Innovation Journal - Cognizant

REINVENT - THE REAL DEAL
Clearly, the systems of engagement concept as described by Malcolm
and Geoff revealed a ray of hope that it is indeed possible to achieve
associate delight. But it meant that we had to completely overhaul how
we developed and deployed corporate IT applications.
Before we did anything, we needed to prove the concept to ourselves.
That meant we needed to demonstrate that we could tinker with
existing systems of record without major new investments and make
them behave like systems of engagement.
Given that we already had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in
our systems of record over the last 18 years of existence, we couldn’t
really make the case to reengineer all production applications without
massive new IT investments. In today’s cost-conscious world, that
approach is a non-starter.
To dramatically reduce the scale of the investment needed for such a
project, we decided that we would build a systems of engagement
layer on top of our existing systems of record.
We decided to tackle the timesheet app for the proof of concept. The
task: Convert the entire timesheet scenario (a 6-step process as
outlined in my previous post) into a OneClick timesheet.
Our goal: When the user clicks on the link to launch the app, s/he
should be taken directly to the timesheet screen (Step #5 in the 6 step
process mentioned in the previous post). Moreover, the app should
copy over the associate’s assigned projects from the previous
timesheet.
Based on the additional research we did on systems of engagement,
we realized that we needed a new method to design software, which
we internally call Social Design. Social Design leverages the idea that
we all work “socially” today, thanks to the advent of Facebook, Twitter,
Linkedin, Cweets (internal Twitter). It goes further by weaving “social”
deeper into the design of the application as opposed to “social” being
a separate layer. We also adopted Eric Ries’ “Lean Startup” method as
a way to reduce the risk of rolling out an entirely new class of software
that had few precedents in the enterprise IT arena in which we operate.
“Lean Startup” was also a great fit for the extremely quick turn-around
we were looking for – 6 months, instead of the usual multi-million-dollar
IT program with a 3 year schedule.
Given that the timesheet software was part of a third-party ERP
package, this would not be easy. Our thinking: If a OneClick timesheet
could be accomplished, why didn’t the third-party developer design it
as such to begin with?
Several internal experts said it wasn’t doable. Oops. What do we do
now?
Producing a OneClick timesheet proved to be a tough challenge
because the foundational software was a third-party application. But
our team persisted. We brought in experts from various parts of
Cognizant and solved the problem.
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