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Preface
Amid perpetual and accelerating technology shifts, businesses must ratchet up their
ability to see, make sense of and respond to proliferating volumes of data. This data can
yield predictive insights on everything from developing more personalized products and
services, to unsnarling complex operational logjams.
Progressive organizations are already opening their APIs to business partners and
embracing micro-services to fuel continuous innovation and build profitable e-business
platforms. Meanwhile, these forward-thinking enterprises continue to address persistent
security challenges with pervasive, layered approaches that keep mission-critical data
and networks safe from prying eyes.
What follows is our crystal ball into seven critical technology and business upheavals your
organization must navigate to succeed in the digital age.
We hope you find our perspective thought-provoking and prescriptive. Feel free to contact
me at the e-mail below to discuss how these trends relate to your business and industry.
RAJ BALA
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
COGNIZANT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
Rajasekaran.Balasubramaniam@cognizant.com
Executive Summary
Across every industry and in every corner of the globe, customers
are demanding smarter, more personalized and more secure (yet less
expensive) products and services. Meeting these imperatives will require
new technologies and information architectures, as well as new ways of
working and thinking about business and customers.
To understand these emerging business and technology mandates, look no
further than the mirror.
Whether as an individual consumer or a business customer, you are more
apt to buy from companies that dont just meet but anticipate your needs,
as well as customize products and services around your wants and desires.
You mercilessly shop for the lowest price but expect the highest levels
of service. You demand superb, instant support anywhere and anytime
over any device, including mobiles and wearables. And any company that
compromises your personal or corporate information because of a security
breach is relegated to your blacklist.
As buyers and as sellers, the ground is shifting beneath our feet, propelled
by seven fundamental technology and business waves. These include:
RIDING THE SEVEN WAVES OF CHANGE THAT WILL POWER, OR CRUSH, YOUR DIGITAL BUSINESS
3. Establishing a smart, pervasive security strategy for a hyperconnected world that replaces walled gardens with self-protecting
assets. This approach will enable businesses to securely provide
customers, employees and business partners with the digital
capabilities and information they need. Read more about over-thehorizon developments in pervasive security on page 12.
5. Enabling enterprise control through digital code, using softwaredefined automation. Doing so enables organizations to not only
slash IT and operational costs but also respond more nimbly than
competitors to changing market requirements. Read more about the
expanding software-defined enterprise made possible by automation
everywhere on page 19.
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SECTION 1:
Graphics
X4 >
Student
Excitement
X4 > Student
Churn Target
City > Store 1234
Churn Target
City > Store 1234
In-Store Organization
City > Store 1234
Battery Life
X4 > Student
Love
X4 > Student
ttitude
Store 1234 >
Laptops > Ted
CPU
X4 > Student
Training
City > Store 1234
Buying Experience
City > Store 1234 > Student
Website Search
X4 > Student
Figure 1
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January 2016
Even more powerful are the new business models built around real-time, even
predictive, awareness of customer needs and trends. Examples range from auto
insurers that can price policies based on real-time driving behavior gleaned from
on-board sensors, to Amazons ability to predict orders from a given geography
and pre-ship them to a local warehouse for faster delivery when the actual order
is placed.2
Whatever your industry, failing to move toward an insights-driven approach will
render you progressively blind to market opportunities and risks, and at risk of
being outmaneuvered by competitors with a clearer view of near- and long-term
trends.
The following are some of the new tools businesses are using to build and extract
meaning from Code Halos:
Cognitive computing, which uses machine learning to create systems that are
easier and more natural for humans to use.
Natural language processing that mirrors human speech and writing patterns.
Tomorrows Possibilities
The dual forces of improved analytics and cost-cutting pressure will lead enterprises to automate more strategic decision-making. This is already happening with
routine text entry and accounts payable tasks and will spread to more sophisticated
decisions, such as audit and tax compliance. Over time, software bots (programs
that operate on behalf of a user or another program and mimic a human activity)
will optimize business processes, bringing more intelligence to both customerfacing processes, such as real-time product recommendations and discounts, and
internal processes, such as IT security and management.
Analyzing consumer data location, purchases, social media postings, etc. will
enable businesses to more accurately predict customer needs and offer customized
solutions. IoT data will enable manufacturers to more completely understand
the lifecycle of the devices they produce and better support them. Recognizing
the importance of customer sentiment, businesses will also look for new ways
to measure emotions such as enthusiasm and excitement, along with customer
actions, such as downloads and clickthroughs.3
At the same time, more powerful analytics and big data tools will enable organizations to move from backwards-looking dashboards to proactively addressing
customer needs, identifying market trends and creating new business models.
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Quick Take
Advice for the Insights-Driven Enterprise
To make the best use of IoT data, employ abstraction layers, such as master data management and
metadata models, that allow business users, not
just IT professionals, to understand what data
is available, what the data represents and how
to quickly generate insights. Leverage existing
data from legacy industrial sensors, as well as the
analytic models used in legacy systems, to schedule
maintenance, production runs and the ordering of
raw material.
Plan for the move to predictive analytics by identifying key processes for which taking action before
it happens can result in outsized business benefit.
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SECTION 2:
Hyper-Personalization
Serving Markets of One
Todays Reality
Every customer has unique wants and needs, even if he or she is the same age or in
the same income bracket or ZIP Code as countless others. Todays most loyal and
lucrative customers expect products and experiences to reflect their ever-changing
preferences, needs and context, such as their past behavior, choice of device and
location, and forward-thinking companies are responding (see Figure 2).
By analyzing big data analytics, geolocation and historical metadata, enterprises
can customize products and services to meet, anticipate and exceed customer
needs (see Section 1 on the insight-driven enterprise, page 6). The supply chain for
physical products and digital services must support just-in-time customization, or
hyper-personalization, and technologies such as natural language processing, textto-speech and avatars must provide hyper-personalization capabilities in the most
user-friendly form.
HELLO
my name is
44%
42%
17%
Website
13%
Mobile
Web
Website Application
9%
Mobile None of the
App
above / NA
Figure 2
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British Airways Know Me program, for example, combines various data sources
to create a single customer view, and uses it to give extra attention to high-value
customers or those who have recently experienced delays or other problems. It also
allows employees to search Google Images for a photo to immediately recognize
such customers.
Some retailers are already using big data analytics to build detailed records of the
behavior of their best customers and proactively push offers to them in anticipation
of their needs. These records might show, for example, that a customer submits a
clothing order every six to eight weeks at lunchtime on Wednesday. If the shopper
hasnt purchased by Thursday morning on that cycle, the retailer can send an offer
for the customers favorite sweater style in a color he doesnt yet own.
For some products, technologies such as 3-D printing (at a site near the customer
or vendor) can speed production and delivery of hyper-personalized products. An
example is Normal,6 which provides a smartphone app that allows customers to take
a photo of their ear canal, from which the company can custom-print earphones.
Another example of the hyper-personalization phenomenon comes from wireless
provider Virgin Mobile, which enables customers to build their own service plans
based on the number of users and amount of voice, data and texts they wish to
pay for, even how much data different family members can use. In India, wireless
provider Tata Docomo used Facebook Custom Audience to display customized ads
to users based on their recent Facebook activity. As a result, the company won
back more than 350,000 lapsed customers, boosted the use of services such as
paid subscriptions for songs by 26% per user, and realized more than $2 million in
incremental revenue per month.7
Tomorrows Possibilities
The first wave of personalization is well underway, with customers responding to
shopping recommendations from businesses such as Amazon and entertainment
recommendations from Netflix. Such on-the-fly customization is now spreading to
other services and mainstream markets.
In healthcare, doctors sometimes use insights into a patients unique biome
the unique mix of bacteria and other organisms in their bodies to tailor diet or
medication recommendations.8 Successful businesses are also intuiting customers
intentions from their actions, both online and offline, in increasingly sophisticated
ways to understand the implicit requests they make.
For example, a retailers Web analytics might indicate a customer has conducted
three searches on the companys site for extra-large buffalo plaid flannel shirts
but failed to make a purchase. The businesss CRM records might show the customer
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initiated a chat on the issue but gave up after failing to connect with an agent. The
retailer could respond by generating a customized offer to check its remainders,
back inventory and upcoming shipments to find the best price on the specific item.
A customer receiving such proactive help is much more likely to complete that
transaction and recommend the site to others.
Businesses that generate the greatest sales and margins will explore opportunities
to push highly personalized offers to customers, based on their location in the store,
their Web search patterns or other behaviors that indicate a need for assistance
(see Figure 3). This will require the adoption of emerging technologies such as
locator beacons and smart mirrors that allow a customer to view how an item
would look on them, and share the image on social media.
Such on-the-fly customization can boost customer loyalty and sustain, even expand,
market share. Moreover, it can provide the opportunity to create and deliver products
and experiences that command a premium and
possibly disrupt entire industries. Think Uber and
Targeting Customers
its ability to match the needs of individual vehicle
owners (i.e., to earn money) with passengers who
need transport (and are willing to pay).
On a more tactical level, hyper-personalization
driven by analytics and machine learning can
reduce support costs and improve customer
service by providing highly customized services
without costly human intervention. Imagine the
convenience for a commercial customer, and
the associated reduction in administrative costs,
if a supplier could predict its use of various raw
materials and automatically deliver just the right
amount of the right material at the right time.
Assuming an organization has properly tweaked
its supply chain, such hyper-personalization can
also help it profitably serve niche markets with
smaller production runs.
BEACON
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Quick Take
Advice for Hyper-Personalization
Provide intuitive tools for self-customization of products and services. For example, one wireless provider
already lets customers use their current bill to estimate the most suitable custom plan.
Be clear with your customers about which of their actions are being tracked, and provide an opt out.
Experiment with the proper medium and timing of personalized offers. Many businesses may begin by overpersonalizing their offers in ways that customers reject as intrusive, and then pull back in the face of resistance.
Start small, iterate often and be prepared to fail forward by learning from your mistakes. Even with the most
advanced analytics, it can still be difficult to determine the context of a customers actions and intent.
Put business-savvy humans in the loop for a common-sense review of the validity of the analysis and the
action taken based on it. For example, if an algorithm finds that lower-income home buyers in a specific age group
are a better loan risk than previously thought, human experts should review the underlying data to ensure it has
not been manipulated by, for example, unscrupulous lenders.
SECTION 3:
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BARTELL HOTELS
UPS
AARON BROTHERS
400K customers
credit & debit card
information stolen
TARGET
40M individuals
contact information
stolen
MICHAELS
2.6M individuals
credit card
information stolen
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
SALLY BEAUTY
55K customers
Customers
information
personal
reportedly stolen
information
KMART
from 60
Malware stole
UPS stores
credit card
compromised
numbers
GOODWILL
from 1,200
868K credit &
Kmart stores
debit cards
for over
P.F. CHANGS
reportedly stolen a month
33 P.F. Changs
locations affected
NOV
JUL
JUN
ALBERTSONS
SUPERVALU
AUG
SEPT
OCT
HOME DEPOT
56M individuals
credit card
information
stolen
DAIRY QUEEN
Source: 2015 Dell Security Annual Threat Report, Dell Computer, 2015.
Figure 4
The answer lies in implementing pervasive layers of assets that are intelligent
enough to protect themselves. Such approaches include containerization
multiple, isolated environments that enable personal and professional use of the
same system and technologies like encryption and mobile management tools that
control what users can do with their company-supplied or personal devices.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence also help by correlating multiple securityrelated events from various systems to identify the source of a breach, and
adaptively learning how to counter it.
Tomorrows Possibilities
The number and types of systems vulnerable to attack will explode with the accelerating adoption of mobile technology, as well as the 50 billion smart devices expected
on the IoT by 202010 (see Figure 5, next page). Public concerns over IoT security will
only grow as more revelations emerge, such as the misuse of embedded software
to seize control of a vehicle11 and the hacking of medical equipment to change drug
dosages.12
Securing devices on the IoT will be especially challenging because some, such as
sensors, lack the computing power or memory to support security mechanisms
such as encryption and authentication. Because of their long lives, variety and
upgrading difficulties, these devices will continue to be a weak link in the security
chain. This reinforces the impossibility of physically controlling every end point,
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13
50
50.1
42.1
5%
40
30
Penetration of
connected objects in
total things expected
to reach 2.7% in
2020 from 0.6% in 2012.
34.8
28.4
3%
22.9
18.2
20
14.4
11.2
10
2%
8.7
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
Figure 5
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2019
2020
However,
new
technologies
and
ongoing user education require serious
investment and effort. Correctly calibrating the cost of security with its benefits
is difficult and can lead to over- or under-spending. Security staffs must also be
careful not to reflexively deny access to corporate systems without evaluating the
business benefits of such access, so they are not seen as or actually become a
roadblock to innovation.
Source: Cisco
14
2018
January 2016
Quick Take
Advice for Pervasive Security
The most important pillar in a digital security strategy is new thinking. Security is no longer only the job of the IT department,
and cannot only be focused on the perimeter. Security must now be the concern of every employee and business unit, with the
understanding that its not a matter of if, but when, the business will be compromised. The chief information security officer
(CISO) needs visibility into, and a reporting relationship with, the highest levels of management. CISOs must make it clear
that security is no longer a gating function that slows innovation but a critical enabler of the business and protector of the
brand. As organizations adopt DevOps13 to speed application deployment, they should consider adding security experts to the
scrum teams. Security must also be industrialized through increased automation and the auditing of not only code but also
production and test environments at all stages of the development lifecycle.
Processes
Pervasive security requires a host of emerging and established technologies, deployed in multiple locations, including:
assets to protect themselves, using abstraction technologies that apply customized policies to any combination
of users, devices or assets and among multiple service
providers. Much as software-defined networks can be
reconfigured without touching physical devices, softwaredefined security can easily adapt to changes in business
processes, the sensitivity of data or the needs of customers,
employees or business partners.
Use of automation to cost-effectively protect exponential increases in users, data and traffic. This includes the
use of IT forensics and related technologies and algorithms
to detect potential breaches more quickly.
Tailoring
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SECTION 4:
Just-in-Time Intelligence
Sense and Respond in Real Time
for Customer Benefit
Todays Reality
Through the IoT, businesses face an historic opportunity to use just-in-time intelligence to create new business models or extend existing ones that save customers
time and money, as well as make their lives safer and easier. IoT data is well on its
way to tracking everything from the fuel consumption of a jet engine in flight, to
the temperature of a pallet of frozen food, to a shoppers location in a mall or their
heart rate at the gym (see Figure 6). Devices ranging from drill bits to production
machinery and household appliances are, or soon will be, continuously sensing and
responding to environmental conditions, and sending updates about their health
and status.
30
66
billion
Gas generation
efficiency
billion
Jet fuel
COMMERCIAL AVIATION
POWER
Improved gas-generation
through integration of
natural gas and power grids.
RAIL TRANSPORTATION
63
billion
System
inefficiencies
27
billion
System
inefficiencies
90
billion
Capital
expenditures
Figure 6
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Imagine having a complete view across the value chain, from the latest cost and
shipping time for a raw material, to the status of work in progress in the factory,
to the latest social media sentiment about your organizations brand and product
usage statistics from the field.
Take the Nest thermostat, which learns a homeowners schedule and automatically
adjusts heating and cooling to match it. Manufacturers of products ranging from
commercial air conditioners to truck engines and transformers in electric grids are
reducing repair costs and improving customer service by analyzing performance
trends to identify problems early on and trigger repairs to prevent more costly
failures.
Tomorrows Possibilities
Just-in-time intelligence will expand as Web-enabled sensors become embedded
in clothing, facilitating continual remote health monitoring. Businesses can use
this data to offer products and services, including customized training regimens,
health alerts and personalized equipment, such
as an ankle brace if a sensors analysis of a
runners stance indicates he needs one. One
company already offers shoes that sync with
customers smartphones, track their location
and provide directions by generating vibrations
in the shoes.14
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17
Real-world, real-time
awareness if communicated
to the right stakeholders
and acted on properly could
help prevent extinction
events that threaten
the survival of a brand.
Quick Take
Advice for Just-in-Time Intelligence
Tapping
Avoid
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To
SECTION 5:
Software-Defined Everything/
Automation Everywhere
Enterprise Control through Code
Todays Reality
Two related trends virtualization and automation are changing the face of
everything from network security to insurance underwriting.
Virtualization (the abstraction of software from hardware) is rapidly spreading
from servers and storage to other devices and services. Everything can be defined
as software, from enterprise networks (and underlying systems), to business and
IT functions such as security, in the form of abstraction layers and code that can
be easily deployed on-premise or in the cloud. eBays online auction service, for
example, has made infrastructure a competitive differentiator through the creation
of a software-defined data center that automates not only infrastructure but also
load balancing, object storage, databases as-a-service, configuration management
and application management.
At the same time, businesses are better able to cut costs and cycle times by
automating processes, thanks to increasing computing power, the ability to perform
faster and more predictive analytics and the development of new tools to model
and describe processes, from claims processing, to invoice entry, to x-ray analysis.
An example is drones that scan inventory in warehouses and, if Amazon has its way,
deliver packages to consumers.
Within IT, more and more tasks (from application testing to infrastructure
deployment) are performed reliably and inexpensively by rules-based scripts,
providing the IT infrastructure that produces the
insights on which the business relies.
Automation enabled by mobile devices provides
consumers with a virtual control panel to function
in an increasingly automated world, allowing them
to control everything from thermostats to security
systems through mobile applications. Robotic
vacuum cleaners and pets are already available for
the home, with automated care-givers not too far
behind.16
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Tomorrows Possibilities
Automation, currently confined to provisioning and management of the IT infrastructure, will next expand to IT processes.
For example, developers working in multiple locations today must alert each other
when they commit code to a repository. It can then take days to compile the source
code and create a build that can be tested before it is deployed. A fully automated
process would algorithmically create new builds, test them and then return them to
developers with a list of defects or enhancements for the next build. These levels of
continuous integration and deployment are needed to deliver market-facing applications quickly enough to define and dominate new markets.
Moving beyond IT into business process automation will take longer and require
improved skills in business process modeling to accurately replicate manual
processes in software.
A further step is automating interactive repetitive services, such as answering
questions from customers and conducting routine transactions. Early versions of
this capability can be seen in the automated wealth management and robo-advisors
at some of our clients in the financial services industry. If this could be extended
to service processes in every company providing
automated, intelligent answers to customers the
benefits of lower prices and higher quality would be
immense.
Over time, the increased use of machine learning (the use of algorithms that can
learn from experience) and predictive analytics will allow these robots to take
on more and more complex tasks. For instance, many news aggregation websites
use automatic authoring tools to deliver customized news updates to readers,
while programmatic direct ad buying provides advertisers a guaranteed number of
impressions from consumers on publisher sites.
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Automation enabled by hardware virtualization allows administrators to reconfigure networks and change security or service policies with a mouse click rather than
visiting a server rack. It reduces management costs and errors while improving
security through automated, error-free configuration and policy-based, real-time
responses to threats.
SERVICE LEVEL
ENHANCEMENT
IMPROVED PREDICTABILITY
& AVAILABILITY
SERVICES
SCALABILITY
FLEXIBILITY
Source: Autonomics: Mastering Self-Learning and Self-Healing, Cognizant Technology Solutions, March 2014.
Figure 7
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Quick Take
Advice for Software-Defined Everything/Automation Everywhere
Automate
IT infrastructure provisioning
and management first, as it is typically the
most mature organizational area, delivers
the greatest short-term cost savings and is
essential to driving business agility.
To
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SECTION 6:
API-Driven Ecosystems
Delivering the Network Effect for Enterprises
Todays Reality
As software eats the world,17 APIs are becoming
a core corporate resource, as they allow applications to communicate with other systems.
The power of APIs lies in their speed and ease of
use, compared with the brittle system-to-system
interfaces that businesses have historically used to
connect applications to each other or to back-end
systems.
On a tactical level, businesses tap APIs from business partners and vendors to
enable rapid, easily maintained connectivity among an ever-changing mix of data,
services and devices (see Figure 8). They also publish their own APIs to create
interoperable ecosystems with customers, and to enable business partners and
other third-parties to connect with their systems and applications. A leading
discount drug retailer, for example, uses APIs to allow users of third-party mobile
applications to print photos directly from their smartphones at their local store.
This not only drives revenue from photo printing services but also draws customers
into stores for possible additional purchases.18
On a more strategic level, easy-to-use APIs can turn a
business into a platform from which it as well as thirdparty developers can generate revenue (see Figure 9,
next page). The platform economy spans organizational
boundaries, fueling innovation from internal business
groups and trusted partners. APIs from Salesforce.com,
for example, allow third-party developers to write applications that increase the value of its namesake customer
relationship management system. Googles APIs allow
developers to tap into Google services such as its maps,
resulting in the funneling of users and ad revenue to
Google. APIs generate nearly half of the annual $3 billion
in income at Salesforce.com, and close to 90% for the
Expedia travel website.19
Application
Programming
Interface
Companys App
Tomorrows Possibilities
The importance of APIs increases with the sale of
every smartphone, wearable fitness tracker and smart
appliance or industrial device. Each of these devices
instantly generates data about its status, communicating its owners wants, needs and behavior. The metadata
generated enables organizations, or their partners, to
derive and apply insights (see Section 1 on the insightsdriven enterprise, page 6). This may be as straightforward
as offering homeowners insurance to an auto insurance
policy holder who just changed addresses, or as complex
Figure 8
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23
OVER
%
50
of whom
75%
said their
company has
an API strategy
API
50%
OF MEDIA/
TELECOM
COMPANIES
33%
OF FINANCIAL
SERVICES
ORGANIZATIONS
70%
of organizations are
integrating about 20 apps.
OF THOSE MAKING
$10 BILLION OR
MORE IN REVENUE:
50%
are integrating
100 or more apps.
Figure 9
as tweaking the fuel flow in a jet engine running too hot for peak efficiency. APIs
can deliver anything from the seemingly simple Log in with Facebook button that
makes it easier for new customers to register at your site, to more complex services,
such as receiving a real-time video security feed from home.
Almost any business with data or expertise (including business rules embedded
within legacy applications) must master the disciplines required to develop, secure,
share, use and monetize APIs. They will become even more essential and strategic
tools in organizations push for market share and revenue as the number and
variety of applications, devices and data types grow.
APIs also ease the move to micro-services architectures by replacing monolithic Web
applications with services that can be deployed and changed as needed. They slash
the time required to integrate organizational systems with those from a business
service provider to drive joint revenue. An example is the applications interoperability that allows United Airlines passengers to book a ride with Uber from within
Uniteds mobile app.20
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Quick Take
Advice for API-Driven Ecosystems
21
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SECTION 7:
Digital Sourcing
For Your Next App or Next Employee,
Look to the Cloud
Todays Reality
Between the rise of global services and open source software, enterprise sourcing
models have changed more in the last decade than in all of the previous decades of
the information age.
However, those changes pale beside the shifts that businesses
will make to meet tomorrows demands for low-cost, highquality and agile delivery to accommodate, if not exceed, the
needs of digital business. Fewer organizations can afford the
massive internal IT staffs or proprietary hardware that sits on
the balance sheet whether theyre used or not. Nor can they
watch competitors grab market share while HR seeks specialized skills with the latest data query language or IT deploys
the servers needed to deliver responses to real-time queries.
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27
47%
39%
will release
internal tools
and projects as
open source
plan to start
own external
OSS project
53%
expect to
reduce barriers
to employee
participation in
OSS
Source: 2015: The Future of Open Source, Blackduck Software, April 15, 2015.
Figure 11
manage this mix, many IT organizations are struggling to become honest brokers
of internal and external services, expert at assessing their own capabilities and proactively looking outside for faster, less expensive or more effective solutions.
Tomorrows Possibilities
With growing levels of education and broadband penetration, the global pool of
independent, highly skilled workers will grow rapidly. According to McKinsey & Co.,
up to 540 million people worldwide could benefit from online talent platforms by
2025, boosting global GDP by $2.7 trillion.24 Advances in analytics and machine
learning will provide businesses with increasingly rich real-time insights into the
skills and qualifications of this talent pool. Declining costs for cloud-based services
(Amazon Web services cut its price 8% from Oct. 2013 to Dec. 2014, while Google
and Microsoft dropped prices 5% to 6%25) and new business models such as crowdfunding26 will help collapse barriers to entry for new competitors.
Organizations should look for:
The provision of more IT and business services over the cloud, with increased
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Tapping global talent reduces costs and improves quality. Walmarts use of the
Kaggle crowdsourced platform to analyze pricing strategies led not only to useful
insights but also the hiring of specialists that the retailer might otherwise have
overlooked.27 We used our Crowd-on-Cloud crowdsourcing solution to field-test
a mobile financial education application for global financial services giant UBS.
Seasoned staff in different locations tested the
application on a variety of devices for performance,
functionality, security, content and user interface
parameters. This helped boost the applications
performance while speeding turnaround and
reducing costs.28
Skilled local workers can help organizations
tailor their products, marketing and business
practices to a new market, and quickly ramp staff
up or down without committing to full-time staff.
Crowdsourcing is also an opportunity to apprentice
or audition staff before hiring them.
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Quick Take
Advice for Digital Sourcing
Technologies
A loosely-coupled
architecture, in
which applications
and services are
not tied to specific
hardware, makes
it easier to switch
suppliers of either IT
or business process
services
Organizations
must
understand local labor
laws and how they
affect how this distributed workforce is paid,
the benefits they receive,
and who owns the code
and other intellectual
property they generate.
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As
Creative organizations
should tap the power
of social platforms to
allow peers to rank each
others skills, much as
renters (and guests) rate
each other on Airbnb. The tools to automatically, and accurately, assess and verify such
skills are not yet widely available, but this is
an area IT organizations should monitor.
access management, can ease the use of distributed systems through single sign-on, as well
as enabling logging and analytics. A looselycoupled architecture, in which applications
and services are not tied to specific hardware,
makes it easier to switch suppliers of either
IT or business process services (see Section
5 on software-defined everything/automation
everywhere, page 19).
These new staffing models can fail if IT cannot properly evaluate and verify the
identities, skills and experience of contributors, or find the required gig economy
skills. Lapses in these areas can cause waste, delay and even security risks.
Businesses must educate just-in-time staff on their priorities, cultures and goals,
and battle reluctance to trust unknown outsiders with corporate data or code. This
is where a micro-services architecture can help by providing standalone test environments that do not expose core systems to vulnerabilities, while pervasive and
self-protecting assets defend against attacks that penetrate the corporate core.
(Learn more in Section 3 on pervasive security, page 12.)
On the infrastructure front, use of the cloud especially combined with traditional
on-premise IT may trigger complex licensing, access management, data privacy
and security issues. Some legacy systems will be too difficult or expensive to move
to the cloud, requiring costly integration or the movement of large amounts of data
to and from the cloud. Local privacy and security regulations may make it impossible
or cost-prohibitive to move some operations or data among cloud providers.
Footnotes
1
Code Halo thinking describes the art and science of distilling and applying
meaning from the digital code that surrounds people, process, organizations and
devices, or things. To learn more, read Code Rules: A Playbook for Managing at
the Crossroads, Cognizant Technology Solutions, June 2013, http://www.cognizant.
com/Futureofwork/Documents/code-rules.pdf, and the book, Code Halos: How
the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of
Business, by Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring, published by John Wiley &
Sons. April 2014, http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118862074.
html.
Greg Bensinger, Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It, Wall
Street Journal, Jan. 17, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/17/amazonwants-to-ship-your-package-before-you-buy-it/.
Laurie Sullivan, Disney Finds Emotion Next Targeting Metric For Advertising,
Marketing, MediaPost, Oct. 2015, http://www.mediapost.com/publications/
article/259739/disney-finds-emotion-next-targeting-metric-for-adv.html.
Kashmir Hill, How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father
Did, Forbes, Feb. 6, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/
how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/.
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Chris Morris, More than 20,000 Kids Just Got Hacked, Fortune, Nov. 30, 2015,
http://fortune.com/2015/11/30/vtech-hacking-children-data/; Whitney Meers, Hello
Barbie, Goodbye Privacy? Hacker Raises Security Concerns, Huffington Post, Nov.
30, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hello-barbie-security-concerns_565
c4921e4b072e9d1c24d22.
10
Gartner Says 4.9 Billion Connected Things Will Be in Use in 2015, Gartner press
release, Nov. 11, 2014, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2905717.
11
12
Kim Zetter, Hacker Can Send Fatal Dose to Hospital Drug Pump, Wired Magazine,
June, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/06/hackers-can-send-fatal-doses-hospital-drug-pumps/.
13
14
Amanda Kooser, Smart Shoes Vibrate You in the Right Direction, CNet, July
29, 2014, http://www.cnet.com/news/bluetooth-smart-shoes-vibrate-you-in-theright-direction/.
15
16
Timothy Torres, Are You Satisfied With Your Care? New Gentle Caregiver Robot
from Japan Enters Experimental Stage, Tech Times, March 2015, http://www.
techtimes.com/articles/36950/20150303/satisfied-care-caregiver-robots-japan.
htm.
17
18
19
Pratap Ranade, Devin Scannell, Brian Stafford, Ready for APIs? Three Steps
to Unlock the Data Economys Most Promising Channel, Forbes, Jan. 7, 2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mckinsey/2014/01/07/ready-for-apis-three-stepsto-unlock-the-data-economys-most-promising-channel/.
20
Dennis Schaal, Uber Secures a Top Spot in Uniteds Mobile Apps in Business
Travel Push, SKift, Aug. 20, 2014, http://skift.com/2014/08/20/uber-secures-aspot-in-uniteds-mobile-apps-in-business-travel-push/.
21
22
JavaScript Object Notation is an open standard format that uses human-readable text to transmit data objects consisting of attributevalue pairs. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON.
23
Arun Sundararajan, The Gig Economy Is Coming. What Will It Mean for Work?
The Guardian, July 25, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/
jul/26/will-we-get-by-gig-economy.
24
25
Cloud Computing Price War, Only the Beginning, Cloud Tweaks, January 2015,
http://cloudtweaks.com/2015/01/cloud-computing-price-war-beginning/.
26
27
Walmart: The Big Data Skills Crisis and Recruiting Analytics Talent, Forbes, July
6, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/07/06/walmart-the-bigdata-skills-crisis-and-recruiting-analytics-talent/#2715e4857a0b153185cd247d.
28
29
Credits
This white paper was researched and written by the Cognizant Global Technology Office (GTO).
Providing key technology trend insights and analyses were Joseph Tobolski, GTO Vice-President and
U.S. Chief Technology Officer, as well as Gerhard Koch, Prabhakaran Sabhapathy, Uma Ramachandran,
M. Murali and Mahesh Balaji, who function as business unit CTOs and play key roles within the
Cognizant Technology Labs organization.
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About Cognizant
Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information
technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the worlds leading companies build
stronger businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey
(U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction,
technology innovation, deep industry and business process
expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies
the future of work. With over 100 development and delivery
centers worldwide and approximately 219,300 employees as of
September 30, 2015, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100,
the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500 and
is ranked among the top performing and fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at www.cognizant.com or
follow us on Twitter: Cognizant.
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