Outsourcing: César Gon, Founder And CEO, CI&T (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: In terms of different engagements, César, I think core competency in iPhone apps or iPad apps is relatively a new core competency, but what is different about your expertise in BI? We have lots of Indian companies and Eastern European companies that do this; there are a lot of outsourcing providers that do BI, right?

César Gon: Yes, that is a good point. For example, we never get reports to produce. Whenever I set [up] a new software [program], I have to deliver 300 new reports. We strike a deal wherein we engage our customer. If they want to improve the sales of their organization, they need to understand better what they are going on in this, analyzing their sales data, you proved a way in the sales team and used that data and link that with business drivers and business goals and then we have a real opportunity to add value. And not producing more report that nobody is going to use and that is the kind of engagement we do using business intelligence. So, every BI project for CI&T starts with exploring what it is, what is the business value we intend from this opportunity, and there is a different set of methodology we use called lean value engineering, and a lot of core consulting skills. This is long before you start doing reports using any platform.

Sramana: Do you specialize in any part of the BI value chain, or do you specialize in marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) or manufacturing KPIs? Is there any kind of special core competency in your organization?

César: Yes, normally we do business intelligence for customers where we have a strong and intimate relationship. We are specialized not only in any vertical, but in any specific customer we intend to work with. So, we don’t sell business intelligence for any company. We do it for only the company we have established a partnership with so that we can specialize our team in that specific area. Sometimes it’s logistics and sometimes it is retail, but it is more important than the vertical steps that we set up. It’s a strategy to learn together and continue to learn and adding more value to customer using BIs with any of our skill sets.

Sramana: Where do these relationships come from? What is the genesis of the relationships?

César: Normally it is based on specific knowledge that we present. Normally it is not through the classic questions, How many resources do you have? Rather, the questions are: What did you do for different customers and what do you know and how? What we can learn and how fast we can learn it? Those are the kinds of discussions we have with our customers.

Sramana: I would like to understand why a customer would be interested in working with you in the area of business intelligence. I understand more on the mobile app side. The skill is relatively new, if you have core competency and working with companies such as Coca-Cola and mobile games especially, working with the marketing department and creating core applications – mobile apps and services is a core competency, I understand, but it is not a competency that is abundantly available in an outsourcer.

César: For our business intelligence, normally what we have heard is that companies say, We have been working on reports for years, and we see no value from what we get. We say to them, we have a completely different approach to this, and we can help you to establish a new way of doing things with your businesspeople to get more value from this kind of technology. That is the normally how we sell BI, saying that we do not want to be another report provider; rather, we want to help a client to get more results from their investment, and it is a completely different approach that demands a different kind of engagement and skill set.

Sramana: OK. One observation I have about BI and the delivery and availability of business intelligence, having it at the fingertips, at the mobile device level, and so forth, is this: From lots of conversations I have had with CIOs who have agreed on this, this is an area that seems to be wide open.

César: Yes. BI is fundamental. If you think about it, we are launching – for example, we design and develop our sales force for a very large company in the U.S. using the iPad, and there is a lot of concern about this. How will it work and it is going to help? If you get the data, if you launch this initiative fast, and if you learn from the data on the people who are using the interface, you want to know how they are using it, if you are improving the sales, and so on. You can drastically adapt to our strategy and deliver an application that will be valuable to the client, so BI is also a core competence.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: César Gon, Founder And CEO, CI&T
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