Navigating the Digital Age: What senior leaders worldwide have learned from pushing the boundaries of change.

Cognizanti
Part II
Navigating the
Digital Age
What senior leaders worldwide have
learned from pushing the boundaries
of change.
VOLUME 11 • 2018

Cognizanti is an annual journal published by Cognizant. Our
mission is to provide unique insights, emerging strategies and
proven best practices that globally-minded companies can use in
their quest for business and IT performance excellence.
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The Cognizanti Team
Publisher: Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice-President, Strategy & Marketing
Editor-in-Chief: Alan Alper, Vice-President, Corporate Marketing
Editor: Rajeshwer Chigullapalli, Associate Director, Corporate Marketing
Thought Leadership
Program Management: April Vadnais, Associate Director, Corporate Marketing
Art Director: Jason Feuilly, Director, Corporate Brand/Design
Design/Print Production: Diana Fitter, Contributing Art Director
Contributing Editor: Mary Brandel, Contributing Editor
Columnist: Bruce J. Rogow, Independent Advisor
Digital Distribution: Nikhil Narayanan, Senior Manager, Social Media Marketing
Editorial Advisory Board
Kaushik Bhaumik, Executive Vice-President,
Global Leader, Healthcare Business Unit
Irene Sandler, Vice-President Marketing,
Cognizant Accelerator
Mats Johard, Associate Vice-President, Cognizant Business
Consulting, Strategy & Transformation
Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, Executive Director, India
Anand Chandramouli, Director,
Cognizant Primary Research
Ben Pring, Vice-President,
Cognizant Center for the Future of Work
Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus, CIO Magazine
VOLUME 11 • 2018
An annual journal produced by Cognizant
Cognizanti

5 Editor’s Note
The Global Mosaic That Is Digital
Alan Alper, Cognizant
7 The First Word
Unfurling the Blockchain Blueprint
Rajeshwer Chigullapalli, Cognizant
13 Insurance/Health & Wellness
You Don’t Join Us; We Join You
Steve Roberts, Aetna Health
21 Banking and Financial Services
Customer Centricity through Collaboration:
Mizuho’s Path to Digital
Nobuhisa Abe, Mizuho Financial Group, Inc.
27 Commentary
Hands Up For Talent
Gary Beach, CIO Magazine
33 Educational Services
Building a Global Community of Connected
Students, from Classroom to Career
Andrew Barkla, IDP Education
39 Healthcare
Transforming Physician and Patient
Engagement at LifeBridge Health
Jonathan Ringo, Sinai Hospital of Baltimore
Jonathan Thierman, LifeBridge Health
and Northwest Hospital
Jonathan Moles, LifeBridge Health
47 Manufacturing, Consumer Goods & Retail
Asian Paints: The Digital Odyssey
of a Serial Reinventor
Harish Lade, Asian Paints
55 The Last Word
Lessons From the Digital Frontier
Bruce J. Rogow, IT Odyssey
Table of Contents

Cognizanti • 5Cognizanti • 5
The Global Mosaic That Is Digital
Look around. Our personal and professional lives are increasingly conducted through a screen,
app or voice interface. And this phenomenon of relying on digital approaches to get things done
will only accelerate, globally.
That’s why we dedicate this issue of Cognizanti to the digital movement taking shape worldwide.
We continue our exploration of digital through the eyes of practitioners – namely, our clients –
who are pursuing digital that truly matters in ways that advance their market leadership, both
regionally and globally.
In the pages that follow, we present essays written by senior leaders at Aetna, Asian Paints, IDP
Education, LifeBridge and Mizuho, whose ambition is to steer their organizations into a brighter
digital tomorrow. Notably, the authors include doctors, a CEO, an innovation leader and of course
IT executives, underscoring the wide array of business and technology influencers who drive
digital strategy and execution.
From Aetna, you’ll hear how the company is seeking to transform from a health insurer to a
wellness company. Mizuho, the Japanese mega-bank, explains how it is applying blockchain, big
data analytics and AI, along with fintech partnerships, to deliver customer-oriented innovation
to relevant areas of its global business. You’ll learn how IDP Education is working hard to extend
its support for customers to every stage of their international education journey and beyond, with
personalized, relevant content.
LifeBridge, a major U.S. regional health provider network, reveals how it’s applying new-age con-
sumer-style digital engagement to enhance physician communications and patient care coordina-
tion. Lastly, Asian Paints – the third largest provider of paint in the Asia-Pacific region – presents
a colorful canvas of design thinking, behavioral and data sciences and modern enterprise systems,
detailing the company’s pursuit of leadership in the paint-as-a-service and home decor markets.
Sprinkled in, as always, are commentaries that offer insight into major developments that drive
our digital age. We open with a fact-based look at blockchain’s slow but steady move from the lab
to a mainstream force in enterprise computing. Veteran IT industry commentator Gary Beach
offers advice on filling in the talent gap that threatens the entire digital movement. Bruce Rogow
punctuates the issue with a cautionary tale and lessons learned, crafted from interviews with top
senior business and IT leaders who have come up short in in their initial digital initiatives. Bruce’s
advice: Do a better job of anticipating factors that conspire to undermine even the best efforts.
We hope you enjoy and benefit from the views shared by your colleagues and our commentators.
And if you’d like your own digital journey featured in an upcoming issue of Cognizanti, or in our
Digital Perspectives app (available both at the Apple App Store and Google Play on smartphones
and tablets), contact me at Alan.Alper@cognizant.com. You can also share your point of view on
our Cognizant Connections e-community.
Editor’s Note

Cognizanti • 7Cognizanti • 7
Organizations worldwide see
blockchain as a significant
force for their business and
industry, and are well on their
way to developing a strategy,
with an eye on reducing
operating costs, automating
key business processes
and enhancing trust and
transparency, our latest
study reveals.
As the whipsaw volatility of Bitcoin’s
cryptocurrency simultaneously excites and
generates fear among digitally-minded
investors, a movement is quietly taking
hold at organizations worldwide: applying
Bitcoin’s underlying technology – blockchain
– to resolve the essential business challenges
of trust and transactional integrity that have
vexed e-commerce decision makers for a
better part of this millennium.
While still in the “prove it” phase, many
business and technology leaders worldwide
see blockchain’s distributed ledger technology
and built-in encryption capabilities on private
and public networks as fundamental to
enabling virtual business – from R&D, supply
chain management and assembly, through
sales, distribution and after-market support –
to take on many of the same characteristics as
physical business by essentially guaranteeing
that all trading parties are who they say they
are, and enforcing their contractual obliga-
tions. And via the technology’s encryption
and immutable records, they also hope to
keep out prying eyes and ne’er-do-wells who
seek to inflict harm on the digital value
chains proliferating throughout the globe.
Our recent global study of 3,000-plus senior
executives found that a vast majority see
blockchain as critical to reducing operating
costs by allowing their organization to
plug-and-play on shared IT infrastructure
(private and public); automating key business
processes with smart contract technology; and
pursuing business opportunities that emerge
from new collaborative ecosystems worldwide.
In fact, an overwhelming majority of our
respondents across banking and financial
services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare
and insurance, and spanning IT, operations,
innovation and functional business roles in
Asia-Pac, Europe and North America, see
blockchain as a significant force that will
impact their company (92%) and industry
(86%) in the years to come. They believe
blockchain will empower their organization
to reimagine and reinvent their business.
Unfurling the
Blockchain Blueprint
By Rajeshwer Chigullapalli
First Word

Cognizanti • 98
Given the nascent stage of the technology,
most organizations are carefully testing
the waters with proofs of concept (PoCs),
pilots and prototypes. Choice of platform
also reveals an interesting mix. A majority
of respondents indicated interest in permis-
sioned (40%) and open (37%) blockchain
networks, while the choice of private
blockchain networks garnered a small
percentage. This is indicative of the fact
that organizations realize that the value
of blockchain is in supporting multi-party
ecosystems, not internal operations. The
preference for closed or permissioned
platforms in their current projects seems
to stem from a lack of trust across existing
ecosystems, with half of the surveyed respon-
dents saying they have only a “medium level”
of trust in their partners (see Figure 2).
Hurdles Along the Path
Change management is critical to embracing
the collaborative culture that is core to
blockchain’s shared technology and operating
models. This appears to be a work in progress,
according to respondents. Legacy systems
integration is another key challenge that
respondents are contending with via a mix
of approaches that include outright system
replacements, workarounds or hybrid models.
Topping the chart of internal barriers to
blockchain adoption are understanding
blockchain and relevant use cases that
demonstrate business benefits, followed by
communicating blockchain’s business value
to key decision makers. External roadblocks,
meanwhile, include perceived concerns about
privacy and security, scalability, standards
and interoperability.
Many see blockchain’s ability to unlock
business opportunities in new markets (53%),
service lines (56%) and customer segments
(52%). Their rationale: Blockchain provides
the technological wherewithal to stay ahead
of the competition and mitigate the threat
of digital disruption. They estimate that in
the short term, blockchain will generate cost
savings of 2.5%-plus, and lead to revenue
growth of 5% to 10%.
Treading Cautiously
The blockchain adoption journey is well
underway, with most organizations deep into
defining a blockchain strategy, finalizing
budgets and organizing teams. Most respon-
dents estimate their blockchain budgets to
equal 2.5% to 10% of total IT spending and
report that they have established teams (of
six to 15 people) dedicated to blockchain
initiatives. Respondents expect to encounter
skill gaps arising from blockchain’s growing
impact and have drawn up action plans that
combine traditional training and innovation
lab approaches.
When asked about their strategy, respondents
revealed that they are embracing a multi-
faceted approach (see Figure 1). In order of
priority, the components include identifying
innovation opportunities; assessing impact on
existing systems; evaluating blockchain along
with other emerging technologies such as
Internet of Things (IoT), advanced analytics
and robotic process automation; and identify-
ing processes to which smart contracts can be
applied.
Paradoxically, despite recognizing the
potential for breakthrough innovations, only
12% cite altered or new business models as
a strategy component of their move-forward
thinking. This is further corroborated by the
majority view that blockchain is unlikely to
affect their current operating models (47%)
or fuel new operating models (13%).
Top Strategy Components
Respondents were asked to identify the components that
make up their blockchain strategy.
Base: 3,236 respondents. Multiple responses allowed.
Figure 1
Forming dedicated teams to identify use cases
and opportunities for innovation
Implementing internally to assess benefits and
Implications of blockchain for existing systems
Assessing the impact of blockchain
alongside emerging technologies such as IoT,
advanced analytics and robotics
Identifying processes that can be improved
through the use of smart contracts
Understanding regulatory implications of
moving processes to blockchain
Working with industry partners/consortia to
identify areas to focus on or avoid
Enabling new or extended business models
based on blockchain platforms
Replacing current systems
with blockchain solutions
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%
Organizations realize that the value of blockchain is in
supporting multiparty ecosystems, not internal operations.
More Trust Needed
Respondents were asked to indicate the level of trust they
had in their ecosystem partners.
Base: 3,236 respondents.
Figure 2
Medium
High
Low
Don’t know

10 Cognizanti • 11
The Road Ahead
Organizations embracing blockchain would
do well to create a cohesive strategy that
positions the distributed ledger technology
as radically transformative rather than as
just another architectural layer. Strategy,
therefore, should be focused on developing a
blueprint, generating top management buy-in
and spotting ways to create new approaches
for interacting and transacting.
Given that material benefits of blockchain
can only be unlocked through shared business
and technology models, organizations must
learn to work with partners on developing
and adopting mutually agreeable standards
that become the foundation for collaborative
ecosystems. Learning to play in an environ-
ment comprised of shared infrastructure and
data is critical to unlocking value.
Other critical success factors include building
cross-functional blockchain project teams
that transcend IT, setting clear goals around
business issues and objectives to be achieved,
iterating and learning on the go without
waiting until costs and benefits are clear,
staying flexible and adapting to the likely
business-technology challenges that will
occur as blockchain takes root (such as inte-
grating legacy with blockchain platforms),
and experimenting with a variety of networks,
both permissioned and permissionless.
Perhaps most critically, organizations need
to use business needs and desires as their
yardstick to guide planning and success
metrics, rather than being influenced by the
blockchain buzz emanating from the crypto-
currency trading craziness that has even the
most savvy investors perplexed.
Author
Rajeshwer Chigullapalli is an Associate Director within Cognizant’s thought leadership
program. He has over 25 years of experience in the areas of business research and
publishing. Previously, he was the Head of ICFAI University Press and Chief Editor,
SPG Media, India. He can be reached at Rajeshwer.Chigullapalli@cognizant.com.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the team at Cognizant’s Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Consulting
Practice for their valuable contributions to this article, including Fletcher McCraw, Partnerships and Alliance
Lead, and Lata Varghese, Assistant Vice-President at Cognizant, who oversees the company’s Blockchain
and Distributed Ledger Practice. For more blockchain insights, and to read our industry-specific reports, visit
https://www.cognizant.com/blockchain.

Cognizanti • 13
The success of a new
healthcare business model
means offering features,
functionality and value that
consumers find indispensable
— delivered by Aetna Health.
Not too long ago, most of us didn’t have
electronic navigation in our cars. We’d
unfold a map or ask a gas station attendant
for directions. Now, we won’t get in our cars
for even short trips without activating some
form of GPS capability or launching an app
telling us which lane to be in to get off at the
correct exit. Many of us wonder how we lived
without those apps.
That’s the same level of experience and reli-
ability we strive to deliver to our members at
Aetna Health with our health and wellness
management platform. It’s our challenge,
and our opportunity, to build solutions for
needs and desires our members can’t quite
articulate yet – just like we didn’t know we
needed maps on our phones. Our hope is to
create tools, especially a new mobile app,
that members will use as frequently and
effortlessly as they do their digital maps,
music and social media apps.
We will reach this goal in phases, and as we
hit our milestones, we’ll also help our parent
company, Aetna, transform from a health
insurer to a wellness company. Technolo-
gies such as analytics and Internet of Things
(IoT), as well as our engagement strategies,
will help us meet our members where they
are and deliver just what they need, whether
it’s sending a reminder to refill their prescrip-
tion when they walk into a pharmacy or
issuing a reward for reaching 10,000 steps.
Our ultimate goal is to significantly reduce
healthcare costs by helping our members get
and stay healthy through our effective care
and wellness tools (see Figure 1, next page).
You Don’t Join Us;
We Join You
By Steve Roberts
Insurance/Health & Wellness
Our ultimate goal is
to significantly reduce
healthcare costs by
helping our members get
and stay healthy through
our effective care and
wellness tools.

Cognizanti • 1514
Integrating the Mobile
Experience into Members’
Daily Lives
We engage our members through our Aetna
Health platform, which delivers personal-
ized health advice, health tools and trackers,
and the ability to connect their fitness and
medical devices and communicate with
coaches.
Our CareEngine platform powers the per-
sonalized insights offered by Aetna Health.
CareEngine digests lagging and real-time
data from medical claims, doctor’s office visits
and medical adherence, such as whether a
member fills or refills a prescription. Members
can also share data about their daily activities
through various wearable and in-home
devices.
Using thousands of clinical rules and
analytics, the CareEngine platform
sorts members into appropriate health
management programs so they get the right
support at the right time. Our programs
include lifestyle and wellness coaching, as
well as management for chronic diseases like
diabetes.
CareEngine continually generates member-
specific insights, such as “Care Consider-
ations,” personalized health alerts sent to
members and their care managers and health
coaches. The platform also generates daily
worklists for our 3,000 care managers so they
can personally follow up with members by
phone or e-mail (see Quick Take, next page).
Delivery Across the Continuum with
a Holistic Member Focus
Aetna Health combines the human touch with a variety of digital tools
to give members the personalized and context-aware advice and
information they need to reach their health goals.
Source: Aetna Inc.
Figure 1
ENGAGEMENT
PLATFORM
MOBILE
DECISION
SUPPORT
ADVOCACY
CONCIERGE
High-acuity case management
and caregiver support
Integrated lifestyle-condition
management
Promoting a
healthier
lifestyle
Predictive
modelling
Member
impactability
Omnichannel
engagement
Local and community
partnership
Living with
a condition
Having a high
risk pregnancy and
neonatal ICU stay
Needing advanced
situational
support
POWERED BY:
Actively Managing Member Health
with a Human Touch
Quick Take
At Aetna, we use a lot of technology to
help members meet their health goals. Our
CareEngine platform stratifies high-risk
members, identifies the best health
management programs for them, and personal-
izes the information they see on the care and
wellness platform. Members can upload their
own data from a fitness band or home health
device to earn incentives. We offer multiple
communication channels to support member
preferences.
Yet to help members incorporate healthier
behaviors into their lifestyle, we must uncover
their motivations for improving their health,
help them understand what they can do to
reach their goals and identify the best way to
encourage them to act. Our care manager-
coaches build a rapport with individual
members to understand these factors on a
personal level.
Coaches seek to learn more about what’s
driving individual members to change their
behaviors, such as staying in shape to live
longer so they can see their grandchildren
grow up. Understanding members’ motiva-
tions helps the coach add a human touch to
the individualized information and analysis
that CareEngine provides. Coaches can
understand members’ personalities and stress
points in ways even the best analytics can’t.
Coaches and members can check in daily via
phone, e-mail and the Aetna Health Care and
Wellness platform. Our technology provides
information and insights to augment the
encouragement and support coaches provide.
As a result, members tell us, “I never feel
alone,” as they work toward a goal or manage
a chronic condition or rehab an injury. The
human touch is a key factor in keeping our
members healthy.

Aetna Health Experience
Our member credo is “you don’t join us; we
join you” – and that means serving members
through their smartphones. As our clients see
a growing reliance among their employees on
their phones, they’re asking for mobile health
management and wellness tools. While our
members can access the Aetna Health Care
and Wellness platform online, we wanted to
rethink how engagement could be delivered
through mobile.
The Aetna Health mobile app focuses on the
end-to-end experience because it signals a
radical shift in how we can engage members
and make our services a constant in their
lives. After conducting extensive research
and focus groups to find out what members
wanted, we determined that the app would
initially offer recommended health actions,
coach messages, digital coaching, and health
assessments and incentives, all personalized
for individual members.
Although it doesn’t sound revolutionary, we
had to focus a lot of energy on ease of use and
the member’s experience with the tool. We
addressed these questions from a member’s
perspective:
OO How does it connect with my life?
OO How will it always be available to me?
OO How does it stay smart about me to tell me
what to do?
OO How does it track all data associated with
me that I am willing to share?
OO How do I customize it to make it more
personal to me?
OO How do I use it to get to a real outcome?
OO What is my overall end-to-end experience?
We take our “you don’t join us; we join
you” credo literally with our mobile app.
Through the app, we want to issue offers and
reminders that make sense in the context
of where individual members are and what
they’re doing. If the app knows a member is
in a pharmacy, that’s a great time to send a
prescription refill reminder. One challenge
will be keeping the app integrated with the
web platform; another will be achieving the
right balance between the app’s proactive
offerings and its responsiveness to members.
We can incorporate dozens of fitness
wearables and other devices into CareEngine
to power the Aetna Health app. Because
Aetna partners with Apple, we are also
tightly integrated with Apple devices and
can create features that span that company’s
devices and capabilities to engage our
members.
In tandem with the digital mechanics of
an engagement experience, we continu-
ously refine how to help members effectively
engage with care managers to meet personal
goals, such as remembering to regularly take
medicine for a chronic disease or meeting
weight loss and fitness targets. Cognizant
works with us on a variety of key member-
facing systems and business processes,
including rewards and incentives customized
The Aetna Health mobile app signals a radical shift in
how we can engage members and make our services
a constant in their lives.
Aetna Health is a differentiator for Aetna, a technology
enablement tool that signals to our clients and the
industry that we need to work together to find new ways
of improving care.
for our members. One person may be willing
to walk an extra thousand steps for a gift
card; another may prefer to accumulate
“hearts” or points in a competition with
other members; and another may just want
help organizing goals so there’s some activity
she can accomplish every day.
We must personalize member experiences
because different age groups have different
needs. A relatively healthy 20-year-old
may want fitness and wellness tips, while a
50-year-old with a chronic health condition
is likely to be more concerned about
receiving medical advice or what to do if
they forgot to take their medicine. Again, it’s
about us addressing member needs within the
context of where they are emotionally and
physically.
The Bottom Line
With our app and engagement strategies,
Aetna Health is positioned to meet our
clients’ health management needs. Employers
and health plans expect population and care
management services to ensure they have
healthier employees and members who won’t
need expensive health services or who use
fewer services because we help them manage
their conditions effectively.
Similarly, Aetna realized we must do
things dramatically differently to success-
fully transition from a health insurer to a
wellness company. That’s our response to
the healthcare industry’s changing reim-
bursement and value models, which will
reward quality of care over quantity. In that
world, we have to find better ways to engage
members than handing them a clipboard and
pen at the doctor’s office.
That’s a huge mind and cultural shift.
Aetna Health is a differentiator for Aetna, a
technology enablement tool that signals to our
clients and the industry that we need to work
together to find new ways of improving care.
As we and Aetna continue to evolve toward
serving consumers, we’ll need to continue
investing in delivering best-in-class service
advocacy. Meeting our members where they
are means recognizing they have many needs
that affect their ability to manage their
health conditions.

Cognizanti • 1918
How will we measure the success of our
Aetna Health platform in such a complex
world? We measure healthy days, the
adoption rate for our services and, most
importantly, whether adoption impacts
medical costs. Coming full circle, our ability
to engage members and keep them engaged
will likely affect adoption rates.
We’ll continue to push the adoption curve,
prove the concept and work with partners to
create and sustain members’ motivation to
use the app. We will focus on the experience
to make sure the app remains easy and simple
to use.
Our nirvana would be for members to use the
app on their home screen, just like texting
and e-mail or their favorite navigation app,
blending it right into their lifestyles. When
we hear our members ask, “How did we ever
live without this?” we’ll count that as one
more major measure of success.
Author
Steve Roberts leads an Aetna Health technology center of excellence as Head of
Population Health-IT that builds and maintains consumer, provider, government and
multi-payer software solutions focused on our health and wellness platform. The center
of excellence includes development, architecture, business analysts, quality assurance,
and support and operations for Active Health Management (AHM), providing
actionable insights, meaningful engagement and comprehensive care management.
Steve has been with Aetna since 2013.
With more than 20 years of experience in healthcare IT, Steve has held senior executive
positions within Henry Schein, Allscripts, GE Healthcare and McKesson. He holds
a degree in business administration from Augustana College and an MBA from
Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management. Steve can be reached at
RobertsS5@Aetna.com | www.linkedin.com/in/stevenmroberts/.
Our nirvana would be for members to use the app
on their home screen, just like texting and e-mail or
their favorite navigation app, blending it right into
their lifestyles. When we hear our members ask,
“How did we ever live without this?” we’ll count that
as one more major measure of success.

Cognizanti • 21
This Japanese financial
services firm has achieved
global digital megabank
status by leveraging the latest
tools, developing fintech
partnerships, nurturing a
collaborative culture and
disseminating customer-
oriented innovations to
relevant areas of the
business.
Mizuho Financial Group is a large Japanese
financial services organization with $1.8
trillion in assets under management. Our
group’s business is spread across the globe,
with a presence in 38 regions, and boasts of
a robust customer base, fortified by a deep
understanding of our customers, developed
on the strength of a rich information base
built over time.
A few years ago, however, we realized that
sitting on our historical strengths wouldn’t
be enough to remain a leader in the future.
We therefore began modernizing our retail
banking group by focusing on technologi-
cal innovation brought about by advanced
digital technologies.
We started with a strategy whose objective
was to enhance customer service and
establish Mizuho as a digital-age megabank.
The main technologies we chose to drive
our digital transformation strategy were
blockchain, big data analytics and AI. The
strategy’s success pivoted around partner-
ships with fintechs and other vendors, as well
as the establishment of a business division
whose sole purpose was to develop and drive
innovation across the group’s businesses.
Until recently, established banking regula-
tions1
limited financial institutions’ fintech
voting rights to 5%. When this barrier was
dismantled in 2014, the door was opened to
innovation driven by new-age technologies
developed by digitally-native companies.
This regulatory change empowered financial
institutions to invest in fintechs in order to
set up financial IT companies to advance
their digital transformation initiatives.
On the economic front, our topline strategy
was built on a healthy spread between lending
and deposit rates. A decades-long ultra-low
interest rate regime and reduced demand
Customer Centricity
through Collaboration:
Mizuho’s Path to Digital
By Nobuhisa Abe
Banking & Financial Services

22
The lab applies contemporary practices such
as Agile development methods and design
thinking principles, while enabling individu-
als to network with other experts, fostering
an innovation culture. FINOLAB offers an
open, collegiate environment that fosters a
flow of ideas among individuals from not just
different units but also from external entities.
Unlike a traditional Japanese company, it
is more akin to a network-based graduate
school laboratory or a lab within a Silicon
Valley start-up.
We’ve worked closely with fintechs to improve
the user interface (UI) and user experience
(UX) aspects of our customer interfaces. At
an applications programming interface (API)
level, systems functionality is provided by the
bank, but the UI is provided by our collabo-
rating fintech start-up. The initiative signifi-
cantly improved the customer experience from
the use of improved UI and UX.
On the business front, fintechs typically lack
customer relationships. As financial institu-
tions join hands with fintechs and collab-
oratively offer customer services, customer
ownership is likely to emerge as an issue.
Customers are more comfortable dealing
with a trusted bank. Mizuho intends to
guard its ownership of customers by carefully
balancing its fintech partnerships. In the
early stage of these partnerships, it remains to
be seen how they will evolve and lead to new
sustainable business models.
Our Three Digital
Levers: Blockchain,
AI and Big Data
Blockchain, AI, and big data analytics are
the core digital technologies that we chose to
focus on to drive business results:
OO A partnership with Metaps and WiL.
This collaboration has led to our new
financial settlement service offering
using digital wallet technology. Targeting
smartphone users, the service analyzes
customer payment behavior via AI-based
algorithms and provides contextually
relevant advice. This value-added service
goes beyond existing bank settlements
for utility payments or settlements using
credit cards.
OO Big data analytics and AI-based
lending services. In association with
SoftBank, we launched a company called
J.Score, which – starting in September
2017 – renders score-based personal
lending services. The company makes use
of big data and AI to power its innovative
services. Customers enter their basic finan-
cial information such as lifestyle, smart-
phone utilization, Mizuho bank financial
information and user profile, and the
bank’s AI-based systems then analyze their
data and provide lending scores. Based on
the score, customers can see what their
potential interest rate would be. The rate
is generated entirely through an AI-based
mechanism, obviating the need for face-to-
face discussion with a human being.
for lending services placed an enormous
challenge on us to have the capital needed to
invest in digital innovation. As a result, we
focused on cost reduction and innovations
that would make our products and services
more appealing to customers and to enhance
satisfaction through digital channels.
Institutionalizing the
Push Toward Digital
Prior to 2015, the organizational unit set up
to drive digital innovation was in the form of
a project team. Upon my arrival to the digital
innovation team from a branch banking role
in 2015, I moved to set up a digital strategy
incubation project team as an independent
unit within the Mizuho group.
Mizuho group’s businesses are organized
as companies by customer segment. This
structure called for an institutionalized
approach to transferring the digital project
team’s transformational innovations to the
various businesses within the group. To
support this, we reorganized the team into a
digital innovation department to develop and
drive digital technology-powered innovations
across the group’s businesses.
In 2017, we created the role of chief digital
innovation officer (CDIO), who is charged
exclusively with the agenda of driving digital
innovations. This practice differs from those
of similar types of banks that combine other
tasks and responsibilities with this role. In
our case, the role has the sole purpose of
driving digital in a significant way.
We take a two-pronged approach to
managing digital development and
deployment. One, the digital innovation
department gets involved with the business
department that is creating the proof of
concept (POC) to determine how the
innovation can support new ways of doing
business. Two, we identify opportunities to
address difficulties and challenges confronted
by the business lines that can benefit from
innovative digital solutions, and then build
appropriate solutions.
Winning through Fintech
Collaboration
In October 2016, we set up a laboratory to
drive open innovation through our associa-
tion with fintechs. The lab combines our deep
expertise in financial services with the techno-
logical prowess of fintechs, which are focused
exclusively on technological innovation and
can speed time to market of new applications
driven by digital technologies.
It is important to propagate the technology
and ideas we sourced to the entire group.
While doing so, we’ve also been able to dis-
seminate the behaviors and atmosphere that
help to inculcate a new culture and way of
doing business across the group. For example,
our FINOLAB, which is situated next to our
Otemachi head office, is set in a laboratory-
like environment, where venture companies
staff our digital innovation department.
Meanwhile, other partners pursue digital
innovations by actively engaging among
themselves.
FINOLAB offers an open, collegiate environment that
fosters a flow of ideas among individuals from not just
different units but also from external entities. Unlike
a traditional Japanese company, it is more akin to a
network-based graduate school laboratory or a lab within
a Silicon Valley start-up.
Cognizanti • 23

Cognizanti • 2524
business and IT processes throughout the
organization to identify areas for automation.
These successful initiatives are leading us to
build many automated processes throughout
the Mizuho bank businesses.
We are working with various partners
to launch a company called Blue Lab
to stimulate revenue growth and reduce
operating costs. Blue Lab’s goal is to add
100 billion in added value by around 2020
through cost reductions, increased profits
and the value of the new ventures. We
want to create a business that will impact
the profits and losses of the group in at least
two or three years, including the creation of
new business and enabling them to provide
various levels of industry support.
OO Leading with blockchain. We are
applying blockchain thinking and
technology to develop a solution for
sharing sensitive documents among the
group’s worldwide subsidiaries. Our initial
tests using blockchain show that the
approach could enable the bank’s subsid-
iaries to tokenize internal money transfers,
eliminating the need for cumbersome and
manual data reconciliation. Our trials
confirmed that blockchain can create
an effective platform for information
sharing among multiple group companies,
resulting in potential cost savings and
enhanced usability. The solution was
designed using Ethereum for smart
contracts, BigchainDB for decentralized
storage and InterPlanetary File System
(IPFS) for decentralized file transfer. In
addition to meeting the business need,
the project helped us understand how
to leverage the different strengths of
platforms to build an overall solution.
(For more on this topic, see “Financial
Services: Building Blockchain One Block
at a Time.”)
In April 2017, we announced our
intention to use Corda, the open source
distributed ledger platform developed by
industry consortium R3, to digitize trade
documents such as letters of credit and
bills of lading. The goals are to reduce
fraud, optimize the speed and efficiency of
transactions and enhance visibility for all
parties involved in trade finance.
We are undertaking a J Coin2
initiative
in collaboration with external entities
through the use of shared infrastructure
and expertise. Employing the model of
shared resources tends to drive down the
costs involved with embracing new-age
technologies, resulting in a win-win
scenario. The Financial Services Agency
(FSA), the regulator of financial services
in Japan, is encouraging the use of shared
technology models like blockchain for the
benefit of all financial institutions.
OO Reaping advantage with robotic
process automation: As part of
our endeavor to extend digital into
our branches, we’ve also launched
AI-powered humanoid robots that
assist our customers in areas such as
account opening and analyzing insurance
coverage.
Our Outlook
The rise of new-age digital technologies
also poses the threat of disintermediation of
incumbent financial institutions such as ours
in the areas of settlement and lending. Tax
regulations, for instance, and the need to
evolve our business to accommodate our new
digital platform based-lending businesses are
key challenges. While there may be changes
in how we acquire customers in the medium
term, in the long term only those financial
institutions that sustain businesses with low
margins will remain viable.
The utilization of robotic process automation
(RPA) and AI is a primary focus area for us
today, based on the level of expected benefits.
Our RPA experts are analyzing routine
Author
Nobuhisa Abe is General Manager of the Digital Innovation Division at Mizuho
Financial Group, Inc. He joined Mizuho Bank in 1992, after which he moved to the
Mizuho Financial Group’s Corporate Planning Department as Senior Manager. He
has also been General Manager of the Nagano Branch of Mizuho Bank, and General
Manager of the Incubation Project Team. He has a bachelor’s of engineering degree from
Osaka University.
Our trials confirmed that blockchain can create an
effective platform for information sharing among
multiple group companies, resulting in potential cost
savings and enhanced usability.
Our RPA experts are analyzing routine business and
IT processes throughout the organization to identify
areas for automation. These successful initiatives
are leading us to build many automated processes
throughout the Mizuho bank businesses.
Footnotes
1
The Banking Act was amended in 2014, relaxing limitations on holding of voting rights by
banks in other companies.
2
Motonao Uesugi and Koji Okuda, “J Coin: Japanese Banks’ Virtual Currency without the
Volatility,” Asian Review, Sept. 17, 2017, https://asia.nikkei.com/Markets/Currencies/J-Coin-
Japanese-banks-virtual-currency-without-the-volatility.

Hands Up for Talent
By Gary Beach
Commentary
A widening IT skills gap is
preventing many companies
from cashing in on digital’s
bright promise, casting a
dark cloud over the global
economy. Here’s how
business leaders can attract,
develop and retain the talent
needed to succeed in today’s
digital era.
I often start my C-level keynote speeches by
asking the audience whether their company
has formulated a digital strategy. In most
cases, I see a roomful of hands raised in the
air. I then instruct the audience to keep their
hands raised if their company’s technology
strategy is aligned with their digital business
strategy. Most hands remain raised.
Borrowing a phrase from the software devel-
opment community, my third directive is a
showstopper; I ask the execs to keep their
hands up only if their company has a talent
strategy optimized to support their digital
business and technology plans. Some shake
their head. Many look down. Nearly all lower
their hand to their side. This is not what I’d
want to see. The essence of digital success,
after all, can be likened to the proverbial
three-legged stool, consisting of these
components: a comprehensive transforma-
tion strategy; a supporting digital technology
strategy that factors in both new and legacy
technology; and a multifaceted, multigen-
erational digital talent strategy. Without all
three in place, a business’s digital efforts will
likely fail.
The Skills Gap:
Myth or Reality?
The lack of attention to a digital talent
strategy is particularly troubling when you
consider the nearly six million jobs that,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, are unfilled, or “open,” in the
country.1
Many employers claim these jobs
are open because they cannot find workers
with the required skills. Not everyone agrees
– job candidates say the open jobs would
be filled quickly if employers were to offer
competitive salaries. Welcome to the skills
gap debate, an employment enigma, where
open, unfilled jobs are often perceived by
some economists as a harbinger of a growing
economy.
But another – and I believe more accurate
– interpretation is that this very real and
measurable skills gap is something execs
should be not only aware of but also ready
to act upon. Consider that Oklahoma State
University’s Skills Gap Misery Index suggests
the supply-demand talent gulf is 29.7% wider
now than it was in the year 2000.2
When you
add in today’s highly in-demand digital roles,
such as cybersecurity behavior analysts, cloud
aggregation specialists and chief robotics
officers, it’s clear that the talent gap could
cause a significant drag on the economy.
According to the global job posting company
Indeed.com, the talent imbalance costs the
U.S. economy $160 billion each year.3
That’s
Cognizanti 27

equal to $993 million every business day.
Tom Monahan, managing partner of Norton
Street Capital, warned at a recent conference
that on average, the skills gap lowers a
company’s annual productivity by 10%.4
The Widening IT Skills Gap
When I spoke with the tech industry trade
association CompTIA for a column I write
for The Wall Street Journal, I learned that
548,000 technology jobs are “open” in
America. But hold on. Here’s a startling
adjunct fact from CompTIA: Those 548,000
positions are IT jobs “open” 90 days or
longer. Do the math, and that projects out to
49,320,000 days of lost technology-driven
productivity every quarter. Factoring in
that data, it is understandable why C-level
executives have increased their investments
in artificial intelligence, robotic process
automation and smart machines.
The Future Talent Pipeline
Is Leaking
Here’s the elephant in the room: Does the
next generation of U.S. IT workers, par-
ticularly those 30 years of age or younger,
have a strong foundational base of skills
necessary to compete in the Fourth Industrial
Revolution?5
Data addressing that question
is ominous. Since 2000, global assessments
of 15-year-old students in math, science,
reading and collaboration suggest the skills of
young Americans are markedly inferior when
compared with peers in other nations.6
Results from the U.S. Department of Educa-
tion’s “National Assessment of Educational
Progress” further expose the U.S.’s talent
pipeline crisis. The agency reports that the
percentage of students determined to be
“proficient” – think grade level “B” – in math
and science examinations alarmingly erodes
from fourth to eighth to 12th grade.7
These
folks are the future of the U.S workforce.
I am convinced it will take a generation,
and probably longer, to measurably improve
the pipeline of digital talent in the U.S.
To buttress a lackluster national education
system, employers must create “cultures of
learning” within the walls of their company
aimed at upskilling workers.
If these measures are not adopted in the near
future, U.S. employers will be forced to rely
on the interconnectedness of the Internet to
source talent in other parts of the world. This
a strategy that will not “Make America Great
Again.” Nor will increasingly restrictive
immigration policies favored by the Trump
administration.
‘Soft Skills’ Are Hard to Find
I frequently ask C-level executives which
talent/skills are most important to their
company. Responses vary. Frequently cited
are technical “STEM” skills in science,
technology, engineering and math. Many
more, however, place importance on talent
attributes called “soft skills,” such as the
ability to communicate, collaborate and
make sense of large amounts of data. The
Cognizanti 2928
Institute for the Future’s “Workforce 2020”
report features the most comprehensive list
of “soft” skills I’ve ever seen compiled in one
place.8
I recommend downloading it. I also
recommend Hit Refresh, the best-selling book
by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who touts
another important soft skill that is hard to
master: human empathy.9
Digital Jobs Now In Demand
Upscored, a New York City-based talent
platform company, correlates skill demand
with supply to determine which digital
jobs are in high demand. According to the
company’s data, the five most difficult digital
jobs to onboard are: algorithm design, dis-
tributed systems, machine learning, mobile
development and data science.10
Digital Jobs Over the Horizon
Upwork, a Mountain View, Calif.-based
freelance employment service, matches
employer demand with freelance talent supply
and releases a quarterly report that ranks
the highest-demand freelancer jobs. This is
a “canary-in-the-coalmine” compilation of
positions employers will be competing for in
the immediate future. The five most popular
freelance jobs in Upwork’s most current
report are: robotics, blockchain (enterprise
applications), Bitcoin (cryptocurrency
trading), penetration testing and react.js
(a JavaScript library).11
Does your organiza-
tion have a talent acquisition strategy for
each of these positions?
Location Matters
An often overlooked component of the
digital talent gap is location. Employment
data suggests the availability of IT talent
differs widely by regions and states. The U.S.
Department of Labor’s monthly job opening
labor turnover report claims the talent gap is
widest in the South (2,096,000 open jobs) and
the Midwest (1,550,000 open jobs) and less
acute in the West (1,368,000 open jobs) and
East (983,000 open jobs).12
(See our recent
report “Space Matters: Shaping the Workplace
to Get the Right Work Done” for more on the
emergence of geographic talent clusters.)
This gap also varies from state to state. Log
on to the Massachusetts Technology Talent
and Economic Reporting System. Produced
by the Massachusetts High Technology
Council, “MATTERS” is a real-time
database that ranks talent for all 50 states
in the following areas: STEM degrees per
capita, relocation of college-educated adults,
bachelor degree holders in the workforce,
and tech employment as a percent of total
employment.13
Purple Squirrels and
Pink Unicorns
These are code words used to describe overly
selective hiring practices aimed at hiring the
“perfect” – usually external – job candidate.
Is your company guilty of overreliance on
this practice? Do this. Select several open
tech jobs at your company. Cut and paste
the listing into a Word document. Count
the words. How many are over 500 words?
How many include the phrase “five years of
experience required”? How many narrow
the search further by requiring a bachelor’s
degree in a national talent pool where 70%
of the workforce never graduated from
college? A more manageable path to bridging
the digital skills gap is to internally create the
perfect job candidate through comprehensive
skill development programs.
Keep Your Selling Shoes On
While most of this commentary focuses
on how to attract and hire talent, another
vital issue is retention. Millennials, now
the largest component of the workforce,
are notorious job hoppers. Business and
technology executives must develop
strategies that brand the company as a
“best place to work,” promoting issues
like work/life balance, diversity and an
opportunity to do meaningful work. While
online labor markets make it easier to find
talent, they also make it harder to retain
talent. Corporate branding is a “must-do”
component of any solid digital talent strategy
designed to attract and retain talent.
I am convinced it will take a generation, and probably
longer, to measurably improve the pipeline of digital
talent in the U.S. To buttress a lackluster national
education system, employers must create “cultures
of learning” within the walls of their company aimed
at upskilling workers.

30
Workers’ Mantra: Don’t Call Us;
We‘ll Call You
Today, employers drive the employment
process. Moving forward, as many global
economies remain at near full employment
and millions of jobs remain open, the
model will flip. Workers will control the
employment market and the hiring process.
By 2020, labor market experts predict over
50% of the workforce will be “contract” or
“gig” workers, essentially labor mercenaries
working for themselves.14
(For more, see my
commentary in Cognizanti Volume 9, 2016,
“Jumping on the Gig Economy.”) To survive,
a company’s digital talent strategy must not
just include “gig workers” but also leverage
contract work as a cornerstone employment
strategy.
‘Talentism’ Is the
New Capitalism
Talent acquisition in the age of digital
transformation is a structural employment
problem that will require bold thinking to
resolve. Finding a solution is predicated on
the acknowledgment that – as Dr. Klaus
Schwab, executive chairman of the World
Economic Forum, says – “talentism is the
new capitalism.”15
In this era of talentism, the employment sup-
ply-demand model has undergone a structural
shift. From here forward, talent doesn’t need
your company; your company needs talent.
Those businesses that fail to craft a solution
to this looming talent challenge, and nurture
a culture of learning within their organiza-
tion, will be on the wrong side of the digital
talent equation.
Homework Assignment: How Aligned Are Your
Digital Talent and Transformation Strategies?
Quick Take
The following matrix can help your organization determine whether its technology
and talent strategies are aligned. Plot your dots! Let us know what you see.
Maturity of Digital Transformation Strategy
Least
optimal
Most
optimal
StateofDigitalTalent Footnotes
1
“Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary,” U.S. Department of Labor, Jan. 9, 2018,
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm.
2
“Filling the Skills Gap,” Ohio State University Institute of Technology,
http://go.osuit.edu/skills_gap.
3
“Unfilled Jobs Cost Employers $160 Billion Annually,” Indeed, Nov 18, 2014,
http://blog.indeed.com/2014/11/18/unfilled-jobs-cost-employers-160-billion-annually/.
4
“How to Close Your Software Development Skills Gap,” TechBeacon,
https://techbeacon.com/how-close-your-software-development-skills-gap.
5
Klaus Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means, How to Respond,” World
Economic Forum, Jan. 14, 2016, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-indus-
trial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/.
6
Drew Desilver, “U.S. Students’ Academic Achievement Still Lags that of their Peers in Many
Other Countries,” Pew Research Center, Feb. 15, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/.
7
“NAEP Overview,” National Assessment of Education Progress,
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/.
8
“FutureWork Skills 2020,” Institute for the Future, 2011, http://www.iftf.org/futureworkskills.
9
Satya Nadella, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future
for Everyone, HarperBusiness, 2017, https://www.amazon.com/Hit-Refresh-Rediscover-Micro-
softs-Everyone-ebook/dp/B01HOT5SQA.
10
“Capitalize on the Most Sought-After Technical Skills,” Upscored, Nov. 30, 2015,
https://upscored.com/blogpage/24/.
11
“The Hottest Freelance Skills on Upwork: Q3 2017,” Upwork, Nov. 2, 2017,
https://www.upwork.com/blog/2017/11/freelance-skills-upwork-q3-2017/.
12
“Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
https://www.bls.gov/jlt/.
13
“MATTERS Talent Index,” Massachusetts Technology, Talent, and Economic Reporting
System, http://matters.mhtc.org.
14
Brian Rashid, “The Rise of the Freelancer Economy,” Forbes, Jan. 26, 2016, https://www.
forbes.com/sites/brianrashid/2016/01/26/the-rise-of-the-freelancer-economy/#4941ca9a3bdf.
15
Anne-Marie Slaughter, “New Capitalism Nurtures People, Not Products,” Financial Times,
Feb. 19, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/4523e9a4-f472-11e6-95ee-f14e55513608.
Author
Gary Beach is the Publisher Emeritus of CIO Magazine. He is also a guest
columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of the best-selling book The U.S.
Technology Skills Gap. He can be reached at Garybeachcio@gmail.com |
Twitter @gbeachcio.
Cognizanti • 31

Cognizanti • 33
IDP, a leading international
educational service provider,
seized the opportunity
to support its customers
at every stage of the
international education
journey – from searching for
and attending a university, to
career services and lifelong
learning — with personalized,
relevant content.
IDP has been operating for close to 50 years,
creating a huge network of opportunity,
with more than 700 counselors in over 30
countries.
When I came onboard as CEO two years
ago, IDP was performing well, but with the
rapid technological advances in interna-
tional education services, it was clear that
continuing to do what had worked in the
past would expose us to disruptive threats
to our leadership position. In my new role, I
met with many different groups – employees,
education providers and customers – to better
understand what those changes needed to be.
It quickly became clear that it was the profes-
sionalism and compassion of our education
counseling teams that separated us from our
competitors in a crowded space.
Our customers trust our counselors’ advice at
life-changing junctures. Our teams take pride
in understanding all the details so they can
find the country, institution and course that
will position our customers for success.
While this trust and bond existed face-to-
face, the journey with IDP became disjointed
once students moved beyond their home
country to their new study destination.
Our task was to remedy this, in a way that
we’d remain robust and fit for purpose as
consumers grow more accustomed to digital
communications every day.
Building a Global
Community of Connected
Students, from
Classroom to Career
By Andrew Barkla
Educational Services

Cognizanti • 3534
Nurturing a Culture of
Innovation
Traditionally focused on performance, we
needed to embed and celebrate a culture of
innovation through all levels of the business.
Through strategic planning with key teams
from across the world, we determined
that customer experience and continual
innovation would be the keys to unlocking
our future success. By nature, our students are
globally mobile and digitally savvy. We needed
to be accessible whenever they needed us,
through channels that suited their needs. We
needed to place the customer at the center of
everything we do. That is our True North.
Our board recognized that technological
strength was key to meeting our goals, and
as we began to identify what was needed to
transform our organization, we knew we had
to choose strategic partners. I was very aware
of how other industries like retail, financial
services and transportation were transform-
ing, and was also aware of Cognizant’s strong
track record in this space.
We worked with Cognizant to develop our
roadmap and document all the elements of
our vision, while keeping the students very
much at the center. It quickly became clear
that we needed better data, systems and
processes.
For example, over the last two years, IDP
teams around the world have tested new
systems and platforms to improve the
customer experiences at our student recruit-
ment events. At one stage, different teams
were using four separate event solutions. It
was clear we needed a single platform that
could meet our customer and staff needs.
Similarly, we’re now one-third of the way
through consolidating our customer relation-
ship management and contact center systems.
When that’s complete, we hope to have a
single view of our customers, and consistent
and streamlined processes for our staff.
Supporting Individual
Customer Needs
To be successful, our programs need to
be built with, and for, our customers. We
recruited internally to build a team of global
customer ambassadors, selecting people
from our regional offices who were digitally
minded and customer-centric. These indi-
viduals are tasked with running co-design
sessions with customers to ensure everything
we build reflects their behaviors and needs.
Our ambassadors and teams led many round-
tables, which was important because our
customers’ needs are very different depending
on their home country, culture and personal
preferences. While all students are unique,
and it’s dangerous to over-generalize, there
are certain regional trends that we need to
be aware of, such as the influencers in the
students’ decision-making process. In North
Asia, for example, parents are very heavily
involved in decision-making, and that’s not
necessarily true for other countries.
Despite these distinct cultural differences,
there is a core mindset that unifies our
customers. Around the world, IDP students
are purposeful and progressive, and our
services needed to reflect this.
We want to personalize the experience to
each unique individual through smarter
marketing automation systems, building
a platform that will serve a contextually
correct experience to each customer. You
can only do that through technology and
data. For example, we know some students
aspire to attend highly ranked universities,
while others are looking for more practical,
vocation-based courses. Our data informs our
Offering Students Richer
Resources for a Lifelong
Journey
Studying overseas is a huge emotional
and financial decision. The importance
of providing our customers with the best
advice and support is not lost on our teams,
who spend 16 months on average with
a student and his or her parents in the
counseling process. Our customers’ educa-
tional journey begins before we first speak
with them. They’re talking to their friends
about studying overseas, reading university
blogs, looking at school websites. And it
continues all the way to when they graduate
and begin employment in their chosen field
– sometimes over many years. We wanted
to serve students by offering them lifelong
learning and career services.
We knew we built great relationships with
our customers when they were in their home
country, but that relationship was often lost
when a student moved to their study country,
as our systems didn’t speak to each other.
This meant our customers weren’t aware
of the support available to them once they
started their studies, such as the events we
hold for students to meet each other, or the
workshops we run to help them prepare for
internships and part-time work.
This is why we made it a top priority to build
a customer platform that would guide students
on their journeys and establish an ongoing
connection with them, enabling services like
accommodation support, insurance referrals
and, eventually, career support.
Our goal was to create the world’s leading
global platform and connected community
for international students.
IDP’s Digital Transformation Vision
A bold strategy to transform our industry by establishing a digital
platform that enables and empowers a connected customer journey.
Source: IDP Education
Figure 1
Deliver world-leading capabilities and services …
Using an integrated global platform …
… ensures that we understand the needs
and expectations of students and clients.
The world’s definitive international
student dataset and connected
community.
WORLD’S
BEST COURSE
SEARCH
DIGITIZING
STUDENT
EXPOS
GLOBAL
CONTACT
CENTER
VIRTUAL
AGENCY
LEADING
OFFICE
NETWORK
ADDITIONAL
STUDENT
SERVICES
CAREER
SUPPORT
LEADING
CRM AND CMS
Connecting our customers to success.
IDP
IELTS
(Leading international
English test co-owned
by IDP)
Hotcourses
(Course and university
search platform)
Other
Partners
We needed to place the customer at the center of
everything we do. That is our True North.

personas, which helps us group our content.
It is then up to us to develop those crucial
one-on-one relationships.
There’s always a balance when you’re
collecting customer data. We have to
maintain the utmost of respect for our
customers. Translating human empathy to
the digital environment is core to what we
do. It’s about offering an opt-in capability
but also letting users go gracefully if this is
requested.
Early last year, we acquired a company called
Hotcourses in the UK, which maintains
the world’s leading course search database.
In doing so, we gained search engine opti-
mization and digital capabilities, letting us
support students earlier in their decision-
making process.
The acquisition also gave us access to data
that provides us with real-time insights into
the online behavior of our students. When
globally significant events unfold, such as
political elections or policy changes, we can
see the immediate shifts and swings in search
activity as students reconsider their destina-
tion preferences. This gives us the opportu-
nity to provide relevant content across our
digital platform that not only responds to
this change in search activity, but also offers
students a trusted source of information that
assists with building credibility and loyalty in
today’s fast-paced news cycle.
Staying Ahead with Digital
We’re close to 18 months into our digital
transformation, and while we still have
more to do, it’s inspiring to see the growing
enthusiasm of our teams as they build their
skills and gain confidence in new digital
capabilities.
What we do at IDP is life-changing.
Together with Cognizant, our students and
our teams, we have laid the foundation to
build our connected community for our next
generation of global leaders.
Author
Andrew Barkla is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of IDP
Education, a global leader in international education services. He was appointed
CEO of IDP in 2015 and has extensive experience in the technology, services and
software industry, with over 20 years of senior management experience in roles across
Australia, New Zealand, Asia and North America.
Translating human empathy to the digital environment
is core to what we do. It’s about offering an opt-in
capability but also letting users go gracefully if this
is requested.

Cognizanti • 39
A consumer style of
engagement is supercharging
physician communications
and patient care coordination
at a major regional health
network.
Most industries today are actively engaged
with how to deliver great experiences to
target customers. Until relatively recently,
that has not necessarily been the case for
healthcare, which has lagged in engagement
technologies for physicians and patients, our
primary customers.
Even before “patient-centered” and
“healthcare consumerism” were buzzwords,
LifeBridge Health’s vision was to deliver the
same level of best-in-class services and experi-
ences to our customers as they receive when
they interact with other service providers,
from online retailers to travel providers. Our
goal was to solve important business and
communication issues with leading-edge
engagement capabilities that would also
support our overall digital transformation
strategy, designed to deliver better patient and
population health services.
The solution we implemented uses consumer-
like service and technology options to make
it easy for physicians to access our health
system, coordinate care and empower our
patients to manage their health. So far, the
benefits include better care delivered with
greater efficiency, more satisfied physicians
and healthier patients, and robust engagement
resources that support a range of uses well
beyond what we initially envisioned. The
solution has also helped us build market share
and a reputation for quality care that spans
the state of Maryland.
Coordinating Great
Performance
Quality and cost are rapidly becoming the
measures by which insurers will calculate
reimbursements for LifeBridge and other
providers vs. healthcare’s traditional fee-for-
service model. The Department of Health
and Human Services intends to tie 80% of all
Transforming
Physician and Patient
Engagement at
LifeBridge Health
By Jonathan Ringo, M.D., Jonathan Thierman, M.D., Ph.D., & Jonathan Moles
Healthcare

40
A Platform for
Engagement
Our thinking was to create an engagement
platform that would offer PCPs in our com-
munities an easy way to connect with hospi-
tal-based providers so they could exchange
notes and engage in useful warm hand-offs.
The platform would have the best features
that online retailers, airlines, financial services
providers already deliver. It would store trans-
action histories, offer suggestions and provide
customizable options.
We initially scoped a pilot to see if we could
combine people, process and data effectively
to deliver the services we envisioned. The
pilot results would help us gauge whether
it made sense to invest in rolling out the
platform on a broad scale.
We had worked with Cognizant previously
and were well acquainted with the company’s
global clinical services, including a call
center in Manila staffed with U.S.-trained
registered nurses available 24x7. The nurses
are equipped with Cognizant’s cloud-based
OnVida engagement platform. We worked
internally to develop the call scripts the
nurse agents would use and the processes the
physicians would follow.
The engagement pilot, launched in July 2015
after about six weeks of planning, included
these basic mechanics:
OO An automated workflow engages nurse
agents in the call center to make contact
with physicians via their preferred com-
munication method (phone, secure e-mail
or text).
OO The nurse agent then coordinates a
connection between the care team via
text, phone or e-mail, whichever commu-
nication preference is dictated by the use
case executed.
OO The nurse captures the notes from the
conversation, entering them into the
platform and the electronic medical
record (EMR).
The platform is also designed to help patients
follow post-discharge orders. A call center
nurse contacts the patient to answer questions,
review care instructions, coordinate medicine
deliveries and even organize transportation for
the patient to reach follow-up appointments.
Making Connections
The engagement program, called LifeLink,
has come a very long way since we launched
it with 10 nurses and a call volume of 1,000
contacts in the first month. Today, 30 nurse
agents support more than 22,000 contacts per
month and a range of additional features.
We have integrated our EMR system with the
OnVida platform, which enables automated
physician consult orders. A physician
creates a consult order in the EMR, and the
EMR automatically populates OnVida with
Medicare fee-for-service to quality or value
measures by 2018, and the overall industry
expects the majority of reimbursements to be
pay-for-performance-based by 2020. These
trends make efficient care coordination and
patient and physician engagement extremely
critical capabilities for delivering high-quality
care at great value.
Effective coordination of care helps prevent
test and procedure duplication, ensures
physicians inside and outside our facilities
have all the information they require to
make the best decisions for their patients,
and equips patients to follow pre- and post-
discharge regimens and manage their health
conditions.
One means of accomplishing better care coor-
dination is to adopt the “hospitalist” model.
A hospitalist is a physician whose entire focus
is caring for patients while they are in the
hospital. Ideally, the hospitalist coordinates
care with the specialists treating the patient,
such as surgeons and oncologists, and with the
patient’s primary care physician (PCP) outside
the hospital.
The challenge is that hospitalists simply can’t
be on a first-name basis with all the PCPs
and specialists in a major health network like
ours, or in a large city like Baltimore and its
suburbs, where we operate.
Our scale is considerable: LifeBridge has
almost 1,238 beds across four hospitals,
one of which is a teaching facility and the
largest community hospital in Maryland. We
also offer a range of destination programs,
operate a health and fitness group, and have
many subsidiaries and affiliates, all spread
over a roughly 100-mile radius of urban and
suburban settings.
Given our size, we were seeing a breakdown
in “warm handoffs,” in which a hospital-
ist and a PCP share detailed notes when a
patient is admitted to or discharged from the
hospital. This failure to connect is more than
a cosmetic issue; it has a direct impact on the
quality and cost of care. Post-discharge care
can be less effective if the PCP doesn’t have a
full picture of what occurred in the hospital.
It can also lead to patients using expensive
emergency care departments for follow-up
services and/or being readmitted to the
hospital. Care coordination is clearly essential
for ensuring patients have the best possible
experience at LifeBridge, which in our view
extends to their ability to manage their own
health once they are back home.
Cognizanti • 41
This failure to connect is more than a cosmetic issue;
it has a direct impact on the quality and cost of care.
Our thinking was to create an engagement platform
that would offer PCPs in our communities an easy way
to connect with hospital-based providers so they could
exchange notes and engage in useful warm handoffs.

Cognizanti • 4342
OO Increased patient interaction after
hospital discharge. This has led to
improved patient follow-through, appoint-
ment scheduling, medication adherence
and follow-up with primary care. This is
important for ensuring continuity of care
for patients among our facilities.
OO A 15% reduction in no-shows via
reminder calls.
OO Streamlined management of acute
care patient transfers. Transfers to
LifeBridge Health hospitals from other
care facilities have more than doubled,
with the process being managed through a
single integrated call center.
We learned some interesting lessons on the
way to achieving these results. While we’d
envisioned a white-glove, concierge-style
service for physicians, it turned out that the
physicians we serve were too busy even for
salutations such as “How are you today?” They
wanted to get to business, fast. As a result,
we rewrote call scripts on an almost daily
basis in the early days. Conversely, patients
needed a warmer approach on follow-up calls
to establish trust between themselves and the
call center nurses.
Again, engaging patients and physicians in
their preferred communication styles is more
than a matter of style points. Rather, it yields
objective data that helps us identify issues
and pain points that affect care quality so that
we can address them. In one of our facilities,
the data showed the call center nurses were
having difficulty reaching patients after
discharge. An investigation revealed that at
this facility, nurses had to make initial contact
with patients before they were discharged
instead of afterwards to establish trust and get
the best phone number to ensure follow-up.
Lowering Costs,
Accelerating Speed
The platform also helps us avoid costs while
ensuring patients get proper care. Patients
often come to emergency departments (ED)
with chest pain, but certain low-risk patients
could receive a stress test and echocardiogram
at a clinic or other lower cost location. ED
physicians are reluctant to let these patients
do so, however, because of their concerns
the patient won’t follow through. With the
engagement platform, a nurse calls the patient
while she is still in the emergency department
and tells her where and when to go for the
test. The nurse follows up with the patient to
ensure the test is completed and also connects
with the ED physician to relay the results and
close the information loop.
The platform also accelerates our ED response
times. Our ED physicians simply hit a pre-
programmed speed dial to summon the right
clinical team, e.g., #1 for a STEMI heart
attack, #2 for a stroke, #3 for acute care, etc.
This new process has reduced door-to-needle
and door-to-balloon times – key measures,
respectively, for good outcomes for heart
attack and stroke patients.
We use the analytics and metrics built into
the platform to refine performance, such
as eliminating call holding time, which
is not acceptable in an emergency care
setting. Critical calls are now routed to our
most senior nurse agents – agents who our
emergency physicians know personally – and
their task list is divided among three agents,
a worklist of patients requiring consults.
The nurse agents use the platform capabili-
ties to connect consulting specialists with
the ordering physician and PCP via their
preferred channels. If physicians have all
selected the secure texting app as their
channel, the entire process is fully digital.
Such automation improves compliance too,
with the EMR record updated to show that
the consult, in fact, occurred.
We’ve also added remote patient monitoring
to our suite of engagement services,
beginning with a population of patients with
congestive heart failure. Our nurse practi-
tioners enter threshold parameters for blood
pressure, weight and medical adherence
when they enroll a patient into the system.
The system alerts our remote nurse agents
when a threshold is exceeded so they can
contact a patient’s physician through the
engagement platform. Through the program,
patients have 21.5% lower odds of a 30-day
readmission than in the year prior, when
LifeLink was not in operation.
Our nurse agents also enable us to centralize
patient transport arrangements, working with
ambulance companies and Uber Health.
With a central transport hub, we can ensure
adherence to the transit service guidelines
established for Medicare, Medicaid and
private health plans.
The Rules of Engagement
In all these applications, the platform enables
the community-based PCP to rightfully
remain the captain of the ship throughout
patients’ treatment journey, including their
time in a LifeBridge facility. It delivers
simplicity, intuitiveness and ease of use – all
the qualities of a retail engagement model.
The results have been significant and
measurable, including:
The platform has reduced door-to-needle and door-
to-balloon times – key measures, respectively, for good
outcomes for heart attack and stroke patients.
LifeBridge Engagement Platform Connects
Primary Care Physicians and Hospitalists
The LifeBridge LifeLink engagement platform streamlines the warm
handoff process between a PCP and a hospitalist or other physician.
The PCP needs to contact a call center nurse just once; the nurse
manages the other connections based on the platform data and
ensures the handoff call is documented.
Figure 1
Patient is admitted
via the ED.
System recognizes
physician’s phone number
and pulls up patient profile.
Nurse representative
answers and contacts
attending physician.
Nurse arranges callback
time with PCP.
Nurse calls PCP and sets
up three-way conferencing
for warm handoff.

Cognizanti • 4544
each of whom immediately goes into action
so the necessary steps are carried out simulta-
neously. One might order an ambulance, for
example, while a second alerts a clinical inter-
vention team (for instance, the cath lab), and
a third reaches the hospital operations officer
with news of an acute patient’s arrival. This
change has compressed a 20- to 25-minute
process to literally a few minutes. In fact, the
nurse agents work so quickly that the patient
is often still on the ambulance gurney when
the cardiac or stroke teams arrive.
The platform and agent nurses are available
24x7, so a physician may call at, say, 2:00 a.m.
to request a same-day appointment at our new
neuro-urgent care center, or a patient may
connect with an on-call provider.
On a wider scale, these platform capabilities
support our accountable care organization
(ACO) initiative and our entire Medicare
population through connections with the
Chesapeake Regional Information System
for Our Patients (CRISP), a health informa-
tion exchange (HIE). LifeBridge Health
Medicare population members are registered
in CRISP. When a Medicare patient arrives
at any hospital in the CRISP network, CRISP
automatically notifies our nurse agents, who
then alert the patient’s PCP. CRISP’s clinical
information portal is being integrated into
our EMR environment, which will further
streamline our nurse agents’ abilities to keep
PCPs informed.
Also, CRISP helps us identify high-risk
patients in our population areas, so we may
ensure they have 24x7x365 access to our
nurse agents and the engagement platform to
support early interventions.
Continuing to Connect,
While Protecting Privacy
LifeLink enabled us to achieve a 98th
percentile ranking on the Hospital Consumer
Assessment of Healthcare Providers and
Systems (HCAHPS) patient satisfaction
survey, which we conduct through the
engagement platform. This is indicative of
the difference we’re making in how patients
perceive LifeBridge and has given us impetus
to continue expanding the reach of the
engagement platform.
Looking ahead, we plan to build a clinical
command center that would help us
coordinate care management with services
such as scheduling, bed control, teletriage
and telemedicine, and integrate the efforts of
nurses, social workers, PCPs and specialists.
Nurse agents would be the primary coordina-
tors, with the engagement platform helping
them connect to patients, deploy ambulances
and establish telemedicine links to patients’
homes so physicians can decide whether to
treat in place, order an admission to a chronic
care facility, or send the patient to an ED.
We envision these efforts being coordinated
across our entire system vs. in hospital silos.
That said, we must be sensitive to HIPAA
compliance, such as keeping all patient data
in U.S.-based data centers, and security and
privacy practices. We have drawn a firm
line between our EMR and its clinical data
streams and the patient engagement platform
and its tools. While we may integrate
additional third-party systems into our nurse
agent platform, the EMR will likely remain a
standalone entity.
The nurse agents work so quickly that the patient
is often still on the ambulance gurney when the
cardiac or stroke teams arrive.
In the meantime, we are establishing
ourselves as a hub of care and a “transfer to”
location. Our reputation for high-quality
care is growing across the state, quite a feat
for a midsized community hospital system.
Physicians and patients outside of our network
routinely call and ask for care services at our
facilities. From the very start, our goal was to
make it as easy as possible for physicians to
access our healthcare system’s services and
provide their patients a high level of care. Our
growing market share and satisfaction scores
suggest we are succeeding.
We must also interact with members of
the community who may never become
patients at any of our hospitals, and the
platform provides options for us to engage
with them in ways never before available
in healthcare. Delivering the same level of
technological capability that our physicians
and patients enjoy in consumer settings will
help LifeBridge thrive under value-based
reimbursement models by offering top-notch
medical care at great value. In turn, this
success will enable us to fulfill our primary
mission of maintaining and improving the
health of the community we serve.
Authors
Jonathan Ringo, M.D., is the President and Chief Operating Officer of Sinai Hospital
of Baltimore. Sinai Hospital has over 500 beds and is the flagship member of the
LifeBridge Health health system. Sinai is the state of Maryland’s largest independent
teaching and research hospital, with tertiary services in trauma, advanced orthopedic,
cardiovascular and neurosurgery, neonatal level III, and a full-service children’s
hospital. Dr. Ringo also serves as Senior Vice-President for LifeBridge Health. He is
responsible for the system’s move from fee-for-service to value-based care. He can be
reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-ringo-8b98501a/.
Jonathan Thierman, M.D., Ph.D., is the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO)
for LifeBridge Health and the Vice-Chairman of the Medical Staff for Northwest
Hospital. He is leading LifeBridge into the digital medicine era with initiatives
including a system telehealth platform and big data analytics, to improve patient
throughput, system efficiencies and the delivery of quality care across the continuum.
He also oversees and continues to work on projects related to physician system optimiza-
tion and engagement. Prior to his role as CMIO, Dr. Thierman served as Associate
Medical Director of Northwest Hospital’s Emergency Department, where he also
provided clinical care for a number of years. He can be reached at jthierma@lifebridge-
health.org | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-thierman-md-phd-125a5517/.
Jonathan Moles joined LifeBridge Health in 2015 to establish a clinical operations
center. He is Assistant Vice-President, responsible for the Clinical Command Center
and Access. Prior to LifeBridge Health, Jonathan spent eight years leading implementa-
tion activities for custom software solutions and in the organ and tissue procurement
industry, and five years in data management supporting pharmaceutical clinical trials.
He can be reached at jmoles@lifebridgehealth.org | https://www.linkedin.com/in/
jonathan-moles-pmp-17a98115/.

Cognizanti • 47
Manufacturing, Consumer Goods & Retail
Asian Paints: The
Digital Odyssey of
a Serial Reinventor
By Harish Lade
A leading Asia-Pacific paint
company has woven a
modern digital backbone into
the fabric of its organization
to deliver a superior
consumer experience. Its
goal: become the top player
in the paint-as-a-service and
home decor markets.
Asian Paints is the leader in the Indian paint
industry. With a consolidated turnover of
over $2 billion, our company is the third
largest paint company in Asia, a top-five
player in decorative paints worldwide and
the tenth largest coatings company globally.
Our operations span 16 countries (largely
emerging markets), with 25 paint manu-
facturing plants across the globe, servicing
customers in over 60 countries. We distribute
our products through carefully nourished
relationships with over 45,000 dealers spread
across India for over 75 years.
In India, customers buy paint from hardware
stores and hire painters, contractors or
architect interior designers (AIDs) to do the
painting. The do-it-yourself model doesn’t
exist in the region. While the per-capita
paint consumption in India is far lower
than in Western countries, we’ve seen high
growth over the last decade, spurred by
increased consumer awareness and higher
discretionary spend due to the growing
Indian economy. Our growth mantra has
been to create demand through the continual
and proactive introduction of innovative
products and services. That goal has been
ably aided by a modern IT backbone powered
by enterprise applications from SAP and
the company’s HANA in-memory database,
which automates manufacturing and supply
chain management (SCM) and enables more
seamless omnichannel journeys.
Complacency has always been anathema
to our company. Whether we’re launching
innovative products or introducing new
services for the digital age, we’re continu-
ously reinventing the company, keeping the
customer at the center. Our relentless
customer-centric efforts have established us as
a leading Indian consumer brand, despite the
fact that paint is not a regularly used product.

OO Using data to add intelligence to a
complex supply chain. Our industry is
beset by seasonal uncertainties. Further,
roughly 60% of our costs are attribut-
able to raw materials, and about 50%
of our raw material requirements are
met through imports. We were using
JDA Software’s advanced supply chain
planning solutions for over two decades
to help us plan better; however, given
the increasingly VUCA world (with its
volatility, uncertainty, complexity and
ambiguity), global events often disrupt
availability and impact costs. Macro
factors and directional trends, such as
commodity demand fluctuations and
price volatility in international markets,
significantly influence our cost structure.
Effectively handling these uncertainties
required us to remap procurement that
typically deals with unstructured data. We
developed an advanced SCM application
using IBM Watson, which informed more
effective decision making amid continuing
uncertainty.
It’s crucial in the paint product category
to ensure service levels at the dealer
counters and availability of the range
of SKUs. We’ve enabled optimized
shipment creation and tracking to ensure
high order fill rates. In some markets,
we offer twice-a-day delivery to our
dealers. Our SAP HANA platform-based
solution reinvented our order servicing by
empowering the sales team with timely
information about the current stock,
and the distribution team about
inventory levels and possible SKU
shortages. The distribution team
is empowered with real-time
visibility across all the company depots,
and into shifts in demand and production
schedules for effective decision making, as
well as the ability to perform root-cause
analyses for quick corrective action. This
is done via a workbench that combines
analytics with an execution engine. This
application won the first prize at the 2015
SAP HANA innovation awards.
OO Elevating CRM to new heights. Our
CRM models all of our customer relation-
ships (both dealer-enabled and direct).
The system is built to handle a franchising
model spread across 13 cities, comprising
processes that involve organizing, con-
tracting and executing an end-to-end
painting service. The system effectively
manages loyalty and rating systems, net
promoter scores and customer satisfac-
tion, driving customer centricity. We’ve
recently launched a new service model,
called PaintTotal, under which the dealers
offer services using their own set of
resources. The entire process is backed by
a data architecture that funnels informa-
tion to all sets of users.
From Products to Services
A decade ago, we began transforming from
a predominantly brick-and-mortar product
manufacturer into an agile and adaptive
enterprise that provides value-add services
in addition to products that help customers
make their homes beautiful.
Our services transformation began with
our painting-as-a-service offering, when we
launched a toll-free telephone service for
customers to request home painting. This
required a major mindset shift and was the
first step toward offering differentiating décor
services.
The next step was reimagining our business
as a home décor business. This change
emerged from our understanding of the paint-
ing-as-a-service ecosystem and the number of
customer touchpoints involved. Home reno-
vations typically require customers to work
with dealers, painters and contractors, while
high-end projects could include architects
and interior designers. At any point in the
project, customers typically experience
unexpected problems and setbacks. We have
an opportunity to unlock value and address
a larger share of the customer’s wallet by
working through these issues with customers
or eliminating the problems completely.
When customers seek to change their home
décor, they also need assistance with coor-
dinating colors and textures that mesh with
their existing décor. So, while paint remains
the core of our business, we also began
offering consultancy services beyond our
professional painting services, which helped
us differentiate ourselves and position our
company as a partner with customers as they
work to beautify their homes.
Other strategic shifts include foraying into
emerging markets and extending our home
décor umbrella to include kitchen and bath
spaces. This required us to make a few acqui-
sitions and extend our enterprise in newly
collaborative ways. This has been a signifi-
cant shift involving cultural change and new
IT systems.
Digital-powered
Endeavors
In order to provide a consistent customer
experience across multiple touchpoints and
offer optimal product and service delivery, we
needed to ensure strong digital enablement
across the value chain. This drove us to
digitize the organization’s functions end to
end, from customer engagement systems, to
all front-end CRM and dealer management
systems and all supply chain and manufac-
turing operations. This meant keeping IT
as a foundational element to make people
efficient, accountable and focused precisely
on the customer. Data analytics has been
another foundational element across the
value chain.
Key digital initiatives that powered our trans-
formation include:
OO Getting our arms and mind around
the manufacturing supply chain.
While paint manufacturing is not
complex, we needed to improve our
operations with large-scale automated
factories. At the scale required, we needed
fully-digitized recipe management, with
full integration of shop floor operations
with our SAP ERP system.
We began transforming from a predominantly brick-
and-mortar product manufacturer into an agile and
adaptive enterprise that helps customers make their
homes beautiful.

Cognizanti • 5150
Connecting Digital with
Human Expertise
By gaining a better understanding of the
home paint buyer, we learned that our
customers needed a better visual view of
our products and services. Armed with
this insight, we launched our 8,000-to-
12,000-square-foot Asian Paints home stores
in partnership with dealers. These stores
employ 3-D visualization and virtual reality
technologies to provide customers with more
intuitive visual walkthroughs, enabling them
to explore a bouquet of colors and textures
and make their choices along the way,
creating their own unique cache of choices.
Subsequently, consultants step in to complete
the decision-making process.
To facilitate this, we created a color
consultant app that allows consultants to
take pictures of customers’ home walls and
apply color and texture. The app renders
them instantly, providing a view of what they
would look like if painted in different colors
and finishes. The application is powered
by our CRM systems and other front-end
applications, such as our Paint Total app and
Visualizer app.
To further engage customers, we employ
a curated chat-like engine, using robotic
process automation technologies, to empower
dealers to recommend contractors to execute
jobs. This also allows us to track the entire
transaction to ensure customer satisfaction.
None of this would matter if we couldn’t
provide white-glove service to our customers.
Our call center handles around 100,000
customer interactions every day. Calls are
recorded and analyzed to better understand
niche requirements. Customers’ need for
Vastu consulting (an Indian equivalent
of Feng Shui, the Chinese philosophy of
arranging personal surroundings in harmony
and balance with the natural world) is a
niche requirement that we’ve added to our
menu of services and embedded into our
mobile app after listening to many customer
calls over the past two years. This has
enabled us to better understand and stan-
dardize the process.
No digital makeover is complete without
a website component designed to educate,
encourage and entertain our customers in
their home improvement quest. To that
end, we’ve launched websites such as
www.beautifulhomes.com to create curated
customer experiences. These are geared
toward storytelling and are not linked with
sales. Our next step will be to discover ways
to monetize these sites.
OO Achieving omnichannel consistency.
In our relentless focus on enhancing
satisfaction, we embarked on an initiative
to provide a seamless experience to
customers, dealers and influencers across
physical, digital and human channels.
When we began this journey, our data
architecture wasn’t able to fully support
the required changes.
To overcome this, we mapped the
customer journey across channels and
built a data architecture and IT platform
powered by SAP enterprise application
software, such as Hybris Commerce,
Hybris Billing and Hybris Marketing. This
is combined with Adobe’s Experience
Management platform to provide a strong
IT architecture that covers both the
experience and transactional require-
ments of the company. This helped us
facilitate seamless journeys across physical,
digital and human channels. Powered
by insights from data gathered at each
touchpoint, the solution enables us to
generate unique offers to each customer’s
needs. A consistent view enabled by the
IT architecture empowers the call center,
stores and consultants, etc. to provide a
delightful customer experience.
OO Applying precision customer seg-
mentation by blending behavioral
and data science. Armed with our
foundational data architecture that
connects all systems, we’ve embarked
on mapping the customer journey across
our human, digital and physical channels
to create specific behavioral categories.
Supplemented by in-depth interviews and
research, this led us to segment customers
based on their demonstrated choices and
behaviors.
Our largest segment is a tech-savvy
persona who conducts a lot of online
research and becomes loyal to our brand
only after interacting and transacting with
us. Another customer type is a wealthy
person living in a tier-two city who tends
to display his accomplishments by painting
his home in a dazzling display of colors.
This customer prefers to deal with consul-
tants and requires human interactions.
We created a color consultant app that allows
consultants to take pictures of customers’ home walls
and apply color and texture. The app renders them
instantly, providing a view of what they would look
like if painted in different colors and finishes.
Courtesy of Asian Paints, www.beautifulhomes.com.

52
Selectively Applying
Best Practices
We applied a few best practices to guide and
inform our business and digital transforma-
tion journey. These include:
OO Marrying IT and business strategy:
At Asian Paints, IT strategy begins in the
boardroom. IT leaders are an integral part
of our organization’s operating council,
and thus are engaged with the corporate
strategy from the get-go.
OO Early adoption of emerging IT: Transfor-
mative vision needs early onboarding of IT
tools. Given our propensity for continual
reinvention, we understood that early (and
in some cases pioneering) adoption of IT
is critical to success. Early adoption of an
API-driven architecture worked very well
for us. While the front-end kept changing
rapidly, the back-end system remained
supportive. We were an early adopter of
HANA software and pushed its usage to
the core. This was a pioneering adoption
in India’s manufacturing sector. We also
evaluate emerging technologies on an
annual basis and plot them across the
business areas to determine possible oppor-
tunities and selectively execute them.
OO Applying design thinking to create
more intuitive applications. On the
people side, we’ve adopted the design
thinking methodology. We started with
a boot camp at Stanford University, and
after becoming certified coaches, we
trained others and institutionalized the
practice. The design thinking methodol-
ogy allows us to stay focused on customer
empathy, and reimagine solutions based
on our deeply observed points of view.
This has been the key success factor
driving successful adoption of our various
transformational applications.
We now use this approach for most of our
app development. For example, in the
past, when we pushed information to our
frontline workforce’s mobile device, the
apps weren’t well used. Using the design
thinking methodology, however, our IT
teams spent time shadowing the frontline
workforce, meticulously understanding
how they interact with customers and
at dealer counters. We noticed marked
regional differences in user requirements.
For example, in some markets, our regional
managers prefer to first view collections,
whereas in other metro markets, selling a
premium product was the main goal.
In some cases, this involved listening to
customer audio clips since these conversa-
tions occurred in vernacular languages
for which voice-to-text application was
difficult. We had collated clips, classified
them and made them downloadable on an
app to enable our employees to listen to
interactions. This provided many insights,
which are incorporated as features in
future releases.
OO Empowering dealers, minimizing
disruption. In the process of change,
we strive to minimize disruption for our
dealers and make them a partner in the
entire evolution. We consider them a key
stakeholder and focus on equipping them
with the right technology tools they need
to keep pace with a continuously rein-
venting Asian Paints.
Author
Harish Lade is Vice-President of Information Technology and Systems at Asian
Paints Ltd. In his 21 years at the company, he has led a variety of transformational
initiatives in diverse areas, such as next-generation consumer engagement platforms,
advanced supply chain planning systems, manufacturing execution systems,
robotics, advanced and predictive analytics, and external and internal collaboration
platforms. He is currently leading the IT team into the next wave of digital trans-
formation at Asian Paints that will accelerate the company’s vision of becoming
a forerunner in inspiring home décor. Harish holds a post-graduate diploma in
computer-aided management from Indian Institute of Kolkata, India, and a B.E.
in electronics engineering from National Institute of Technology, India. He can be
reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/harish-lade-6abb803/.

Cognizanti • 55
When it comes to capitalizing
on digital opportunities,
senior business and IT
leaders must do a better job
of foreseeing and overcoming
key disablement factors that
conspire to undermine their
best efforts.
In my previous Cognizanti column,1
I noted
that most legacy business executives I visit2
understand that the profitable use of digital
technology is crucial to business viability
and success. But on closer inspection, I get
the sense that while they see the “why,” they
often struggle with the precise “what” – as
in exactly which applications of digital will
result in real, tangible, material economic
contribution.
Increasingly, most senior executives with
whom I meet realize that the journey to a
more digitally enhanced business will not be
a one- or two-year program. It seems they
have a gut feeling that it will be an iterative
journey, one similar in scope to what it has
taken to transform their national business
into a global enterprise.
I recently conducted targeted interviews with
five executives who several years ago seemed
to be progressing effectively toward digitally
enhancing or changing their businesses.
All, it turns out, had endured very similar
experiences, from which the following six
lessons emerged (spoiler alert: not all have
succeeded).
They Greatly
Underestimated the Time,
Persistence and Struggle
Involved
Four of the five executives I interviewed had
quit in frustration or been fired. The one who
faced the earliest, most daunting challenge
had made the most significant lasting contri-
bution. He was onto the next plateau of digital
change: expanding the innovation beyond the
initial case, accommodating business model
change and achieving a recognized, positive
material economic impact.
All the executives mentioned that they had
misjudged the recognizable material outcome
of their efforts by a factor of 200% or more.
They, the pundits, consultants and vendors
had all failed to set, communicate and resell
the timeframe, difficulties and necessary
course corrections involved in their initiatives.
As preliminary timeframes were exceeded,
originally supportive senior executives
asked increasingly difficult, often unanswer-
Lessons from the
Digital Frontier
By Bruce J. Rogow
The Last Word

Cognizanti • 5756
without a cohesive team with the right
skills. The new, individually customized
and expanded service was aimed at smaller
customers with inadequate staff at the busiest
time of year. Customers were thoroughly
confused, and the distributor’s local reps had
little interest in helping or training them.
The company also never seemed to have
time for adequate after-action reviews.
It Wasn’t About
the Data, Analytics,
Mobile or IoT
In my previous Cognizanti column,3
I noted
that organizations large and small often chase
the technology and not the outcome. All of
the digital pioneers with whom I spoke said
their projects generated great data, insights,
mobile apps or clever IoT implementations.
Turning these new capabilities into business
contribution and profit, however, was a
struggle. The marketing executive vice-pres-
ident at a pharmaceuticals business described
how his company’s data analytics group had
discovered a major business opportunity.
However, when the CEO asked what had
changed in the business, the room went silent;
no one knew how to turn the new knowledge
into actions. He kept saying, “OK, what the
h… do we do now?” Three days later, the
digital analytics group was terminated.
Digital Enhancement
Is a Totally Different
Three-Ring Circus,
Requiring Different
Clowns for Each Ring
All the executives with whom I spoke under-
estimated how different digital enhancement
was from classic IT transformation projects.
They all had proven, experienced IT teams
and users but had not thought through the
implications of the three major forms of
digital enhancement,4
each of which demand
totally different skills, talents, process,
measures, incentives and culture:
OO Enhance the business (efficiency,
responsiveness, reach, flexibility, agility,
urgency, process change).
OO Enhance the products (intelligence,
self-diagnostics and remediation,
data, preventive maintenance, perfor-
mance, customer experience, customer
economics).
OO Change the business model (revenue
generation, required acquisitions, moneti-
zation, new markets, provocative change,
broader credibility, branding change,
realistic institutionalization at scale).
As an example of the final point, one pioneer
led a brilliant but unsuccessful effort to more
properly organize the business. With all that
can be done with digital technologies, the
CEO and board asked: “Why EMEA (Europe,
Middle East, Africa)?” Those individual
markets, products, channels, regulations and
cultures have almost nothing in common,
other than they can be reached from
Heathrow.
Digital technologies should allow this
company to organize globally by common
markets, products, channels, regulations and
cultures. So, they did. I’ll leave it to the reader
to imagine what could go wrong – much of it
had nothing to do with technology.
They Should Have
Expected, Managed and
‘Opportunized’ Inevitable
Setbacks, Challenges,
Complications
None of the five digital pioneers could
identify anything they tried that actually
went where they wanted, in the timeframe
they predicted, with the outcome desired.
As mentioned above, they hadn’t properly
set the expectations. The board and
senior executive pundits made it worse by
demanding compliance with the mantra of
“first-mover advantage.” For legacy businesses
in the land of “We don’t know what we don’t
know,” blind faith to competitive advantage
results in an unpredictable journey to digital
enhancement.
able questions, such as how long it would
take to deliver a material contribution. As
costs increased and measurable, acknowl-
edged results were pushed out, supporters
abandoned the initiative in fear that digital
was a slippery slope. According to a distribu-
tion industry CIO, a member of the executive
committee said the road to digital reminded
him of driving from the Midwest to Disney
World with his twin 6-year-old daughters in
the backseat, who constantly asked, “Are
we there yet? If it’s much further, can we go
home?” Two CIOs said they were denounced
as incompetent by a CEO board member.
The one successful digital pioneer, a CIO,
had strong board-level support from a former
CIO and digital veteran. He said he’d had
to deploy many tactics he’d learned in the
Marines Corp. and as a CIO: Establish critical
support at the outset; set and communicate
realistic expectations; ensure a broad team
comes together and stays deeply committed;
expect and power through setbacks; hold the
naysayers at bay; and be there to push forward
as milestones are achieved.
They Didn’t
Adequately Anticipate,
Focus on and Mitigate
the ‘Digital Disablement’
Factors
Most executives who pursue a more digitally
enhanced business identify and then act
on what they believe to be the enablement
factors of skills, sourcing, resources and
process. All five of the executives I inter-
viewed, however, said they hadn’t adequately
addressed what one described as the “digital
disablement factors.”
One oft-cited factor was corporate culture and
behavioral resistance. Both the dimensions
and domains of company and customer
culture proved an overwhelming obstacle
toward making adequate progress and buy-in.
A persistent and passive-aggressive chorus
hurled challenges such as: “Won’t this change
the nature of our business?” “Won’t this cause
our channel partners to abandon us?” “What
makes you think our classic customers will
want this?” “I know this is important to you
IT folks, but I can’t spare people this year.”
Other digital disablement factors that should
have been addressed more aggressively were
accounting conventions, human resource
policy and practice, incentives and a lack
of slack. Three of the digital pioneers were
shocked to find that the accounting system
under-reported their initiative’s revenue
contribution while dramatically enhancing
tabulated costs. To make matters worse,
a continuous battle also raged with the
company’s economic value-added (EVA)
mob, who shot down any innovation
initiative if it lacked immediate and major
returns.
One of the pioneers, a chief digital officer,
advised: “Own the measures, or the measures
of others will dominate you.”
Their Readiness
Assessment Should Have
Equaled or Exceeded
Risk Assessment
All of the executives did some form of risk
assessment on their ventures. Unfortunately,
these assessments were largely based on IT
and not digital experience. With the classic
IT approach, waterfall methodologies are
employed, and the use of the applications is
mandated as a condition of employment or to
do business with the enterprise. Most digital
applications and services, on the other hand,
are delivered with Agile methodologies to
an audience that can choose whether to use
the capabilities provided. All five pioneers
felt an iterative approach to enhancing risk
assessment was needed.
However, the greater exposure proved to be a
lack of a highly detailed readiness assessment
of the exact what, how, who, when and
where – not to mention the economics of the
initiative. The distribution industry digital
pioneer described how his company launched
in the wrong place to an unprepared market,

Cognizanti • 5958
The successful CIO pointed to early digital
efforts that initially resulted in great
customer satisfaction as a major outcome:
Problem installations of the company’s
product dropped from 30% to less than
3%. Under a corporately funded program,
digitally equipped and connected specialists
planned and then monitored the installations
for the first 90 days.
However, after the original corporate
funding dried up, revenues failed to appear
as customers refused to pay for the added
attention. No one predicted this, but the
CIO had warned senior leaders that there
would be major issues and adjustments.
Despite initial skepticism, the board and
CEO realized the business model, revenue
and pricing must change from product-
based to service-based. Massive marketing
investments, customer communication and
adjustments to accounting procedures, as well
as incentives, were required. Today, related
service revenues exceed the old product
revenues as customers increasingly chose
the service option. The enterprise is moving
toward managing its entire business in this
manner. It “opportunitized” what appeared to
be a catastrophic setback.
Learning from Failure
The demand for digital enhancement is
real. Digital enhancement requires more
than teammates with the ideas, desire and
passion to conceptualize a future business
state brought to life with digital technologies
and thinking. Happenators, as I described in
an earlier Cognizanti article,5
who can tackle
the exact what, how, who, when and where
are also required. Together, they must design
and execute an outcomes-driven approach.
Frankly, I seldom meet organizations that
have world-class talent in both arenas.
Organizations also can’t shy away from the
disablement factors that undermine digital
enablement. The chief digital officer of a
media company cited a five-step approach:
OO At the outset, identify the major and
possible disablement factors.
OO Rank the disablement factors and develop
an offensive game plan for each.
OO Monitor the status, relative exposure and
progress against each disablement factor.
OO Continuously identify disablement factors
and review them thoroughly.
OO If all else fails, go back to Step 2!
The digital game is afoot. Is your enterprise
on the road to winning?
Footnotes
1
Bruce J. Rogow, “And Now for the Hard Work,” Cognizanti, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017, https://
www.cognizant.com/whitepapers/the-last-word-and-now-for-the-hard-work-codex2676.pdf.
2
The focus of IT Odyssey is not on greenfield, born-digital enterprises but on large, existing,
often mature businesses with legacy management, products, assets, culture, customers,
markets and business models.
3
Bruce J. Rogow, “And Now for the Hard Work,” Cognizanti, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017, https://
4
Bruce J. Rogow, “Enabling the Digitally Enhanced Business,” Cognizanti, Volume 8, Issue 1,
2015, https://www.cognizant.com/whitepapers/the-last-word-enabling-the-digitally-enhanced-
business-cognizanti11.pdf.
5
Bruce J. Rogow, “And Now for the Hard Work”, Cognizanti, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017, https://
Author
Bruce J. Rogow is a Principal at IT Odyssey and Advisory in Marblehead, Mass.
Known as the counselor to CIOs and CEOs on IT strategy, Bruce has for the last
15 years conducted independent, face-to-face interviews with thousands of C-level
executives. Previously, he spent five years as Executive Vice-President and Head of
Research at Gartner Inc. Prior to that, he was Senior Managing Principal at Nolan,
Norton & Co. Bruce can be reached at Bruce@ITOdyssey.com.

About Cognizant
Cognizant (NASDAQ-100: CTSH) is one of the world’s leading professional
services companies, transforming clients’ business, operating and technology
models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach
helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses.
Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant is ranked 230 on the Fortune 500 and is
consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world.
Learn how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com or
follow us @Cognizant.
U.S. Headquarters:
211 Quality Circle
College Station, TX 77845
Tel: +1 979 691 7700
Fax: +1 979 691 7750
Toll Free: +1 855 789 4268
Email: inquiry@cognizant.com
India Operations Headquarters:
#5/535, Old Mahabalipuram Road
Okkiyam Pettai, Thoraipakkam
Chennai 600 096 India
Phone: +91 (0) 44 4209 6000
Fax: +91 (0) 44 4209 6060
Email: inquiryindia@cognizant.com
China Operations Headquarters:
Cognizant Technology Solutiions
(Shanghai) Co.
CN Shanghai You Do Space
ChuanQiao Road
Pu Dong New District
Phone: +86 21 6100 6466
Fax: +86 21 6100 6457
Email: inquirychina@cognizant.com
World Headquarters:
500 Frank W. Burr Blvd.
Teaneck, NJ 07666 USA
Phone: +1 201 801 0233
Fax: +1 201 801 0243
Toll free: +1 888 937 3277
European Headquarters:
1 Kingdom Street
Paddington Central
London W2 6BD
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7297 7600
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7121 0102
Email: infouk@cognizant.com
Philippines Headquarters:
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Philippines, Inc.
5th & 6th Floor,
8/10 Upper McKinley Road Building
10 Upper McKinley Rd.
McKinley Hill, Fort Bonifacio
Taguig City 1634 Metro Manila
Philippines
Phone: + 63-2-976-2270
Primary Global Delivery Centers:
Budapest (Hungary), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Guadalajara (Mexico), London (UK),
Manila (Philippines), Shanghai (China), Toronto (Canada); Chennai, Coimbatore, Kolkata,
Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, New Delhi, Cochin (India); Bentonville, AR;
Bridgewater, NJ; Des Moines, IA; Phoenix, AZ; Tampa, FL (U.S.).
Primary Regional Offices:
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Norwalk, Phoenix, San Ramon, Teaneck (U.S.);
London (Canada); London (UK); Frankfurt (Germany); Paris (France); Madrid (Spain);
Helsinki (Finland); Copenhagen (Denmark); Zurich, Geneva (Switzerland); Amsterdam (The
Netherlands); Hong Kong, Shanghai (China); Tokyo (Japan); Melbourne, Sydney (Australia);
Singapore (Singapore); Bangkok (Thailand); Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia); Buenos Aires
(Argentina); Dubai (UAE); Manila (Philippines).

Navigating the Digital Age: What senior leaders worldwide have learned from pushing the boundaries of change.

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