Innovation Journal - Cognizant

REINVENT - THE REAL DEAL
Now we had the germ of the idea proven. But where do we begin?
There were so many application systems on myriad technology
platforms. One of our teammates suggested that we do an
ethnographic (or anthropological) study to understand our users
better. That was a great idea. We pursued it.
We conducted this study by identifying the top 25 tasks that
associates perform using corporate IT applications. We decided that
the minimum viable product should be to OneClick-enable the top 25
tasks.
I am sure you see that all five constraints are “seemingly impossible.”
When we first mentioned the 500% productivity gain, the response
was eye-rolling skepticism. Though the OneClick timesheet proof-ofconcept
did improve productivity significantly, the team found it hard
to accept that a 500% gain was feasible or even attainable.
We needed some inspiration. We scoured the history of software
development, history being one of our favorite sources of inspiration.
We struck pay dirt with CDDB. Understanding CDDB’s brilliant solution
is key to understanding how to produce a 500%-plus productivity
gain, and it was a very simple idea. CDDB’s designers figured out:
Is this sufficient to produce associate delight? We went over the five
major problems, which we outlined in the first post, again and decided
that we needed to a few constraints to guide our designers. We came
up with five that would enable us to produce delightful designs:
1. 500 millisec response time for the applications.
1. A unique signature for a CD can be created by concatenating the
track number and track length of all the tracks on the CD.
2. When a CD is ripped for the first time, the ripper enters the title,
composer and singer information, which is stored in CDDB with the
CD’s unique signature.
2. 500% productivity gain from the previous way of performing tasks.
3. No change management effort – no mail blasts, no marketing
campaigns, no training/elearning, etc.
4. No e-mail alerts from the platform.
5. Apps should be rolled out in a few weeks instead of the typical
several months or years.
3. The next time someone else rips the same CD, CDDB furnishes the
title and composer info, which means the second and Nth ripper of
the same CD need not key in the information.
4. Combine this with the fact that the music industry is hits-driven, so
the CD collections of people have remarkable similarity.
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