Realizing the Future of Work Today

Globalization; virtual business processes; millennials and cloud technologies are reshaping the future of work. Here's a proven framework to help organizations prosper in this new environment.

Forces Driving Change

Four interconnected and irreversible forces are shaping the future of work.

• Globalization allows companies to tap skilled workers worldwide and perform work wherever it can be done most cost-effectively and with the highest quality. This helps them to leverage global supply chains and fulfill demand worldwide.
• Virtualization of IT systems, business processes and teams is enabled by technology advancements and declining communication costs. This extends beyond providing more cost-effective, energy efficient and flexible servers, storage, and applications. It also enables new collaboration platforms that make it easy for virtual organizations to share knowledge dynamically within the organization and with partners and customers.
• Millennials (those now between 15 and 35 years old) bring a social, collaborative, technology-savvy mindset to business as both employees and as customers. Organizations that adopt this mindset can cement customer loyalty by aligning their brands and business models with a diverse, global, and technology-savvy consumer base. They can also attract the best and brightest employees by providing the same consumer-grade technologies in the workplace millennials use in their personal lives.
• The fourth force, cloud enables not only corporate applications, but social networking, high-bandwidth computing and mobility. Cloud-enablement supports collaborative systems that extend or replace traditional transactional systems and deliver knowledge and insights to the right people, in the right context, place and time.

Achieving New Performance Thresholds

Over the past two years, we have worked with clients to create a proven methodology to help organizations embrace these forces of change and create greater business value.

Using this methodology, we map a company's business position, infrastructure portfolio, and software applications portfolio against four value levers: virtualization, effectiveness, innovation and efficiency.

Fig 1: The four value levers and how they improve the business.

Driving Benefits Through the Four Value Levers

Efficiency: Rapidly implement solutions that optimize spend, reduce unit costs, and improve your bottom line.

Effectiveness: Process optimization that fosters quality Improvements, increases adaptability of ongoing operations and reduces time-to-market for products and services.

Virtualization: Improved flexibility and collaboration across the enterprise through technologies that allow better resource utilization, development and sharing of new ideas, and knowledge management for global workers.

Innovation: Business models that drive additional revenue and strengthen bottom and top lines, including joint go-to-market opportunities with shared investments and revenue.

The methodology for unlocking business value is divided into two phases. The first is optimizing processes for near-term cost efficiencies. Here we apply Lean principles to wring costs out of operations, eliminate waste, leverage economies of scale and global service delivery, and extract maximum efficiency from IT and operational processes.

In the second step, we extend value by migrating business–critical activities to next-generation solutions. We identify business processes that can be fundamentally transformed when standardized, virtualized and delivered via the cloud—an emerging offering known as Business Process as a Service (BpaaS). Looking beyond traditional cost containment, these BpaaS solutions enhance business effectiveness and drive innovation by supporting the creation of new products and/or services that enhance the top line.

Summary

There is no escaping that the future of work and of every organization is being reshaped by globalization, the virtualization of teams, processes and technology, the rise of millennials and cloud-enabled services. A proven methodology can help organizations prosper in this new environment by achieving maximum process efficiencies and then to extend competitive advantage by delivering transformational products and services.

Read more about Cognizant's Value Creation Framework and how our Next Gen Solutions move clients beyond cost savings to business transformation. Read the complete white paper The Future of Work Has Arrived (PDF).