The ISG Operating Model

At the core of ISG's success lies a meticulously crafted operating model that empowered us to drive innovation, execute strategic plans, and deliver impactful solutions with efficiency and scalability. This chapter delves into the intricate details of our operating approach, shedding light on the methodologies we employed and the collaborative spirit that fueled our journey.

The Story of ISG series

• Overview
• Chapter 1: Crafting an Industry Identity & Offerings
• Chapter 2: Crafting Industry-Centric Offerings
• Chapter 3: Collaboration - The Keystone of Innovation
• Chapter 4: Beyond Dollars: ISG's Influence and Brand Impact
• >> Chapter 5: The ISG Operating Model

What started as a simple question: "how do we consolidate our industry investments and drive innovation effectively" ended in a global organization with senior industry experts and a team of nearly 400 talented engineers who developed and implemented industry-shaping solutions within our clients' environments, both greenfield, and brownfield.

ISG had a much broader impact on the 54,000 professionals who engage daily in client projects because of the vertical-focused solutions we took to market and this network of delivery professionals because a much larger virtual practice for ISG than the direct reports in our group.

Our operating model consists of the following four focus areas:

1. Strategy
2. Offerings & Solutions
3. Partnerships
4. Industry & Events

1. Strategic Planning: Charting the Course

Our journey began with strategic planning, a critical process where we identified the major trends and challenges in our industries. This was not a mere exercise in speculation; it involved rigorous research, discussions with industry experts, and a deep dive into market dynamics. Our goal was to narrow down our focus to a few key areas, or "big bets," where we believed we could make a significant impact.

For instance, in the telecommunications sector, we recognized the pivotal shift towards digital service providers (DSPs) and concentrated our efforts on solutions that supported this transition. By aligning our strategy with the evolving needs of our clients and the market, we ensured that our initiatives were relevant and impactful.

Activities:

• Identify Industry Trends: Leveraging market research and expert insights to pinpoint emerging trends and competitors shaping our markets.
• Where we should play: Select 2-3 key focus areas (big bets) based on internal strengths, market attractiveness and competitive advantage.
• Draft solutions: Hypothesis use cases and possible solution sets to address industry pain points and business needs, aligned to our big bets
• Engage with broad internal stakeholders: account teams, service line commercial teams, delivery leaders, US and global leaders, topical experts
• Push the strategy submission out to corporate strategy, review with CEO, marketing and key executives.
• Regular refresh (additions and exclusions of focus areas) throughout the year. We owned the strategy and we treated it as a living-breathing document, not slide-ware exercise.

2. Offerings & Solutions

Offerings versus Solutions

Offerings and solutions are two key components that play distinct roles in my approach to addressing industry challenges.

Offerings are comprehensive packages that encapsulate your organization's diverse capabilities, providing a unified solution to address specific industry needs. This approach marks a shift from service-line-led offerings to a more integrated approach, where offerings are tailored to specific industry verticals. The focus is on driving large deals, identifying new buyers, and managing the full offering lifecycle to align service investments with the industry strategy.

On the other hand, solutions are more technical in nature and include a combination of products or platforms that are aligned with the identified focus areas or "big bets." These solutions are "wrapped" with services such as systems integration, analytics, engineering, quality assurance, and testing, ensuring a seamless deployment, delivery, and operation. Cognizant's solutions often rely on alliances with major technology providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, as well as a network of specialized software vendors. The emphasis is on building and co-selling these solutions with partners and customers, leveraging existing solutions, and adding end-to-end architecture and standards for interoperability.

In summary, offerings provide a strategic, industry-focused package of Cognizant's capabilities, while solutions are the technical implementations that bring these offerings to life, often in collaboration with partners and leveraging existing technologies.

Activities related to offerings & solutions

• Drive service investments and focus on alignment to industry strategy

• Build and co-sell solutions with partners
• Build and co-sell solutions with customers
• Drive large deals, new buyer profiles and high margins opportunities with our internal sales team

Offering Lifecycle Management: From Conception to Market

Central to our model was the Offering Lifecycle Management (OLM) framework, which guided us from the inception of an idea to its launch and beyond. This framework was built on several key components (which further expand to hundreds of line-item actions):

Definitions of the OLM framework in Figure 2:

1. Offering Definition & Strategy: We started by defining the offering, understanding the market landscape, and crafting a compelling value proposition. This stage was crucial in setting the foundation for our offerings.
2. Sales Playbook Development: Next, we created a Sales Playbook, which included client-facing decks, sales brochures, explainer videos, and other essential materials. This playbook was the cornerstone of our sales efforts, ensuring that our team had all the tools they needed to effectively sell the offering.
3. Sales Education & Enablement: To ensure our sales team was well-prepared, we conducted eLearning sessions and training workshops. This stage was vital in aligning our sales efforts with our strategic vision.
4. Technical Delivery Preparation: We also focused on ensuring that our technical delivery was top-notch. This involved creating resource pyramids, project archetypes, and delivering training to our technical teams.
5. Systems Integration: A crucial part of our OLM framework was integrating our offerings into our systems, including the OLM Master Catalog, CRM system, Sales Enablement platforms, and others.
6. Offering Project Management: Finally, we closely monitored the progress of our offerings through bill of materials checklist tracking and offering-level reporting.

Repeatable and Reproducible Offerings & Solutions: The Key to Scalability

A fundamental principle of our operating model was the focus on repeatable and reproducible solutions. This approach allowed us to minimize the need for custom work for each client, thereby reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Repeatable Solutions: By creating solutions that could be used multiple times, we spread development costs across multiple clients and minimized customization. This not only reduced costs but also improved the features of our solutions with each implementation.

Reproducible Solutions: Our solutions were designed to be flexible enough to be adapted for different functional domains. For example, our intelligent monitoring solution for media streamers was initially targeted at digital fulfillment operations. However, by adding layers of AI and analytics, we expanded its applicability to ad sales, telecommunications, and programming.

For example: we launched an intelligent monitoring solution for media streamers. The initial target was for digital fulfillment operations (sometimes known as the distribution and fulfillment NOC/BOC). The tool answered fundamental questions about the performance of the streaming content at the consumer device. However we added layers of AI and analytics so we could target not only the fulfillment ops folks: for ad sales it helped monitor ad playout and skips, for telcos it provided a way to connect between network delivery and content performance (allowing the head of a telco network to sell a revenue generating service to their media clients). For programming the solution represented a way to collect playout data that they could get from Nielsen, Apple or Netflix. Reproducibility is key because sometimes your sales org lacks specific relationships in one function but the solution allows them to sell the same solution to multiple stakeholders within one account, thus increasing the likelihood of a hook and sink!

3. Partners & Alliances

We already covered the importance of partners and alliances. As ISG we did not compete with corporate alliance teams, but complemented them. We were the industry experts, engaging with industry focused functions within the partner, and this resulted in better partnerships and elevated the status of Cognizant alliance within the partner networks.

Activities:

• Annual industry planning with partners (strategy, plays, joint go-to-market)
• Drive consumption for cloud platform alliances through industry solutions
• Launch specialized solutions on partner platforms
• Training & Skilling of delivery teams (technical know-how) and ISG commercial and solution strategy leadership (business/functional knowledge of partner solutions)

4. Industry & Events

Since we defined the strategic playbook and took offerings to market, we became the face for the industry at industry conferences and with industry associations. Our company's presence at key conferences was shaped by ISG in conjunction with marketing so we would tell a consistent story to the market and meet our partners and clients at the events.

Activities

• Industry story narration
• Conference production planning of themes, booth, client meetings, client events (examples: Mobile World Congress Barcelona, NAB, Dreamforce, TMForum Digital Transformation World Copenhagen, MWC Las Vegas)
• Industry POCs
• Demo development/prototypes
• Partner Offering & Solution positioning,
• Partner events, Cognizant presence at Re:Invent, GCPNext, etc.

Operating Model Organization

The following chart depicts our operating model for the ~400 people at ISG:

The number of people in each group varied depending on the number of new solutions launched, demand from our commercial org. The largest group was in our delivery, which was based in India, while our commercial team (in blue) was based in NA where 80% of our revenue came from.

The five key practices are split by industry/function:

• Communications, M&E and Tech ISGs, which had great industry leaders with 30+ years experience each: Naveen Suri (Comms), Gabriel Berger (Media) and Jacqueline Morgan (Tech). I am lucky to have had the opportunity to work with these leaders and their teams who brought discipline, deep domain knowledge and passion that energized every person we worked with, internally and externally. Special thanks to Elaine Haher , Joseph Dervin D'Cunha , Siddharth Khatri , Ram Selvarajan , Jeff Davidson , Stan Iyer , Kaleeswaran Ganapathy , Ravish Tayal , Surajit Paul , Alok Jain in ISG (just to name a few). Special thanks to the many leaders across the company who believed in our mission and supported us over the 5 years of inception: Dharmendra (DK) Sinha , Vivek Kwatra , Sriram Vaithamanithi , Ajmal Noorani , Laurie Hutto-Hill , Chad Andrews , Michael Valocchi , Badhrinath (Badhri) Krishnamoorthy , Harvey Stotland , Todd Weinert , Thomas Knight , Anh Tran , Catherine Roberto Karas , Nirav Patel , Rolf Carlson , Michael J.G. Reid , Noah Beltran , Michael Medina , Michael Luzzi , Mark Kizzar , Biji Michael , Daniel Weinbaum , Nag Kamath , Corey Olfert ???? , Michael Russell , Gina Moran , Zahra Gould , Shane Brentham , Josh Blumenthal , Malcolm Frank , Gajen Kandiah
• IAT: This was our "secret sauce": the innovation accelerator team, lead by Richard C. combined design thinking & human-centered design (HCD) methodologies to drive rapid, proactive solution development through co-innovation with partners, clients and account teams. IAT originated in an agency that Cognizant acquired a few years back and having this capability to facilitate client/partner discussions significantly elevated our footing in the market.
• Delivery organization: ISG had a dedicated team of 350 professionals who were staffed to sold programs. In addition where are 50,000+ professionals who engage on client programs for our industry grouping (out of the nearly 400,000 employees at Cognizant). Think of ISG delivery as the experts in the industry while the rest of the delivery teams, who come from our service lines, represent the complete CMT footprint on client programs. We nurtured ISG delivery team to be the functional experts in the industry and to absorb and capture knowledge gained by the larger delivery organization to keep our technical expertise current.

Summary

Collaboration: The Fuel for Innovation

Collaboration was the lifeblood of our operating model. We fostered a culture of collaboration both internally and externally to drive innovation and achieve our goals.

Internal Collaboration: We brought together experts from different service lines across the entire company to create cross-functional teams capable of tackling complex challenges from multiple angles. This approach ensured that we leveraged the diverse expertise within Cognizant to deliver holistic solutions. It also allowed us to ensure that the hundreds of associates connecting with our clients on-site are using common terminology, have access to a centrally maintained blueprint and become a funnel for the solutions we push to market.

External Collaboration: We also actively sought partnerships with industry leaders and innovators. By co-creating solutions with our partners, we stayed at the forefront of technology and maximized our impact in the industry.

Footnote: If I neglected to list your name in the article: comment here and share with the world what your experience working with ISG was - and I will EDIT the article to include your name too!