10-15 years, every downturn has forced an expansion of the offshore addressable market. As clients come under increasing pressure, they say what else can be moved to a global delivery model. This is something we have seen over and over again, and we are seeing now as well. Our ability to mine existing clients has always been very strong,” he says.

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