CXOTalk: Cognizant’s Executive Vice President of Strategy Talks About Adapting to the Future of Work and Leveraging Code Halos to Drive Meaningful Results

In a conversation with CXOTalk, which brings together prominent executives, authors, investors, and analysts to discuss innovation in enterprise business and technology, Malcolm Frank offers insights on how companies can adapt to the Future of Work.

Speaking with Vala Afshar and Michael Krigsman, Frank analyzes the phenomenon of ‘Code Halos’—the unique virtual identity produced by every digital click, swipe, "like", buy, comment and search—and says that in order to use data to drive meaningful results, companies need to know what they are looking for and how to make correlations.

Frank, along with Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring from Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, is the co-author of Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business. Frank avers that businesses such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have had an unprecedented growth in value based on their ability to perform mass customization—creating new expectations in consumers and causing businesses in every industry to change the way they work. Excerpts from the talk:

“Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work has brought together world class analysts and a number of academic institutions to look at how industry and company structures are transforming and very nature of work itself needs to transform to meet consumer expectations.

Twenty-five years ago, the technology industry was where the ‘cool’ stuff was happening, at scale and in corporations. That has changed in the past decade. The action has shifted to the consumer market, driven by four technology constructs working in parallel–Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud, or the SMAC stack, as we call it. Together, SMAC have clearly transformed our personal lives and they have had a profound impact on how companies perform in the marketplace.

Today, all of us now live virtual as well as physical lives. Every online action leaves a ‘digital exhaust’. Some companies have become very good at seeing our ‘digital exhaust’ and they actually know the virtual you better than the physical you. These companies have started dominating their markets. By starting to build a code halo around customers, the effect of what they do will form the basis for what you provide as a company, so you are there at the right place, at the right time and with the right product.

Most internal IT groups are not known for building beautiful systems, but design matters. From an IT perspective, one of the new skill sets required today is the ability to build beautiful and engaging systems for consumers. Design is more than just a pretty interface; it's how someone interacts with your product. Consumer oriented design has to become a core competency of the technology team and they need to not only design the experience but also the business model to deliver them. The business and technology need to become one and companies need to get these two together as quickly as possible.

It’s important to find people who understand systems and data infrastructure and who also have a great interest in the business. Using data to refine the experiences you offer down to that segment of one opens up new opportunities for mass customization and influencing the product development life cycle. With this level of data on what customers are actually buying, companies are able to get insight into what consumers will want in their product, allowing them to build the products that consumers actually want to buy.

Companies will need to determine whether people will be comfortable or not. As we put more business online, the security risks of bad online activity will only increase and people will need to determine what risks they are willing to incur for the upside of convenience.”