William Koff is a leader in Computer Sciences Corp?s technology community as vice-president and chief technology officer for CSC?s Office of Innovation, which includes the Leading Edge Forum (LEF). Focusing on the practical use of technology, the LEF offers a CSC point of view on technology trends to help clients understand what will happen in the future and how to benefit from change. A career consultant for nearly 30 years, including 20 years with CSC, William plays a key role in guiding CSC research, technology thought leadership and alliance partner activities. He advises CSC and its clients on critical IT trends, technology innovation and strategic investments in leading edge technology. In a recent interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary, William admits that there is a huge pressure on IT companies to demonstrate better value, efficiency and innovation in products and services. Excerpts:
First and foremost, the global economic conditions look challenging yet again. Do you think IT contracts are going to be renegotiated and hiring will be impacted?
I think this is possible. It?s true that there is financial concern in the West. And if cost cutting is to happen, contracts might be renegotiated and total economic value of the deals will decrease. But in some ways, it increases the need for lower cost capabilities. For instance, in the backdrop of an impending slowdown in the global economy, the IT investments might have taken a hit globally. But cloud computing has gained wide interest across all segments of enterprises, small & medium businesses (SMBs) as well as consumers.
We are seeing a lot of enterprises trying to invest in growth, instead of cutting back aggressively on spending. So when you invest in growth, you bring in new systems and ideas. Many of the IT services that we do are really about cost cutting and bringing in efficiencies in the systems. I expect India?s IT services sector to register the strong growth it has seen over the last decade.
What was the rationale behind setting up an Office of Innovation in India?
CSC believes that the ultimate aim of innovation is to create business value for its clients. Uniting CSC?s key technology leadership programmes, innovation centres and groups, the Office of Innovation sets new standards for practical innovation and solution delivery for CSC?s clients. It improves our ability to apply IT strategically to deliver economic value to our customers.
Forming an integral part of CSC?s global Office of Innovation, CSC Office of Innovation in India aims to encourage a culture of creativity and knowledge sharing, and to deliver the results to its stakeholders. The office operates with seven key constituents to its agenda. They revolve around targeted high-impact, value driven processes and initiatives for employees, customers, analysts, partners, research/academic institutions and external agencies, integrating vertical domains and operating incubation centres.
Is it basically an intellectual property creation centre?
We are a services organisation. The primary objective of innovation is to ensure that we are able to bring in value in the services that we offer. We also have our own products and intellectual property (IP) and we support development of them out of India. But it doesn?t stop there. Given that our focus is especially on the commercial side, our focus is on providing services to our customers so it is both bottom-up and top-down value.
We engage with the customers on the business problem and the future trends, and we bring in our expertise and then help create solutions for the customers. A lot of grants have been issued here in India. At any given time, there are few hundred people involved across different projects at the India innovation centre.
A major change that is coming in the industry is the new alignment between services and products or intellectual property (IP). Purely-product oriented companies are becoming service-oriented. How does CSC see this?
We are on both sides of the market. We are a big enterprise service provider in the realm of applications services, IT infrastructure services and business process outsourcing. We are also a big product company, particularly in financial services with the No. 1 market share in property and casualty insurance. So we are on both sides. If you look at the history of our acquisitions, whether it is healthcare or financial services, we have been focused on getting both IP and services that we can provide to our customers.
Is cloud really democratising the access to cutting edge technology especially in emerging countries like India?
The concept of computing as a utility, which would transform the IT industry and would also impact the way computing services are delivered and consumed, is a reality now. The cloud offers the potential to make software more attractive as a service and is redefining the way IT hardware is designed and procured. Cloud has enabled companies to eliminate large capital investments in hardware to deploy their service or resources to operate it.