Is TCS’ “Default” Becoming “Digital” for Business Processes?

That’s the question HfS analysts considered during the recent TCS North America analyst day event in Boston. It started with Ananth Krishnan, Vice President & CTO at TCS, who, during his opening keynote, “Default Is Digital,” painted a picture of TCS positioning. “We want to continuously industrialize what we do (make our processes repeatable, scalable, secure, etc.), but also work with clients and partners to achieve new outcomes by reimagining the future,” he said.

The catalyst for the future, according to TCS, is application of the digital 5 forces: mobility and pervasive computing, cloud, artificial intelligence and robotics, social media, big data and analytics. With 5,500 engagements in the “digital” space, this much is clear – TCS is growing its presence as a digital partner. A new practice with employees in the thousands, TCS is executing on projects from digitization of physical processes to digital transformation (incremental innovation) and finally, digital reimagination (disruptive innovation.) We heard examples of all three from TCS’ long list of clients in this space.

While we see progress in TCS establishing itself as a digital consulting partner, what seemed relatively missing was a roadmap for TCS’ bread and butter business – in what form, magnitude and timeframe will these digital forces to come together to impact existing technology assets and IT and BPO operations.

As part of the answer, to bring together the digital forces and its own capability with clients more effectively, TCS BPO launched a framework – ValueBPS – about 4 months ago. ValueBPS is designed to create ownership of digital initiatives with clients, and become a single point of contact and approach to drive collaboration between the client and TCS’ vast IT and digital capabilities. As such, HfS believes it could be a much needed fix for clients that can sometimes feel lost trying to work with teams across the large and diversified service provider.

ValueBPS is different from the traditional, ingrained Six Sigma, lean and process improvement initiatives. In describing the change in mindset, TCS’ Dinanath Kholkar, Vice President & Global Head, BPS told us, “Our ValueBPS team doesn’t look at operational level metrics, only business. We’re starting to go to the business heads and boards of our client organizations with some of the use cases, focusing not just reducing cost bases but to help launch new products, new geographies and redesign business. Sustained profitable growth, business effectiveness and process efficiency are key levers for all of that.” TCS’ progress on ValueBPS so far with a few clients is encouraging. It reports that 20% of its BPO clients are piloting/proofing or using RPA already, and it has hired a creative design head to start a new center for innovation in Santa Clara, a facility for customers to be active participants for 3 months and co-develop IP and solutions.

However, frameworks such as ValueBPS and the innovation center are building blocks and not a complete picture of the future for the company. We did not take away what ‘default is digital’ means, for example, for its IP and tech assets such as Bancs. TCS has essentially started the conversation around Digital becoming Default for its client organizations and must now demonstrate how levers such as ValueBPS will start to change its services model towards As-a-Service and what Default should look like for IT services and operations.