Cognizant Chief Strategy Officer: We're About To Enter The 'Great Digital Build-Out'

The world is teetering on the brink of a technology revolution, one that Cognizant Chief Strategy Officer Malcolm Frank said will drastically change the way businesses engage with customers.

Frank compared the current technology revolution to the industrial revolution. He said that after a large "burst of innovation," a period of time he called "the chasm" would occur until a large-scale build-out of technologies spread across the market. We are currently in the chasm, he said, and approaching the next phase of the revolution.

"We're about to enter that great digital build-out," said Frank at the IDE Platform Strategy Summit held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., Friday.

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In that digital boom, businesses will embrace big data and analytics in new ways to interact with customers. Through a platform-based approach, companies will be able to collect and utilize data to better understand their customers and drive more business, he said.

Those platforms, by taking and analyzing points of data from a large number of consumers, can better understand and predict patterns of individuals. This will drive changes in how both new and longstanding companies alike go to market, as they begin to use those analytical platforms in their strategy.

For businesses, that doesn't mean that they have to become the next Uber, Frank said. Businesses will have to rethink how they approach the market through a platform, but each industry will reach that point at its own pace.

"When you look at this, the importance of platforms across all of these are profound and I think they're right around the corner. With that, we need to rethink the 100-year-old companies and industries that have such meaning in our lives," Frank said.

However, this transformation, like any, will not be easy. As the "technological boom" evolves, Frank said businesses will need to watch out for pitfalls such as rising mobility, which will drive eventual platform and device consolidation. As they expand their platforms, businesses also need to keep an eye on their processes, user interfaces and keep ethical concerns in mind with data privacy.

The ramifications of technological innovations made years ago will continue to be impossible to see until we have the benefit of hindsight years down the road, Frank said. He likened tech innovations to the invention of the lawnmower by Edwin Budding, who designed the lawnmower mainly to cut the grass on sports grounds in England. "No one could have predicted the lawnmower would give rise to a multibillion-dollar professional sports industry," he said.

These "Budding effects," as he called them, are the types of innovations that will emerge as the industry moves beyond the "chasm" toward the boom of the large-scale build-out. As companies start to utilize more platforms, they will start to step over the threshold and into the next phase, he said.

"The future is already here," Frank said.

PUBLISHED JULY 10, 2015