Innovation Journal - Cognizant

REINVENT - THE REAL DEAL
5. Since title and composer information is stored in the database after
the first instance is supplied, the productivity gain, for mp3 music
listeners, is incalculably high.
as 40-50 seconds. Due to this, we had to introduce an intermediate
screen called “Waiting for backend”. This became a big concern for
early adopters because it completely violated the 500 msec promise.
This design of CDDB, we believe, is the essence of social design. In
case you are not impressed by CDDB, consider the fact that it was
sold for $260MM to Sony in 2008.
CDDB inspired us sufficiently to build apps that delivered similarly
significant productivity gains.
Over the next few months, the team built out the MVP for
OneCognizant and we rolled it out to a few thousand select associates.
We were in stealth mode, another lean startup technique. Since there
was no launch mailer or any marketing communication, only those few
thousand associates knew of the existence of OneCognizant.
Feedback was slowly trickling in, and it was quite positive overall.
However, we hit a major roadblock that threatened our 500msec goal.
“Early adopters really liked the key features of the MVP – Web apps in
an app store, “Like” buttons, game mechanics, the Oneclick timesheet,
etc. Approval by e-mail for key transactions was a big hit with senior
management. But we had hit a big roadblock.
One of the core promises was the 500 msec response time. We were
able to approximate that target after a lot of struggle. However, when
the SoE (system of engagement) layer handed control to the back-end
SoR (system of record), a delay was introduced. This delay was as high
If we didn’t solve this problem, our core promise of a speedy
application was out the window.
Again, the team rose to the challenge. We engaged experts from our
Oracle Solutions Practice, Microsoft CoE (our CTO’s team),
Performance Engineering CoE (Testing Practice) and Data Architecture
CoE (Advanced Solutions Practice). We also engaged architects from
Microsoft. The cross-functional collaboration worked. We completely
eliminated the “Waiting for backend” screen by bringing the handoff
delay to a few msecs.
After much back and forth within the team, we launched the platform
to a global audience on April 30, 2011, just nine months after we
started the program. As per our self-imposed constraints, we didn’t
send any blast e-mails or any marketing communication.
We were all feverishly tracking the usage statistics with bated breath.
On Aug 10th, the 100th day after the global launch, we reached
100,000 unique users. That was a significant milestone in our journey
and confirmed our faith in the overall strategy.
So far, we have only covered the platform aspects and not the Web
apps. I want to highlight one app that is the exemplar for the 500%
productivity gain strategy. At Cognizant, we have been rolling out the
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