Briefing Notes – HCL BEYONDigital Emphasizes End-to-End ... · UX/UI skills. This emphasis on talent development is a value proposition that has low tangible visibility upfront
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Briefing Notes – HCL BEYONDigital EmphasizesEnd-to-End Skills and ServicesSummary
HCL recently briefed the ISG research team on their Digital service line. Krishnan Chatterjee, Chief Customer
Officer at HCL’s digital services unit, BEYONDigital, presented HCL’s broad capabilities for helping
organizations improve business processes, employ emerging technologies, and develop digital properties to
provide a rich end user experience.
Key takeaways: HCL has a robust and long-term focused approach on developing digital transformation
capabilities by relying primarily on internal skill development. The company has been developing capabilities in-
house rather than by acquisitions and aims to become a one-stop shop for digital in a fragmented market. It is
also dwelling on fundamentals as it bolsters talent development specifically to create quality resources that are
critical in delivering digital projects. The challenge ahead for HCL is to keep pace with competitors who rely on
inorganic growth to ramp up their digital offerings.
Briefing Notes
In 2015, BEYONDigital, the enterprise digitalization unit of HCL technologies, conceptualized the 21st-century
enterprise and identified specific traits that personify these enterprises. The company believes that the digital
age enterprise strives to offer a unified experience, focuses on customer satisfaction, adapts to an agile and lean
approach, has a broad ecosystem for collaboration and delivers outcomes across value chains. Accordingly, HCL
has developed its digital offerings to resonate with these characteristics. The BEYONDigital suite of services
encompasses evaluation of user experiences, integration of DevOps and agile across functions for enriched
human experience, deployment of content across the user value chain and the establishment of co-innovation
labs at client sites.
HCL sees the outsourcing provider landscape for digital services as an agency play – i.e., a fragmented market
with several niche providers and a few large traditional outsourcing vendors that are warming up to this
opportunity. Each niche player brings a specialized but limited set of capabilities. HCL views the discrete nature
of these capabilities as an archipelago – i.e., a group of many related capabilities. It is dwelling on this market
gap to try to create a unified entity that delivers end-to-end capabilities that constitute the archipelago. The
company has developed capabilities in-house that span across design, consulting, technology, system integration
and software/product/platform.
We see this as an important step in the creation of a full-fledged digital unit. In the prevalent agency play
scenario, several firms cater to different requirements across the spectrum of digital capabilities, which
encompass technology, engineering, user experience design, social, mobility analytics and digital strategy.
However, the challenge ahead is to differentiate HCL’s homegrown capability against service providers who
have relied on acquisitions. The public relations teams at the other service providers have used these
acquisitions to effectively position their growing portfolio of digital services.
For its go-to-market strategy, HCL believes that the technology stack is of secondary importance in Digital.
According to Mr. Chatterjee: “What buyers want instead is a business discussion focused on the end user”. This is in
contrast to traditional IT, wherein discussions have been structured around the pyramid framework with Designat the top followed by Technology and Operations. For Digital, while the order remains unchanged, HCL’s
discussions with clients take the form of an inverted pyramid with Design having the greatest leverage followed