Key Findings & Highlights:

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) was formed in 1968 and is headquartered in Mumbai, India. It is part of The Tata Group, India’s largest private business conglomerate. The IT services, consulting and business solutions company reached a market cap of ~$100bn in 2018. Its headcount at June 30, 2018, was ~401k.

As digital transformation has grown as a key business objective, TCS has re-positioned its offerings to support evolution to what it calls "Business 4.0". These services look to embed intelligence, agility, automation, and cloud across the enterprise. To address this, TCS is positioning its offerings along three broad themes:

• Cognitive business operations: includes BPS, application operations and IT infrastructure services
• Digital transformation services: includes new practices focusing on various elements of the digital service stack including cloud, analytics, IoT, automation, digital workplace and others
• Consulting and services integration.

TCS launched its digital group in 2010, with a focus on supporting its telecom client base by building out mobile applications to take advantage of transactions increasingly moving to the growing smartphone market.

In 2016, TCS began to centralize and formalize its design and creative capabilities. In February 2016 it launched its first Digital Reimagination Studio in Santa Clara to provide clients a dedicated location to conduct design thinking sessions and focus on user experience design as well as build a TCS creative presence in Silicon Valley.

Following this, in mid-2017, the company formed TCS Interactive to concentrate the design and creative capabilities it has been growing globally in support of client digital transformation. TCS Interactive spans the following services:

• Design: experience, service and interaction design
• Digital marketing: marketing automation, enterprise marketing management, data analytics, and decisions, data management platform
• Digital commerce: search and navigation, promotions and personalization, purchase process
• Digital content: content authoring and creation, digital asset management and content delivery and distribution.
• Digital advertising: programmatic advertising, personalization, measurement, video advertising, micro-moments capture and guidance

TCS Interactive is the core of a strategy in which TCS is seeking to move beyond its offshore outsourcer heritage by investing in positioning as a digital thought leader and emphasis on design led engagements. In addition to its client work, it conducts annual surveys of its client base to understand better how a specific technology impacts its industry and the benefits which can be realized. These research reports are then published to enable clients to gain a broad understanding of its industry.

This research has also formed the basis of TCS' public thought leadership, enabling it to develop internal and external papers as well as deliver keynote speeches at forums such as the Industrial Internet Consortium and the World Economic Forum.

For CY 2017, TCS reported total revenues of ~$18.6bn. Of this, NelsonHall estimates that digital engagements accounted for ~21% (~$3.9bn). NelsonHall further estimates that ~17% ($675m) of this is derived from UX consulting, design and implementation services.

TCS employs a four-phase approach to deliver its UX design services. These "4D activities" include:

• Discover
• Define
• Design
• Deliver.

The full process can be modified to meet client timeline requirements but is generally planned to span ten weeks with the initial discover and define phases lasting approximately four weeks and the design and deliver phases spanning approximately six weeks, in an iterative sprint model where low-fi prototypes, wireframes, visual design components are modified and refined. This agile approach enables developers to get started prior to the completion of all design elements, with the design of a component starting 1-2 sprints ahead of its development.

TCS Interactive has a total of ~4k employees across its locations spanning skills including design thinkers, service designers, creative directors, experience designers, content strategists, copy editors, videographers, 3D specialists, augmented intelligence/mixed reality engineers, digital marketing platform engineers, and UI/UX engineers.

NelsonHall estimates that this team is split with ~55% (~2.2k) of the employees based in a location in India and the remaining 45% (~1.8k) based in locations globally.

Unlike many of its competitors, TCS has made a significant investment to grow its UX design and implementation services organically. This has enabled it to avoid any culture and post-merger integration challenges while building an organization dedicated to creative services but also connected to the broader firm. However, the challenge of this approach is the limited geographic breadth it can provide. As the organization grows, key capabilities will remain centralized in prime locations. This enables greater industrialization of delivery but can be a challenge when looking to support clients in new geographies. TCS itself laid out examples of U.S. based resources working with Japanese and Australian clients. When so much of experience is driven by culture, it will increasingly be important to have a broad local footprint. TCS is continuing to address this with its planned network expansion.

The other challenge it has faced is building awareness among current and potential clients of these offerings. Historically focused on supporting an organization's IT department, these services are frequently driven by the business or marketing. Creating thought leadership materials, investing in partnerships with both design-centric academic institutions and other organizations and building a portfolio of delivered work will help expand its reputation.

While it grows these creative services, it is also ensuring that broader TCS strengths are not abandoned. The ROI-by-design offering builds a quantitative model to support investment in UX, similar to traditional IT investment business cases. It also is building a more industrialized delivery model to help optimize cost for clients once new engagements stabilize.