Silicon.com: How Cognizant Sees the Future of Offshoring

“We are living through an age of the great decoupling,” says Malcolm Frank, Chief Strategist. “Humans, information, machines are all elements that can be pulled apart in virtualization. The volatility of technology forces—social computing, mobile, big data and cloud—slamming together will be the hallmark of the next decade or two. Virtualization of organizations, processes, people and technology will have a very profound impact on the outsourcing industry. As clients continue to decouple, the outsourcing industry is going through a significant change,” he observes.

On the subject of talent development and performance management at Cognizant, Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman, says, “In this industry, growth is driven by talent alone. So our main focal point is, how do we get the best talent, how do we create talent? We are trying to make our managers masters of the domain, and not just the technology. We empower employees by keeping them close to the customer. The incentive or bonus comes only when the customer relationship grows. Are you being innovative, are you wowing the customer, is he buying more from you? Those are the performance yardsticks at Cognizant.”

Touching upon innovation at Cognizant, R Chandrasekaran, President and Managing Director of Global Delivery, says, “Innovation is in the thinking and mindset of all employees. Being innovative with customers is one thing, but being innovative in our personal management is quite another. We have a corporate innovation group that measures our per-capita innovation and attributes a dollar value to it every quarter. We have an annual competition and choose the best innovation cases within the organization. In keeping with Cognizant’s entrepreneurial bent, employee teams are encouraged to come up with new business ideas.”  

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