outcome-focused it delivery: the next step in the continuous improvement journey
TRANSCRIPT
Outcome-Focused IT Delivery: The Next Step in the Continuous Improvement JourneyAs enterprise IT organizations adapt to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape, they need to align traditional “bottom-up” delivery assurance techniques and maturity models with “top-down” business priorities to enable innovation to blossom.
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Executive SummaryThe era of “business as usual” IT delivery is over, putting IT
organizations once again at a crossroads. Several factors
are causing a rethink of the conventional notions of delivery
excellence, including unprecedented market uncertainties,
disruptive technologies (social media, mobility, analytics
and cloud, or the SMAC StackTM), the blurring of boundaries
between traditionally siloed IT functions and the emergence
of managed services.
Long characterized by its ability to provide incremental
productivity or quality gains by fine-tuning internal IT
processes, delivery excellence has often been measured with
IT-specific metrics, such as defect density, availability and
mean-time-to-resolution. But what do these fine-grained
metrics mean in complex IT operations, where multiple
business stakeholders, delivery partners and service providers
must be coordinated worldwide to deliver business value?
The mandate is clear: IT organizations serving today’s global
enterprises must embrace delivery excellence strategies that
cross organizational boundaries and that are focused on
measuring IT’s impact on prioritized business outcomes.
To achieve this result, we suggest that forward-looking IT
organizations adopt two basic guiding principles in their quest
for delivery excellence:
1. Ensure a well-rounded focus on both process and
outcome. Mature and robust processes drive efficient
and predictable service delivery, but a focus on business
outcomes ensures that continuous improvement efforts
deliver value to stakeholders.
2. Take an end-to-end view of the IT value chain
and elevate delivery excellence beyond IT silos or
stovepipes. Delivery excellence programs that do not
holistically address all aspects of IT system delivery,
support and maintenance fail to deliver full value to
the business. Aligning disparate IT functions around a
shared concept of delivery excellence reveals new paths
for gaining big improvements in quality, cost reduction,
delivery speed and stakeholder satisfaction.
IT leaders across industries frequently report that their pursuit
of delivery excellence is stymied by the lack of contemporary
frameworks that holistically address the complexities of today’s
IT value chain, while at the same time mapping to measurable
business outcomes. To address this need, we have leveraged
our experience working with a broad mix of IT organizations
and maturity models (e.g., CMMi,1 ITIL,2 etc.) to develop our
own best-in-class, or BIC, framework. By combining top-down
and bottom-up assessment techniques with the realities of
complex, global, multisourced IT landscapes, we believe that IT
organizations can achieve breakthrough improvements in the
range of a 25% to 30% gain in cost, quality and speed, while
delivering a superior customer experience.
In the sections that follow, we explore our two guiding
principles in greater detail and outline the basic constructs
of the BIC framework. We conclude with a case study that
demonstrates how this new approach to delivery excellence
has driven breakthrough business value.
OUTCOME-FOCUSED IT DELIVERY: THE NEXT STEP IN THE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT JOURNEY 3
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Defining IT Delivery ExcellenceBroadly speaking, we define “IT delivery excellence” as the set of continuous improvement efforts designed to:
• Deliver products and services better, faster and cheaper.
• Provide greater stakeholder satisfaction at business/technology touchpoints.
• Enable sustainable competitive advantage for the business.
In our view, delivery excellence must provide well-rounded, transformational value on a sustained basis that positively influences business outcomes.
The New Normal of IT Delivery ExcellenceAs enterprises across industries confront prolonged global economic uncertainty, changing market dynamics and disruptive technology upheaval (e.g., the SMAC Stack), IT organizations are increasingly being held to standards of delivery excellence that are more demanding than ever. Over the past decades, the ability to deliver 5% to 10% gains in incremental year-on-year productivity has been considered a healthy indicator of IT delivery excellence and a differentiator. But today, incremental gains are considered table stakes; IT organizations are expected to proactively meet and exceed such benchmarks just to keep the business competitive.
Not only are the stakes changing, but the structure of enterprise IT itself is also in the midst of a tremendous transformation that is reshaping expectations around delivery excellence. The myriad changes include:
• System development and system operations/maintenance are approaching one another and becoming more integrated as continuous integration and continuous delivery gain traction.
• The role of quality assurance (QA) is changing from performing software testing to providing business assurance.3
• Static physical infrastructures are moving to virtualized environments, and operations and infrastructure management disciplines are converging in the cloud.
• Vertical “silos” or “stovepipes” that had built up between IT functions over many decades are eroding; an “as-a-service” horizontal view of IT is emerging.
• Enterprises are engaging in more “multitower” initiatives in which success is defined by the ability to harness diverse IT capabilities to deliver business value.
In these circumstances, it is no longer sufficient for IT organizations to demon-strate delivery excellence in silos. Increasingly, IT organizations are expected to
IT organizations are expected to optimize the collaboration between IT functions, technology
platforms and sourcing partners to deliver more with less — greater customer satisfaction, better
quality and faster time-to-market — while reducing total cost of ownership, year-over-year.
OUTCOME-FOCUSED IT DELIVERY: THE NEXT STEP IN THE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT JOURNEY 5
optimize the collaboration between IT functions, technology platforms and sourcing partners to deliver more with less — greater customer satisfaction, better quality and faster time-to-market — while reducing total cost of ownership, year-over-year.
Guiding Principles for Delivery Excellence As IT organizations attempt to negotiate the new normal, there is a growing real-ization that many of the traditional notions of delivery excellence are outmoded and do not address current expectations. IT leaders preparing their organizations to succeed in the new normal must ensure that their delivery excellence programs adhere to the two guiding principles outlined below.
Guiding Principle # 1: Ensure a well-rounded focus on both process improvement and business outcomes.
Arguably, the most important goal of any IT organization is to ensure that it delivers outcomes that matter to business stakeholders. Despite this, “delivery assurance” or “delivery excellence” programs continue to focus on IT-specific process improve-ments that may or may not tie back to business priorities. While robust processes and controls are necessary aspects of predictable IT system delivery and continuous improvement, an exclusively process-centric view of delivery excellence that is divorced from the needs of the business/customer can lead to unintended conse-quences.
Consider the case of the customer communications management team at a leading U.S. insurer. Tasked with improving the time-to-market of customer-facing content, the IT delivery team invested a great deal of effort into improving the processes used for the release and dispatch of information from the headquarters to the field sales force. To the surprise of the team, the program resulted in only a marginal improvement in the time-to-market of the content.
By choosing to focus solely on streamlining the underlying processes, the team did not question how the dispatched information was ultimately being used and whether all of it was relevant. Only later, when the team challenged the value of the information being delivered, was it able to eliminate significant redundancies in the dispatched data. By shifting focus from simply speeding content delivery to delivering the right content, IT was able to deliver real value to the business and impact time-to-market in a meaningful way.
To meet today’s operational challenges, IT delivery excellence programs must focus simultaneously on IT process improvements and business outcomes. Every metric collected and every process documented should clearly map to one or more business benefits.
While robust processes and controls are necessary aspects of predictable IT system delivery and continuous improvement, an exclusively process-centric view of delivery excellence that is divorced from the needs of the business/customer can lead to unintended consequences.
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Guiding Principle # 2: Take an end-to-end view of the IT value chain and elevate delivery excellence beyond IT silos or stovepipes.
Enterprise IT organizations have a long history of organizing themselves into siloed technology groups or IT functions. As a result, it is not uncommon for enterprise IT organizations to have completely separate delivery excellence programs for appli-cation development, system operations, testing, etc. By limiting the focus to within the boundaries of specific IT groups, such programs typically end up leaking value and delivering sub-optimal results.
Consider the case of an IT division at a U.S.-based financial services institution that historically had two separate departments for new system development and technical operations (with development rolling up to the chief technology officer and operations to the chief operating officer). For decades, the development and operations teams had lived in completely different worlds, interacting only briefly during releases. The emergence of newer methodologies such as Agile and DevOps4 revealed significant challenges with this siloed approach. (See our white paper “DevOps Best Practices: Combining Coding with Collaboration” for more insights.)
One unintended consequence was that the two departments were being measured, rewarded and penalized on completely different criteria. While development was incented to deliver significant new functionality as quickly as possible, operations was encouraged to minimize instability and downtime. This lack of alignment created significant friction and inefficiency in the build-to-deploy processes.
To streamline the build-to-deploy operations and promote better integration, the organization decided to bring the two teams closer together. Importantly, a new measure of performance — “time-to-value” — was introduced. Defined as the time it takes for a customer to realize value from any work commissioned (i.e., the time required to conceptualize, design, develop, test and deploy code, followed by post-production fixes until the customer accepts the system), the time-to-value measure brought about a radical shift in behavior. Development started working more closely with operations to understand the nature of the production systems that their applications would run on. The operations group, for its part, engaged earlier in the development cycle to better understand what would be required for successful deployment. With both teams aligned around the same goals, delivery timelines were accelerated by 25% to 30%, and defects in production deployment were reduced by 30% to 35%.
As this example illustrates, delivery excellence cannot be achieved if teams continue to operate in silos. The pursuit of delivery excellence must look at the entire IT value chain across functions. The endeavor must go beyond IT stovepipes and barriers, integrate separate IT functions, optimize performance at the functional touchpoint and focus on value delivery.
With both teams aligned around the same goals, delivery timelines were accelerated by 25% to 30%, and defects in production deployment were reduced by 30% to 35%.
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A Holistic Framework to Drive Value-Based Delivery ExcellenceMany of the frameworks for IT delivery excellence in use today stem from the classical SDLC engineering tradition and focus primarily on granular process improvements in functional IT silos. While frameworks such as ITIL and models such as CMMi are useful and help ensure consistent, repeatable process execution and improvement, they do not fully address our two guiding principles.
In working with some of the world’s most sophisticated IT organizations, across a wide range of industries, we have consistently heard the same message: Modern delivery excellence programs need a new approach for continuously delivering greater business value.
At this point, we will examine the essential elements for any delivery excellence program developed for the modern enterprise. We will first provide an overview of our own best-in-class (BIC) delivery excellence framework. BIC leverages many well-established aspects of traditional IT/software maturity models, while incorpo-rating new elements to holistically deliver positive business outcomes. We believe BIC represents a new paradigm for transforming delivery excellence within large corporate IT organizations.
A Framework for Delivery ExcellenceThe main elements of the BIC framework are a hierarchy of performance indicators (outcomes, value measurements and metrics, and qualitative measures), bench-marked against the following:
• Four maturity levels (inception, functional, performing and best-in-class).
• A library of transformation themes linked to business outcomes.
• An assessment/continuous improvement methodology.
These framework elements are interdependent and are used to support three key activities:
• Benchmarking an organization’s current performance.
• Identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Developing a roadmap to drive transformational change.
Figure 1, next page, provides an overview of the main elements of the BIC framework.
Salient Features of the BIC FrameworkFeatures of the BIC framework include the following:
• A hierarchy of performance indicators to ensure adequate focus on both process and outcomes. The BIC framework has three levels of performance in-dicators: outcomes, value measurements and metrics/qualitative measures that cover the entire IT value chain.
Outcomes are the highest level of the performance indicator pyramid. There are four BIC outcomes, and each is focused on quantifying value to the business:
> Customer satisfaction.
> Quality.
> Time-to-market.
> Total cost of ownership.
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Every benefit achieved through a BIC delivery excellence program must ultimately contribute to one of these four outcomes.
If outcomes quantify the business benefits expected, the value measurements describe the contribution of specific improvement efforts for these outcomes. We found the value measurement concept useful for categorizing the impact of specific improvement opportunities/activities into logical groups (often to be addressed together) and linking those improvements directly to the expected business benefits (outcomes). IT leaders will often focus on delivering results against value measurements, while business stakeholders will ultimately be most interested in progress against the outcomes.
The BIC framework has eight value measurements (listed below by the outcomes to which they are most closely aligned):
> Customer satisfaction: Customer alignment and ingenuity/innovation.
> Quality: Operational/delivery excellence and risk mitigation.
> Time to market: Throughput and industrialization.
> Total cost of ownership: Cost efficiency and Cap-Ex-/Op-Ex optimization.
The relationship between outcomes and value measurement is illustrated in Figure 2, next page.
Figure 1
Best-in-Class Framework to Improve IT Delivery
App Dev App Value Mgmt Quality Engineering
& Assurance IT Infra
Mgmt Business Process Services
Throughput Cost Efficiency
Value Measurements
Risk Mitigation Industrialization
Quality
Outcomes
Delivery Excellence Maturity Levels
Cross-Area Synergies
Level 11Innceptioon
Levell 22Functioonal
Leveel 3Perforrming
Leevel 4Beest-in-Classs
Total Cost of Ownership
Time-to-Market CustomerSatisfaction
Customer Alignment
Innovation/Ingenuity
OperationalExcellence
Cap-Ex/Op-ExOptimization
Metrics/Qualitative Measures Across IT Service Lines
1. Assessment
5.Continuous
Improvement
2.Transformation
Roadmap
3. Pre-Implementation
Definition
4. Implementation
PerformanceImprovement
OUTCOME-FOCUSED IT DELIVERY: THE NEXT STEP IN THE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT JOURNEY 9
Figure 2
Outcomes and Value Measurements
Finally, it is in the metrics and qualitative measures (the lowest level of perfor-mance indicators in the hierarchy) that we find details on specific process areas. Metrics and qualitative measures cover familiar IT metrics, such as defect density, uptime, mean-time-to-issue-resolution, etc. Importantly, within our BIC framework, we chose to link each metric and qualitative measure to the value measurement category on which it had the greatest impact. Defect leakage, for example, would link to operational/delivery excellence under the quality outcome.
Every model has its limitations, and any attempt at hierarchical categorization invariably involves some sort of simplifying logic. In our framework, for example, it is sometimes difficult to say whether a specific metric and qualitative measure impacts one value measurement more than another. That said, we have found that the three-tiered hierarchy of performance indicators defined in our BIC framework is well-suited to balance the very different challenges of quantifying business benefits and measuring fine-grained process improvements.
• Four maturity levels for benchmarking against industry-leading levels of performance. While we believe that the BIC framework’s hierarchical model of performance indicators represents a powerful tool for building a comprehensive view of IT delivery performance, it is of limited value without context. To provide that context, and offer a quantitative measure of improvement opportunity, we developed a four-tiered maturity model and applied it to the values captured at each level of performance indicator.
The four maturity levels defined in BIC are (from lowest to highest):
> Inception: Minimal IT performance and quality disciplines adopted.
> Functional: Performance measured against service levels; focus on achiev-ing efficiency improvements.
> Performing: Performance proactively assessed for strengthening and creat-ing competitive advantage.
> Best-in-Class: Industry-leading performance; emphasis on continuous im-provement through innovation.
Quality
Customer Alignment Ingenuity/Innovation
Customer Satisfaction
Operational/Delivery Excellence
Risk Mitigation
Quality
Cost Efficiency Cap-Ex/Op-Ex Optimization
Total Cost of Ownership
Throughput Industrialization
Time-to-Market
Four Fundamental Outcomes Eight Key Value Measurements
Customer Satisfaction
Time-to-Market
Total Cost of
Ownership
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For metrics and qualitative measures, we found it useful to create a database containing benchmarked threshold values for each of the four maturity levels. These benchmarks are a combination of performance data collected across thousands of client engagements, as well as available industry data. To ensure that the BIC framework satisfies Guiding Principle 2 (i.e., it is holistic in its approach to the IT value chain), our benchmarks cover both “common” IT metrics, as well as metrics that are specific to various IT functions (e.g., QA, infrastructure, etc.).
• A library of transformation and improvement themes. In building our BIC framework, one of the greatest challenges we faced was aggregating and align-ing specific, granular process enhancements into outcome-focused improvement plans in a way that would be repeatable. To achieve this goal, we created a library of transformation and improvement themes.
Each theme in the library encapsulates some aspect of an IT process area that can be improved upon to deliver business value. Each theme covers one or more processes that can be measured and benchmarked using the BIC performance indicators. We developed this library to serve two purposes:
1. To aggregate specific, cross-functional process improvement opportunities — and their associated metrics and qualitative measures — into logical groups that are categorized by the value measurements that they impact (which, in turn, link directly to measurable business outcomes). This ensures that any program that applies the BIC framework is using a common vocabulary and set of measures when articulating its delivery improvement strategy and de-sired business outcomes.
2. To serve as a source of best practices, listing and detailing the specific mea-sures that can be undertaken to achieve some form of delivery transforma-tion/improvement in an enterprise IT organization. By sitting between the fine-grained IT processes and high-level business outcomes, transformation and improvement themes also serve as a bridge between bottom-up and top-down views of IT processes.
Transformation and improvement themes often cut across multiple value measurements (and hence may impact multiple outcomes). As an example, one transformation and improvement theme that we have identified in countless IT organizations relates to test automation. End-to-end test automation coverage and tools standardization is a theme that covers multiple aspects of an IT organization (development, testing, build and release) and will ultimately drive benefits around total cost of ownership, quality and time-to-market.
• A continuous performance improvement methodology that is both top-down and bottom-up. A continuous performance improvement methodology lies at the core of the BIC framework and helps create a cycle of sustained improve-ment. The methodology looks for improvement opportunities from two comple-mentary vantage points:
1. A top-down, outcome-focused review is conducted to understand the business priorities and how they map to the corporate IT strategy. Is there a mandate
For metrics and qualitative measures, we found it useful to create a database
containing benchmarked threshold values for each of the four maturity levels.
OUTCOME-FOCUSED IT DELIVERY: THE NEXT STEP IN THE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT JOURNEY 11
to cut costs? Speed time-to-market? Improve the end-customer experience? Where does the organization achieve the greatest “bang-for-its-buck” from a delivery excellence perspective? These inputs are used to organize, prioritize and focus the improvement opportunities identified by the bottom-up review.
2. A bottom-up, process-centric review is performed to examine the “how” of current IT operations and identify opportunities for improvement. The focus is on performance across IT functions — and the touchpoints between them — captured through established performance indicators.
The Promise: Delivering Unprecedented Value to the BusinessWe believe that the BIC framework — or approaches that incorporate similar design characteristics — can deliver significant business benefits well beyond the incre-mental gains associated with traditional IT delivery excellence programs (see Figure 3). As with any IT transformation program, success depends heavily on factors such as current organizational maturity, readiness to accept change, executive sponsor-ship, sourcing and technology landscape and budget.
That said, and based on our experience of working with IT groups on best-in-class delivery constructs, organizations that are able to control most of these factors to their advantage can expect to realize a 20% to 25% improvement in customer satisfaction, 25% to 30% superior quality, 20% to 25% faster time-to-market and 25% to 30% lower total cost of ownership over a two- to three-year time horizon.
Figure 3
Best-in-Class Benefits
Improved quality
Faster time-to-market
Desired Outcome Performance of Best-in-Class
Organizations vs. Median Peers
Increased customer satisfaction
Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO)
20% to 25% better customer satisfaction
25% to 30% superior quality
20% to 25% faster time-to-market
25% to 30% reduced TCO
Best-in-Class Performance
MedianPerformance
Best-in-Class Performance
MedianPerformance
Best-in-Class Performance
MedianPerformance
Best-in-Class Performance
MedianPerformance
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Quick Take What Does “Best-in-Class” Look Like?
Since developing our framework, we have seen some encouraging real-world results from clients with whom we have partnered on the BIC journey to IT delivery excellence. The following is how we helped a diversified financial services client achieve breakthrough business benefits by employing our BIC framework and adhering closely to our guiding principles.
Business ChallengeThe reconciliation function of a prominent line of business in a credit card, rewards, travel and business services company faced inordinately high operation-al costs, significant duplication of work and frequent customer complaints. Its performance on key business metrics such as transaction accuracy, cost per recon-ciliation, SLA adherence and reconciliation auto-match rate was 15% to 20% lower than industry benchmarks. Similarly, its performance on critical technology metrics, such as application availability and break-fix turnaround time, was also far lower than industry benchmarks.
SolutionA study was initiated using the BIC framework to identify opportunities to improve the performance of the recon-ciliation function. As our team looked across the client’s IT and business operations, we discovered significant areas of disconnect. Despite the inherent similarities that existed in skill sets, processes and technology, different lines of business were running their reconcili-ation activities in independent silos. Over many years, these independent silos had become almost impregnable — so much so that each line of business had developed its own ecosystem comprised of distinct processes and systems. Furthermore, each line of business had inde-pendent, dedicated teams for development, operations, testing, infrastructure and business process support.
Subsequent analysis revealed that moving the various business lines to a single, consolidated reconcilia-tion platform could cut costs by 20% to 30% through improved automation (matching and allocation) and greater standardization of practices and processes. This would also improve reconciliation accuracy and produc-tivity. An estimated 20% additional cost reduction could be achieved if the separate teams performing reconcili-ation in the individual lines of business were merged into a common horizontal utility.
Finally, it was also revealed that consolidating reconcilia-tion across lines of business would provide the requisite scale to make transaction-based pricing more attractive to customers than traditional headcount-based pricing. Further, this action would enable external service providers (looking to provide end-to-end reconciliation services in a managed services model) to pass on signifi-cant synergy and cost benefits.
BenefitsBased on these findings, the client decided to consolidate all of its reconciliation functions and move to a common platform, supported by a global utility operating on a transaction-based pricing model and run by an external service provider. The early results: Total cost ownership was ultimately reduced by 35% to 50% (see Figure 4).
Key TakeawaysThis case study demonstrates how the BIC framework employed both of our guiding principles. First, when looking at the client’s challenge (in this case its reconcili-ation operations), BIC helped ensure that our assessment was focused on the positive business outcomes that the client sought to achieve, not just areas of fine-grained process inefficiency (Guiding Principle 1). Second, in assessing where the greatest benefits could be achieved, we looked across functional IT boundaries and did not limit our improvement plans based on traditional organi-zational silos (Guiding Principle 2).
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Looking AheadIn the midst of continuing macro-economic turbulence, when it is all too easy to fixate on short-term challenges, there is a real danger of losing sight of the deeper trends reshaping IT. As IT grows in strategic importance to the business, and emerges from the shadows of being a necessary cost center, new demands are being placed on all aspects of IT delivery.
To stay ahead of the curve and emerge successfully, IT organizations must embrace a holistic, outcomes-focused view of delivery excellence. Successful delivery excellence programs need to exit the realm of IT/software engineering maturity models and incorporate two guiding principles:
• Ensure a well-rounded focus on both process improvement and business outcomes.
• Take an end-to-end view of the IT value chain and elevate delivery excellence beyond IT silos and stovepipes.
Our BIC delivery excellence framework can help IT organizations address these two guiding principles and meet new business challenges. Our experience thus far with the BIC framework has been encouraging. We believe that organizations employing
Figure 4
Projected Reduction in TCO
Lever 3
Lever 2
Lever 1
15%-20% reduction in total cost of ownership
20%-30% reduction in total cost of ownership
Consolidation of operations into a horizontal utility
Standardization of practices/
processes
Increasedautomation
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the concepts outlined in this paper can achieve significant business benefits over a sustained two- to three-year program:
• 20% to 25% improvement in customer satisfaction.
• 25% to 30% improvement in quality (i.e., reduction of defects).
• 20% to 25% faster time-to-market.
• 25% to 30% reduction in total cost of ownership.
Delivering big business outcomes is the new normal for enterprise IT organiza-tions. Adopting a holistic delivery excellence program that is focused on delivering business value, and that cuts across old organizational barriers, has become an imperative that can no longer be ignored.
Footnotes 1 CMMI is a process improvement program administered by Carnegie Mellon University.
See the CMMI Institute Web page for more information: http://cmmiinstitute.com/: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/.
2 ITIL is a set of practices for IT service management that focuses on aligning IT sevices with the needs of the business. For more information, see the ITIL Web site: http://www.itil-officialsite.com.
3 Expectations of testing are changing, and there is a need to position testing as an advisory service rather than limiting it to traditional QA/QC functions. For more information, see “Transforming from Software Testing to Business Assurance,” Cognizant Technology Solutions, 2012, https://speakerdeck.com/qaistc/transform-ing-from-software-testing-to-business-assurance.
4 DevOps is an umbrella concept that refers to anything that streamlines the inter-action between development and operations. For more information, see “What is DevOps,” dev2ops Web site, http://dev2ops.org/2010/02/what-is-devops/.
OUTCOME-FOCUSED IT DELIVERY: THE NEXT STEP IN THE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT JOURNEY 15
About the AuthorsPhilippe Dintrans is the Vice President and Practice Leader of Cognizant Business Consulting’s North American Strategic Services Group. Philippe has led numerous consulting engagements on business transformation, IT transformation and change management for marquee clients at Cognizant. He holds a master’s of science degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an MBA from INSEAD. He can be reached at [email protected] | Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/pub/philippe-dintrans/0/259/179.
Josh Soldati is the Vice President and co-leader of Cognizant’s BIC initiative, helping drive delivery transformation for clients. Josh has over 20 years of experience in IT services, cutting across industries such as life sciences, financial services, online services, commercial software, retail and high-tech. Josh holds a bachelor’s of art degree from the Columbia University, New York. He can be reached at [email protected] | Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/profile/joshsoldati.
Ravishankar Ganesan is an Assistant Vice President in the Delivery Assurance Group and a core member of Cognizant’s BIC team. He has extensive experience in the field of quality, with implementation and assessment experience of quality models/standards and methodologies — ISO 9001, CMMi, Six Sigma and Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. He is a certified Black Belt and holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Annamalai University, India. He can be reached at [email protected] | http://in.linkedin.com/pub/ravishankar-ganesan/23/98/433..
Amit Anand is a Director with Cognizant Business Consulting’s Strategic Services Group. He has 12-plus years of experience in successfully leading and managing large IT performance and process improvement initiatives for various clients. Amit holds a bachelor’s degree from the IIT Delhi and an M.B.A. from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He can be reached at [email protected] | Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/pub/amit-anand/15/54b/b53.
Joydeep Bhattacharyya is a Consulting Manager with Cognizant Business Con-sulting’s Strategic Services Group. He has seven-plus years of experience in leading IT strategy, IT performance improvement and large-scale transforma-tion initiatives. Joydeep holds an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Kalyani, India. He can be reached at [email protected] | Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/joydeepbhattacharyya24 | Google+: www.google.com/+JoydeepBhattacharyya24.
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