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Q&A on Innovation With Cognizant's Development Team

We asked our global team of 10,000+ product experts, designers and engineers a few key questions about innovation, bringing together Cognizant’s vast knowledge of technology and how it impacts digital development.

The goal? To see what our people had to say based on their real-world experiences with clients. It’s a series we plan to continue in hopes of creating new conversations about technology. Here are some of our favorite answers to Round 1.

The Visioneer—Digital Innovation and Technology News

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  • Question 1:
    What technology trend(s) is dying and how is it being replaced?

    Top Answers:

    • “Separate apps and websites feel clunky and aged. They are being replaced with mobile-optimized websites or app experiences that are seamless and have the same look and feel across the two. Alternatively, each user experience may dial into a separate function. Starbucks is a good example. Its app is for ordering, finding information, whereas its website is for content displaying content. They don't try to mix the two.”
    • “It’s not really one of the big-buzz topics right now but, frankly, more and more folks are typing less. I imagine in the near future the adoption of digital voice will become a staple—especially as AI is deployed and the number of IoT devices continues to evolve and hit the market. Companies, and functions within those companies, need to understand how to utilize this.”
    • “Infrastructure. Companies that want to move fast will avoid managing a data center and should avoid cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as well. Platform as a service (PaaS) and serverless offerings are rapidly maturing. They now support running and infinitely scaling 12-factor apps packaged in containers.”
    • “Traditional data storage and data protection have been issues for enterprises across all industries. Blockchain technology is an elegant solution to the problem of storing, authenticating and protecting data. Blockchains— decentralized and secure databases which are self-managed—are going to be adopted in all ‘data heavy’ industries, especially in financial services and insurance.”
    • “So far, AI has been more of a buzzword than a reality for most enterprises. The coming year will be ripe for organizations to apply machine learning to real business problems. We need to put a plan in place and identify the groups and tools that can pilot new AI technologies that can be adopted enterprise wide.”
    • “Technology that's dying: Large monolithic platforms like ERP systems and on-prem platforms. Organizations where design, product, engineering and quality are walled off in silos have put handcuffs on the delivery process that need to come off. What's driving business: Digital products based on end user journeys; industries that have the ability to deliver digital experiences in order to engage customers wherever they are; products that are design led, but also use data to drive the product roadmap; and cloud native organizations, where business success is measured on key metrics like revenue growth and usage.”
    • “Monolithic architectures, tightly coupled architectures, on-premise deployments and hosting are all dying and being replaced with hybrid deployments using both on-prem and cloud. Other key building blocks include microservices and loosely coupled architectures. Resilience and reliability—including security enhancements—are getting more integrated into the application layer as the traditional view of infrastructure, or edge based security, is dying. More data driving analysis is beginning to aid decision making and automated decision making, without human aid, is gaining significant prominence as dependency on human intervention is going away. Automation is the future.”
    • “Development of native mobile apps reached their peak a few years ago and are now on the decline as new web app development techniques that are less time-consuming and costly to develop gain favor. Progressive web apps, single page web applications, and mobile friendly websites have all emerged as viable alternatives to native mobile apps. Web assembly is the next web technology which has the potential to further transform app development.”
    • “In my case it's not so much technology but development trends that are changing. In the discussion of waterfall vs agile, agile has emerged the clear winner. However, just being agile is no longer sufficient. There is a clear focus on marrying product, design and engineering as well as scaling agile practices to deliver valuable business results.”
  • Question 2:
    What growing digital trend do you think isn't yet being fully harnessed by business leaders to compete?

    Top Answers:

    • “The thought that digital transformation has an end date. Businesses need to realize that they must evolve and pivot based on how the customer landscape changes. Continued review of digital products that align with agile design and development pod structure is a must.”
    • “Platform as a service (PaaS) and serverless offerings. It is hard to give up control of the infrastructure that runs our applications. Historically, the infrastructure and operations of the infrastructure were part of the secret sauce that made applications and companies successful. This is no longer true for the vast majority of applications that are built today. PaaS and serverless offerings support scalability and high availability out of the box.”
    • “AI systems will be the key in the next five years. However, AI systems are only as good as the data we feed to them.”
    • “Optimizing the customer journey across multiple touch-points, training teams in new techniques, channels and disciplines, and using online/offline data to enhance the user experience.”
    • “Buzzwords like cloud, blockchain and augmented reality are all great, and will play a role in the future. But big organizations have a huge opportunity to up their digital product delivery by building and retaining talent, breaking down organizational silos, and measuring their software teams in business terms.”
    • “Conversational AI, autonomous decision making, on-demand chargeback combined with anytime/anywhere computing are all key trends that are developing but still nascent from an implementation and competition standpoint. Many auto insurers for example are working on revamping their entire business process to help provide customers a mile-based insurance policy—the less you drive, the lower your risk and hence the premium you pay. Similarly, insurance for cars with semi-autonomous or autonomous driving capabilities have to be completely rethought from the ground up, and traditional policies may no longer be relevant.”
    • “There is a lot of discussions about metrics, but not always about measuring what matters. Many agile frameworks are applied with rigidity. They just check boxes without fully understanding the power that tools and processes have on outcomes. Measuring the right things can yield amazing results, just as measuring the wrong things can be a team's downfall.”
  • Bonus Question:
    Can you tell us a way that Cognizant Softvision is helping your clients stay in the lead through digital engineering?
    • “It's simple. As a partner, we build teams that are dedicated to our client's business success. We measure those teams based on that business success, and we have a reward and incentive program that rubs off on clients as we deliver.”
    • “We have the capability—through our core competencies—to help customers derive meaningful use cases and define valuable MVPs to test the market and drive full-fledged implementation. We do this at both the speed and scale required to either create new markets for them, or to have first mover advantage in many of their existing markets.”
    • “Cognizant Softvision's Pod Model ensures that each client’s dedicated product-delivery pod is tracking metrics within four dimensions: Productivity, Quality, Business Impact and Autonomy. The metrics within each dimension are defined by pod and client, and a maturity path for each dimension is laid out. This ensures clear goals, alignment with our clients, and most importantly the ability to measure value added over time as our pods reach amazing levels of maturity.”

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