Innovation Journal - Cognizant

REWIRE - EXTENSIBLE ERP
particularly true in the IT services industry, where data exists in multiple
systems like time-sheets, vacation time, employee performance,
resource management, customer and company financials, invoices,
As I write this, CNN is broadcasting a heated debate. The contenders etc. What boggled me was the number of spreadsheets and
are vying for the post of “the most powerful person on Earth” - the PowerPoint slides one could end up with and how so much effort
President of the United States. One of the candidates quotes
was spent on going to the different sources, fetching the
former president John F. Kennedy, and it reminds me of
different data and consolidating all of it to make sensible
something I recently said to my teammates: “Folks, let’s not
decisions.
ask what delivery teams can do for smooth
operations but what the operations team can
At the account PMO level, the teams were
do to ease everyone’s work,” echoing
getting pelted with reports in varying
JFK’s famous quote, "My fellow
formats at the beginning and end
citizens of the world, ask not
of each month, quarterly and
what America will do for you,
in-between. Reports were
but what together we can do for
finance-, process- and peoplerelated,
while others were geared
the freedom of man."
toward executive and client
Having recently moved from delivery
leadership.
to operations, I was like the shoemaker
trying to wear his own shoes. I realized
With Cognizant’s goal to becoming a
that today’s information era has made us
“Tier1” IT services company by 2015, I
all data jugglers, with more to juggle every
thought, could we afford to spend our
passing day. However, it was becoming
efforts in doing business or measuring
clear that the biggest issue of the
business? Could we afford to spend time in
computer age was not data availability or
data consolidation or data analysis? That is
storage but getting the right information to
when the question struck me, “Wouldn’t it be
the right people at the right time, to enable
great if we had all the business operation’s
them to make the right decisions. This is Overview of Extensible ERP – A Holistic
parameters in a one-stop, single view?” Over
Business Health Management System
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