Cognizant’s CMT diversity delivers wins for The English FA

Connecting the dots across the diversity of Cognizant’s global Communications, Media, and Technology (CMT) practice delivers new value and increased innovation opportunities for enterprise clients such as England’s Football Association (FA) and London-based full fiber broadband provider Community Fibre.

Manju Kygonahally, one of Cognizant’s longest-serving employees, runs CMT for all global growth markets (all emerging markets outside North America). Enterprise leaders may wonder how Cognizant can deliver tailored, best-fit solutions when it has organized a division to serve a broad set of industries covering everything from advertising to telco to tech firms.

A diverse portfolio brings the benefits of cross-pollination

Manju sees this diversity as a strength to be taken advantage of rather than shied away from. He says it delivers multiple benefits:

• Broader perspective: Engaging across a range of sectors helps leaders understand challenges and opportunities from alternative and adjacent perspectives and bring those learnings back to specific enterprise challenges.
• More innovation: Cross-pollination through collaboration with a variety of industry segments inspires new ideas and approaches.
• Enhanced content value: Interacting with diverse segments refines content strategies to deliver higher impact.
• More monetization opportunities: Exposure to more comprehensive ranges of business models from disparate industries opens more opportunities to explore commercial options usually found in other sectors.

The 4C framework combines the powers of connectivity, content, collaboration, and commerce

The opportunity to work across a range of industries has also helped Manju and the team shape a framework to create value to apply across each CMT domain, drawing benefits from each domain. The framework consists of “connectivity” from telco, “content” from media, “collaboration” from tech, and “commerce” opportunities emerging from all.

The team applies the 4Cs of connectivity, content, collaboration, and commerce in their engagements. That plays out as

• Prioritizing connectivity as the bedrock for all initiatives.
• Acknowledging the vast significance of content and tailoring it for varied segments.
• Encouraging collaboration, both within and outside the organization, to synergize efforts.
• Seeking opportunities for commerce, looking beyond traditional offerings to monetize innovatively.

The FA gains from diversity and access to the best and brightest

Cognizant has been working with England’s Football Association, applying its 4C framework from the kick-off of a range of digital transformation activities six years ago. The FA’s CIO, Craig Donald, said the work includes everything from improving the grassroots experience of thousands of amateur players to enhancing the match day experience at the home of English soccer, Wembley Stadium.

Craig says Cognizant has accelerated The FA’s digital transformation progress. Two things stand out for him about the engagement. First, while the cache of The FA brand may be huge, its impact on Cognizant revenues is a drop in the ocean versus some of the firm’s larger accounts. Even so, Craig says The FA benefits from all the big account learnings and global enterprise experiences Cognizant can access. And that includes bringing in the brightest and best of Cognizant’s people. His second takeaway? Echoing Manju’s belief that CMT’s diversity is a strength, Craig praises the diversity of the skill sets Cognizant brings and calls out the value of acquisitions such as digital agency Zone.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Initially, The FA felt Cognizant was too slow in coming forward with new ideas. Cognizant’s hesitancy has resolved over the lifetime of the relationship, and now Craig credits the Cognizant team with coming forward with improvements—even to processes outside of their work. The FA recently extended its contract with Cognizant.

How the 4Cs have delivered for The FA

Cognizant’s work at the FA demonstrates the application of the 4Cs through

• Connectivity and content: Cognizant has helped build apps to help grassroots referees and players with training and analysis videos, peer-to-peer mentoring, and always-on connectivity to deliver at the pitch.
• Collaboration: Cognizant has helped The FA build partnerships with tech collaborators to achieve its goals.
• Commerce: With a solid digital infrastructure in place, valuable content, and a ready audience, Cognizant is helping The FA build new revenue streams.

Cognizant is at the heart of the transformation journey at Community Fibre

Chris Williams, CIO at broadband provider Community Fibre, is leading a transformation journey to enable the business to scale. The firm recently announced that more than one million London homes and more than 200,000 London businesses can now connect to its 100% full-fiber network.

Since engaging Cognizant, Chris’s transformation has delivered 28 new apps, thanks in part to an app factory it set up with Cognizant in a matter of weeks. Cognizant has taken on the firm’s Microsoft Dynamics implementation, applied RPA, and helped set up and run DevOps to improve control and security, among other deliverables.

The business has felt the impact through applications in everything from CRM and payments to big data and a Toolkit app to help customer services and the field force deliver improved customer experience.

“Cognizant is more than a functional partner to us—they are a truly strategic partner,” said Chris. That means regular connects, developing an ongoing roadmap together, and Cognizant staff working as part of an integrated team at Community Fibre.

Cognizant’s 4Cs also apply to how it engages

Cognizant’s 4C framework also runs through how it works with Community Fibre.

• Connectivity: In the case of Community Fibre, connectivity is front and center for the business. But beyond this, Chris praises how Cognizant has been passionate about introducing an ecosystem of potential collaborators, connecting the right partners, and having the right conversations to bring them together to provide solutions for the company.
• Content: Cognizant delivers the second C, content, in two ways. First, content is part of the considerations in the roadmaps Cognizant supports Community Fibre in developing, focusing on where the next set of revenues will come from for the broadband provider. Second, Cognizant content brings an understanding of what’s next in telco to Community Fibre’s planning.
• Collaboration: Chris sees close collaboration with Cognizant teams as essential to success—strong working ties provide the context for decision-making and solutions. He says investing in the relationship between parties has been a two-way street from the word go. Cognizant personnel attend all relevant internal team meetings and team evenings out.
• Commerce: Cognizant is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the business, bringing commercial ideas from its global experience with other telcos. Cognizant also suggests new approaches inspired by its work in adjacent domains as part of CMT.

The Bottom Line: CMT’s diversity inspires an open-minded approach to the ecosystem that all parties can benefit from.

Some may criticize Cognizant’s CMT division’s makeup as too broad to deliver focused value. However, the cases of The FA and Community Fibre illustrate that this breadth of capability can play out as a strength. It offers diversity that inspires an open-minded approach to building ecosystems from which all parties can benefit. Cognizant’s 4C framework offers coherence and guidance across a diverse range of projects, benefiting Cognizant teams and the businesses they serve.