Mint Asia: Cognizant’s Vice President and APAC Head Says Technology is Becoming the Lifeblood of Business

“Becoming a digital enterprise is now a necessity, a matter of survival, as businesses, products, people and devices become more connected,” says Jayajyoti Sengupta. “Clients are looking for innovative ways to combine their traditional business models and product sets with new and continuously evolving digital technologies.” Excerpts:

“IT is a means not just to drive productivity and efficiency—what we refer to as “run better”—but also reimagine organizations and business models for future growth, what we call “run different”. This is what we refer to as the dual mandate.

Effectively addressing the dual mandate for clients requires partners that can combine strategy, technology and business consulting in one integrated model. It also requires a partner that has a deep understanding of clients’ legacy environments and business processes so that these can be leveraged and integrated into new digital backbones.

Our strength in the market comes from the fact that we have built this breadth of capabilities at Cognizant and we’ve integrated these together in our Cognizant Digital Works methodology for maximum client impact. We are among the few companies that can provide comprehensive digital innovation at an enterprise scale. Our matrix structure deeply integrates our consulting team with our technology and business process services delivery organization. This synergy between our consulting and delivery organizations helps the teams to work closely, driving business model change, the re-engineering of business processes and organizational change management for our clients’ businesses.

The APAC market is poised well to benefit the best from fulfilling the dual mandate to “run better” and “run different”. Clients who have been partnering with IT and business process firms for a few cycles are in a great position of advantage to generate efficiencies from their ongoing engagements and thereby savings that can be directed towards digital transformation and other business initiatives. At the same time, we are also seeing enterprises making the big leap directly towards adopting digital initiatives. One area that clients in Asia are laying particular emphasis on is around proximity delivery. Overall, the outsourcing space is bustling with action and we are seeing a healthy mix of conventional technology services together with emerging ones such as platform-based services, automation and next-generation IT.

As the industrial economy makes way for the digital economy, the role of technology is shifting from supporting business to being its lifeblood. To be able to transform successfully to a new digital economy, enterprises need a new business and IT architecture to help them drive innovation and efficiency at scale as well as provide flexibility for designing new business processes.

Robots, machine learning, AI, IoT (Internet of Things), 3D printing—so many buzzwords surround automation, but all point to the same theme: rote and repetitive processes are becoming digital, instrumented, analyzed and intelligent—and increasingly operated by smart machines instead of solely by humans.

The need for efficiency, lower error rates, lower costs and faster throughput will drive aggressive adoption of automation. While these outcomes are welcome, the true value of digitization lies in the rich data and metadata that accumulates around process value chains, which will be further enhanced with the emergence of new technologies such as machine learning, deep learning and AI in the coming years—this is when the real transformation can begin. The underlying theme of this transformation is that technology will be far more prevalent in the coming years, and that provides large players like us a great opportunity to make meaningful and lasting contributions to solving some of the most pressing and significant societal and business problems.

Our deep industry, process, legacy and transformative digital knowledge, our integrated Cognizant Digital Works model combining strategy, design, technology and business consulting, and global footprint affording access to the best talent across the world will continue to gives us an edge in these markets as well.”

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