Consulting Magazine: Cognizant’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Discusses Code Halos and Their Impact on Business

“This started out of our Center for the Future of Work,” says Malcolm Frank about Cognizant’s research on Code Halos—the name given by Cognizant to fields of information that surround every person, device, process, and organization, which can be leveraged by businesses for competitive differentiation and form the subject of the book ‘Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business’, co-authored by Frank.

“About four years ago, we launched a technology transition around SMAC—social, mobile, analytics and cloud—and we thought this will fundamentally transform the future of work. How firms are organized, how they interact with their customers, how they generate value… A lot of firms are going to go through a real fundamental shift. We stared doing research around this…It became very clear to us that there is the physical you and then there is the virtual you. And companies that not only recognized the virtual you, but also knew how to interact with it in a meaningful way were the clear winners.” Excerpts from the interview:

“We think this [Code Halos] is a management challenge for the next ten years. Our clients are all recognizing how significant this is and they realize that what happened to a Blockbuster isn’t isolated to that industry. They realize that if they don’t get their act together this could happen to them. Clients are realizing that they need to interface and interact with customers in a completely different way.

Clients are raising their hands and saying that they want to do this around their customer, but they also want to do it around their products. That’s what GE is doing around jet engines. For instance, we’re working with a bunch of car manufacturers to build code halos around their cars. Then the consumer and the company can co-manage that car, monitor its performance and troubleshoot problems before they ever occur. How are consumers using the car? Manufacturers can then use that information to better design future cars. It’s all leading to the mass personalization of products.

In our consulting engagements, we play what we call the “Google game.” We ask them: What if Google came into your industry? People get spooked because they realize pretty quickly how they could be completely dis-intermediated. Then there’s the big box retailers—twelve years ago, they all thought they’d get “Amazoned” but still, 90 percent of purchases come through retail stores, but “show-rooming” is a real issue. So, we’ve created what we call the intelligent store. Your smart phone will actually create a map for you of your local store, pinpointing your products and offering discounts and coupons.”

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