Managing Across Borders

Volume 18, Number 3 Article by J Ramachandran and Pranav Garg September, 2006

Managing Across Borders :

In recent years, Cognizant Technology Solutions has grown spectacularly to become a member of the ‘Tier One’ IT companies in India. Initially set up as the captive arm of Dun and Bradstreet Corporation of USA, Cognizant has gradually morphed into an independent entity providing IT services to other customers too. To understand the reasons for Cognizant’s impressive performance, J Ramachandran and Pranav Garg spoke to Lakshmi Narayanan and Francisco D’Souza, the company’s President and Chief Operating Officer, respectively.

Lakshmi Narayanan and Francisco D’Souza believe that what distinguishes Cognizant from other companies are its people and the experience that the company provides to its customers. Most of the company’s investments therefore are in its people – keeping a deeper bench, encouraging people to try out experiments and products, and acquiring domain knowledge. They discuss the company’s history, the principles that Cognizant inherited from D&B, its parent company and what distinguishes Cognizant’s strategy and organisational model from that of other Indian majors. One such practice is delivering a fixed margin of around 20% to the investors and pumping the surplus into future technologies. An important innovation at Cognizant has been the two-in-a-box organisational model. The duo provides insights on the underlying philosophy, implementation and benefits of the model, which is empowering and customer centric, unlike the traditional ‘passing the baton’ geography centric model. They also discuss how the culture of meritocracy and robust performance management and incentives systems work cohesively to reinforce the model. Finally, they offer their prognosis on the future of the IT industry – the increasing atomisation of processes, the issue of solving business problems for clients; and discuss the implications of these developments for Cognizant.

Reprint No 06303