The Hindu, India: Cognizant’s Chief Strategy Officer Says it is More Imperative Than Ever to Continuously Evolve with Technologies

“Our strategy around acquisitions has been acquiring for capability and not for capacity and that’s going to continue,” says Malcolm Frank. “We are a huge organization and we don’t have to acquire for capacity.” Excerpts:

“In the digital world you are going to see us become more and more aggressive. So, we have been acquiring a number of firms around specific geographies. We had some design and strategy houses like Idea Couture, a privately held firm in Canada that offers a broad range of digital innovation, strategy, design and technology services, and Mirabeau BV in Netherlands. So, you are going to see us acquire firms like those, and also in machine learning and AI, organizations that are focused on very specific vertical industry problems.

You come into services business knowing that technologies continuously evolve and you have to continuously evolve with them. The big trigger quite often is when you see it through your customer’s eyes. Sometimes people can get into denial and think I won’t invest in those skill sets because I can just do this for the next five or ten years. But when you sit down with the client and the client tells you what you’re currently doing with those technologies was important to me ten years ago but now I view it as a commodity, that’s when we see people more motivated to make the shift. It’s easy to talk about change but change is hard, particularly when change is somebody else’s idea, it’s doubly hard. One of the things we have done at Cognizant Academy is we have got this institutional capability to help with this transition and scale.

We re-organized the whole company 12-13 months ago all around digital. We quietly reorganized the whole firm because our clients, when they make this transition, have to change their business, operations and technology models, and we need to align with the needs of our clients.

We have started seeing automation in certain pockets of the business but you’re still going to see good head count growth. We will be a fairly strong hirer.”

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