HfS analysts recently attended Wipro Digital’s first analyst and advisor day event in the U.S., and our collective first impressions could summed up into, “Ok, they get digital, and what it means for enterprises, but are they articulating exactly how they’re going to market on it – and will clients understand?”
The mantra that this group articulated is to think it – design it – build it – run it. Wipro has traditionally been associated with the last two of those battle cries, and is making investments and efforts to climb up the ladder on the first two. With its acquisition of design firm Designit, it has a new set of capabilities, organizational practices and culture that it has started to draw from. As importantly, it is hoping to leverage the agency’s design positioning and brand identity for Wipro Digital – and perhaps Wipro as a whole.
Moving outside of IT, and into the business, is perhaps Wipro’s greatest challenge
A significant challenge for Wipro Digital is its current footprint and connections within enterprises. The service provider mentioned at the event that its starting point for new deals was most often the IT organization, where it is best known and experienced. “Design tech” work is increasingly originating outside the CIO’s office, and while marquee/strategic clients might take Wipro Digital to the table with stakeholders for new initiatives, the service provider has to take new approaches for the larger market where IT and operations are starting to take more joint ownership of digital projects. We see promise and challenge as Wipro, like a lot of its competitors, gears itself up to service old customers in new ways , as well as reinvent itself for new breeds of customers.
Examples of how Wipro Digital is bringing this to life, shared at the event, include:
“Digital pods”: 13 design studios that are office spaces for creative work for Wipro
Digital and Designit’s teams. Wipro stresses that the more clients visit these spaces and
see this way of working, the more its brand perception will be changed.
A $100m fund to invest in digital startups that it can bring into large projects.
Scaling up resources that work exclusively in methodologies that prioritize agility, rapid
prototyping and flexibility in IT design and implementation, including agile practices and DevOps.
Wipro brings “digital” to life with clients in banking
Of the examples of projects Wipro shared the last two years with these new capabilities and methodologies, three examples in banking represent different use cases and Wipro capabilities:
A transformation with a major British retail and commercial bank: The engagement spans across consulting, design and technology. Wipro is taking a different approach with this client – partnering on governance, jointly engineering prototypes, and bringing access to its ecosystem of partners/startups and academy for the client’s IT organization. In the next few years, this is going to be the engagement to watch, to see how Wipro Digital pulls off coordination and collaboration across its internal groups, Designit and the client’s IT organization to execute on the bank’s strategic digital initiative.
From the ground up with Designit: A project with Israel’s second largest bank, Leumi, to create a new digital, mobile-only, bank as a startup within the enterprise. Christened Pepper, the teams used agile design thinking methodologies that included intensive collaboration between team members from product, design and technology, and constant user-based feedback and prototyping.
The journey with a multinational BFS firm as they rollout an implementation of the Wipro Holmes E-KYC solution: The bank wants to streamline how its KYC is being run to free up valuable analyst time, focusing not on cost savings but innovation with the help of automation and machine learning technologies. He described his vision for this project as, “wanting to redefine the way we work to make KYC competitive in the banking industry.” The bank is working with Wipro to define outcomes, ROIs and commercial models as the implementation advances.
Service providers need to determine their early “sweet spots” and really hone digital and business capability –and story—with their clients
These examples demonstrate how opportunistic and diverse the digital market is, making it challenging for service providers to pinpoint their approach/experience. Wipro Digital laid out its goal at the event, with Avinash commenting, “We want to move from a cost and efficiency play as a system integrator, to revenue generation and outcomes as digital executors.” That reads like HfS’ thinking on the bifurcation coming down the line, with service providers wanting to be OneOffice Enablers. Wipro has started to share how clients are starting to leverage it – with both new and existing capabilities being brought to bear. What was missing from the messaging was specificity in the execution – how many clients is it working with today, what are the sales team’s approaches, and what is the progress it has made on scaling its talent, and presence in different geographies, especially client markets.
HfS cautions that much like the heady days of IT services, where the biggest players went with ‘being everything to everyone’, Digital practices like this one run the same risks of diluting their message, and as a result, their specializations. Even with the banking examples shared above, the solutions being developed are highly tailored to the clients’ needs – as they should be – but don’t paint a picture of what Wipro Digital envisions as its approach for the banking industry’s needs and opportunities. It will take some big success stories – told by its clients – that will help Wipro Digital in further formulating its range of new capabilities and the brand association behind it.
Posted in : Digital Transformation
