Cognizant has been ‘delivering digital’ for many years. Recently, they helped Aker Solutions move its internal SAP applications to the cloud, delivering operational efficiencies and a 20% reduction in software licensing costs. This is a typical project for Cognizant, the Fortune 500 company driving the digital transformation of Industry 4.0.
Recently, Cognizant launched four Collaboratories, innovation spaces for digital transformation, where their designers, strategists, technologists, and data scientists work side-by-side with customers to make the all-important leap from insight to prototype. This new way of working melds innovation and collaboration to advance the ideas and excitement around Industry 4.0 to practical reality.
This is one reason Cognizant has chosen to sponsor Ignite 2019, taking place in Oslo on June 12 and 13. Ignite is also a collaboratory: an innovation space where more than 800 forward-thinkers from industry and digital technology meet to exchange ideas and shape the industrial future.
Cognizant will bring their key messages about digitalization to Ignite, promoting the adoption of a range of different technologies to step up digital change and transform industrial processes. Manoj Mathew, AVP Digital Transformation Cognizant Technology Solutions, will speak to Ignite’s Executive Track on the first day.
“Ignite is very exciting for me,” Mathew says. “The speaking sessions are great. It’s a phenomenal group of people who share ideas very frankly.”
Mathew’s presentation on Business Operations: Delivering on the Digital Promise, examines the hard truth that, while most companies have launched digital innovation projects over the past two years, very few have taken these initiatives to scale and actually transformed the company operations.
“What we notice is that in 80% of cases, [these digital projects] remain at an incubation stage,” says Mathew.
His talk will explore what differentiates the companies that push through and operationalize their digital innovations.
“What’s that line that you cross when your company actually becomes digital, instead of just playing with digital? What’s worked and what has not worked? And how do we take things to scale?”
An important part of accelerating digital transformation is “data liberation.” Industries open to sharing their data will gain more insight into risk, as well as maintain and improve the performance and condition of critical machinery. Data liberation will also feed back into better, more inventive designs. The challenge is getting access to the data.
Niels Didrich Buch, head of Cognizant Oil & Gas, recently noted, “Everyone believes that keeping the data secret is their competitive advantage and it’s not.”
This mindset is shifting. Companies are realizing that technological innovation needs to go hand-in-hand with data sharing, the same core belief that gave rise to the first Ignite conference just one year ago. That’s why Mathews regards Ignite as a catalyst for change.
“It’s the event before the explosion.”