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Meeting Challenges of a Dynamic Market Landscape

Abstract

Faster time-to-market and a premium customer experience at each touchpoint in a customer lifecycle are the new tenets in the shift towards a digital business environment. Companies today, across industries, are looking at Next-Gen IT outsourcing partners who can not just help reduce total cost of ownership and improve operational efficiencies, but also enable them to succeed in this digital shift through provision of business focused IT and superior customer services.

Need for Next-Gen Application Outsourcing

Present-day businesses are working towards refining the customer experience even when in a constant state of disruption. Be it technological change, global uncertainty or customer expectation, businesses are trying to provide uninterrupted services across geographies.

The changing market landscape and customer needs are pushing businesses to reduce the time-to-market and be extremely agile in delivery. This demands IT outsourcing vendors to not just offer traditional application development but also introduce new functionalities and capabilities in real-time.

The below diagram depicts the factors that are changing at the marketplace causing businesses to change the way they work. These are also critical drivers that are forcing IT vendors to move to Next-Gen Application Outsourcing.

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Ecosystem for Next-Generation Application Outsourcing

Next-Gen Application Outsourcing is a complete ecosystem and is much more than a disruptive technology. We believe that at the heart of Application Outsourcing lies Next-Gen Technology which is changing the way traditional Application Outsourcing has worked. Moving to Next-Gen Application Outsourcing requires a shift from conventional mindset across all aspects of IT engagement.

Below is the table depicting that how the mindset has changed across the IT Landscape.

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Delivering Next-Generation Application Outsourcing

Coforge has developed a six pillar Next-Gen Application Outsourcing framework which is future ready, automation-driven, and risk averse.

Conventionally, outsourcing has been the ‘go to’ strategy for reducing cost and improving business efficiency. In traditional outsourcing, vendors provide only a specific service, such as business applications, operating systems and tools, or databases. A certain number of vendor employees’ work for a pre-determined number of hours, per week or month to provide these technical services to the client. However, they do not necessarily help companies decide what else they can do to achieve business benefits.

In contrast, our Next-Gen Application Outsourcing framework enables clients to transform the businesses as per the changing environment. It is implemented in accordance with the need of the customer and digital trends in the industry. This framework helps us to become strategic partners to the clients and assume the role of advising clients on solutions that will have a direct impact on their business.

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This framework has six pillars, four of which are verticals and encompass the delivery components that are divided into Application Development and Application Maintenance, and two are horizontal-focused, which cut across all IT services. The pillars incorporate a judicious blend of IT execution strategy and business strategy to ensure optimum level of transformation and service delivery in client engagements. These pillars and their respective elements are deployed and adapted to deliver a value proposition consistent with the needs of individual clients.

Each pillar with its components is described below:

  • Scale Digital

    With reduced time-to-market, faster product launches and enhanced competition, Coforge has a dedicated practice to constantly adopt, develop, and leverage Digital for our clients. Our Digital offering includes both horizontal capabilities and vertical-focused offerings. We are focusing on Digital Integration, Digital Experience, and Digital Analytics as three sub-offerings of Digital. On the digital landscape, new technologies are emerging while our current focus is on IoT, Mobility, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Business Process Management. Significant portion of our investments goes into continuously scaling these digital services.

  • Integrated Delivery

    The boundaries of Application, Infrastructure, and Operations teams are getting converged through the use of cloud environments and SaaS products. An increasing number of clients are looking for integrated contracts and one team which could support their entire IT landscape. Coforge acknowledges this fact and has invested considerably in development of integrated teams, processes, and frameworks in areas of transition, delivery, and continuous improvement. We have shared service centers and tooling investments for effective integration.

  • Smart IT

    Smart IT is another pillar that moves away from the current model of Application Outsourcing. Smart IT allows us to be more effective and efficient in existing contracts and enables us to build a customer aligned proposition for new clients. There are five key areas where Coforge is building capability.

    • Automation to provide faster, cheaper, and better solutions and services. Coforge has a fully matured automation framework covering nine components of the IT lifecycle. These include Development, Test, Maintenance, Infrastructure, Service Desk, Performance Management, Business Processes, Robotic Processes, and Data Management.
    • Lean IT to optimize process, eliminate waste, and increase productivity of resources.
    • Business aligned IT to move from solving technology problems to business problems, by shifting focus from SLAs to BLAs.
    • New age commercial models ranging from time and material to fixed price to output/outcome based models.
    • Transformational application portfolio rationalization, legacy modernization and decommissioning, innovation labs, and digital maturity assessment.

  • Agile Leadership

    In this world of ever-changing requirements, it is imperative to move from traditional waterfall methodology to an agile environment. Coforge is leader in agile delivery with its homegrown Global Agile framework as its backbone. Global Agile framework ensures speed, scale, and certainty to provide predictability for agile projects. We deliver agile projects ranging from fixed price to output-based (FP or story point), to outcome-based project. We have also adopted Kanban as a variant of Agile to support projects.

  • Service Culture

    Coforge believes that service culture is an important dimension for any company if they want to move towards a newer way of working. We have built innovation into our culture through our campaign Hi-5. We have adopted leading industry standards through programs like “Up Your Service,” “Ignite,” and “Inspire.” Using these initiatives, we help clients reduce cost and generate more revenue. This enables us to move to the role of a strategic partner for the client.

  • Partner Ecosystem

    For effective Next-Gen Application Outsourcing, it is critical for a system integrator to have relevant partnerships in place, which can enable them to meet the client requirements. Coforge has partnerships in place for PoC-based solution, ERP, Shared Services, Integrated Delivery, RPA, and application development across different technologies, verticals, and geographies.

Success Story 1: Streamlining Operations with a Flexible, Centralized System

Coforge partnered with a publicly held personal line insurer in the US to develop a flexible, centralized system for the commercial and personal lines agents to help them quickly access data on hand-held devices. The centralized system standardized and streamlined the client's processes—enriching the overall experience of the agents

Success Story 2: Unlocking Agility in Data-Driven Business Processes for a Leading Asset Management Firm

A leading asset management firm wanted to overcome the challenges of process inefficiencies, manual efforts in managing data, and lack of measurement framework. To help them deal with these challenges efficiently, we helped the client centralize operations, ensure data standardization and operational efficiency basis proprietary ProcessGymTM methodology, Knowledge Management framework, and Operational Excellence Center approach.

Success Story 3: Customized Regulatory Reporting System for a Leading Financial Institution

The client, a leading global financial institution, wanted strong data management capabilities and an automatic reporting system that could support the company’s analytics and decision-making capabilities. We created a single source of truth at the organization level for all management reporting and decision-making—delivering more value.

 

Road Ahead

The future belongs to the best-of-breed service providers who understand what their clients want and utilize latest technology to provide it, says a National Outsourcing Association (NOA) research. Coforge’ Next-Gen Application Outsourcing framework will enable us to help clients align with dynamic market drivers. The framework is proven to deliver client's business priorities and provide effective solutions through services with a product mindset.

About the Author

Deepti Mishra is a Presales Consultant with Coforge’ Service Design Group. She holds a MBA degree from IIFT, New Delhi, and B.Tech from NIT Allahabad. She has more than 12 years of experience in the IT industry and has worked on Application Outsourcing, Offshoring, and Business Transformation for multiple clients. She has been instrumental in defining the approach and levers for Next Gen Application Outsourcing at Coforge. Her focus is to create superior technology driven business solutions for the client.

Rati Mehrotra is a Presales Consultant with Coforge’ in Service Design Group. She holds an Exec. MBA degree from IMI, Delhi. She has more than 12 years of experience in the IT industry and has worked on Business transformation initiatives and outsourcing solutions for multiple clients. Her focus is on creating strategies to help organizations maximize their ROI from IT investments. She has been instrumental in defining the approach and levers for Next Gen Application Outsourcing at Coforge.

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