Demonstrating Resilience, Adaptability and Purpose through TCS’ Innovation Forum Series

Every year, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) hosts “invite-only,” premier Innovation Forum events in North America, the UK, Europe, Latin America, and Japan, bringing together thousands of senior business leaders focused on setting the innovation, research and technology agenda for the year ahead.

This year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we moved from our typical workplaces to our homes, focusing on employee safety and ensuring business continuity and delivering high-quality services to our customers. More than 95% of our 450,000 global employees have operated from home since March, being able to maintain or improve work productivity in the process due to our Secure Borderless Workspaces? (SBWS?) framework..

Throughout this crisis, technology has kept us connected and businesses running, even thriving. An example of how TCS demonstrated its resilience, adaptability and purpose was to reimagine the 2020 TCS Innovation Forum into a global format through a series of virtual events. This year, we engaged inspiring speakers from business, government and academia located around the world, to share their perspectives and advice on how to navigate the working world and innovate with new business models during a period of uncertainty.

The series kicked off with “A New Beginning: Purpose-driven, Resilient and Adaptable with Business 4.0?,” a global event hosted by TCS’ K Ananth Krishnan, CTO. For many leaders speaking that day, including Eash Sundaram, Executive Vice-president and Chief Digital and Technology Officer, JetBlue Airways, maintaining customer trust and keeping infrastructure up and running were crucial during the early days of the pandemic.

The second virtual event in this series, “A New Beginning: Safeguarding Our Workforce,” featured TCS’ NG Subramaniam, COO and Executive Director, and Ashok Krish, Global Head, Digital Workplace, who provided insights on how companies from different industries can make their workplaces more agile, resilient and safe. The third event, “A New Beginning: Operating Remotely and Autonomously,” featured TCS’ Regu Ayyaswamy, Global Head, Internet of Things and Engineering and Industries, and Krishnan Ramanujan, President, Business and Technology Services, who discussed how the need for reimagining business with remote – and eventually, autonomous – operations is essential to becoming a growth leader and future-ready enterprise.

The Innovation Forum events which continued over the summer months were equally relevant, focusing on building supply chain resilience, customer experience, innovation across countries, companies and communities, shifts in financial services products, and reimagining business in the 5G era. These events comprised of global industry leaders from manufacturing, retail and CPG, life sciences, healthcare, energy, and media and information services, among others.

Discussions included perspectives on how governments play a critical role in delivering health services to citizens; technology capabilities that are enabling banking institutions to be catalysts of recovery and key enablers for growth; organizational transformation from supply chains to supply networks and ecosystem commerce; and how 5G will be a technology gamechanger over the next few years, bringing universal access alongside technology innovations.

The 2020 virtual Innovation Forum events all had a similar theme focused on how businesses have navigated recent disruptions and are transforming their ecosystems by leveraging technology to drive resilience, adaptability and purpose to build competitive advantage. At the same time, these events made it clear that businesses have turned their focus to driving change and delivering on their promises to customers by reinventing themselves and reinforcing their organizational purpose and commitment to their communities.

While events look different this year, we’re still connected virtually and look forward to executing similar events, as needed, for our customers, partners and TCSers in the future.