ZDNet: Global Managing Director at Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Explains how a Company’s IT Organization can Embrace the ‘Code Halos’ Religion

“Every day, you and I and millions of others exchange data and information with different companies. Every ‘click’ or ‘swipe’ or ‘buy’ or ‘like’ or search creates a digital footprint, a digital exhaust trail,” says Paul Roehrig. “All of that information in aggregate creates a virtual you that’s comprised of the information that you share every day, day after day, week after week, month after month.”

Roehrig, Malcolm Frank, Cognizant’s Executive Vice President of Strategy, and Ben Pring, Director, Cognizant’s Center for the Future, are the authors of Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business. Excerpts from Roehrig’s interview:

“Corporate IT is becoming increasingly involved in helping manage employee code halos. The most obvious example is the whole bring-your-own-device shift. Companies are recognizing that employees sharing their own code within the constraints of an organization can actually lead to improved efficiency, [and] improved collaboration. Many companies have built-in social systems where they’re sharing information, they’re solving problems, real time, remotely and virtually.

Other companies are taking it even a step farther and are trying to understand how employees are engaging with the world digitally. There are experiments going on right now where employees are voluntarily sharing that information with their company, and the company is trying to mine that data to create a more improved employee experience, a better work experience.

It’s really a fascinating point in time for an IT leader now to be thrust into this new requirement for managing code, managing employee code, product code, brand code, customer code, all of that data and information. It really shifts the requirements of IT to not only how keep the business going with data centers and desktop systems and what have you, but [figuring out] what do we do with all of this information from different constituents and how we convert that information into real business value.

Security, privacy and compliance issues are not simple, but every day different companies across the world are making tremendous progress on being able to solve some of these issues. Companies have to be compelling and honest in their ability to manage that information in an ethical and trustworthy way, and they have to deliver a level of value that makes it worth the give. We call this the “give-to-get” ratio.

The places [for businesses] to start are three. The first one is the customer interface—how a business can change their interaction [with customers] and create a sense of mass personalization or customization using data and information.

The second place involves the Internet of things, what we call the product interface or the rise of the smart machines. Using devices and information from telematics devices, you’re seeing some really interesting consumer product stories around [companies] creating code and creating value from code. A third key starting point is the notion of creating a beautiful experience and using information to drive new product and service design.”

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