TCS transformers - June 2011

AN IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE IN ASSOCIATION WITH

TRANSFORMING BUSINESS THROUGH JUDICIOUS APPLICATION OF IT

With BCCI’s new web site, cricket fans can watch their favorite matches live on the Internet.

Thanks to TCS’ backend architecture for the hosting servers with adequate load balancing features, the site has served fans without a glitch. Soon, fans will be able to create their own profiles on the site.

PLUS INTERVIEW Anantha Krishnan, VP & CTO, TCS says Innovation is not just about ideas. It’s about extracting value from ideas by bringing them to market before others do.

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

BCCI SCORES with

NEW WEBSITE

Company Board of Control for Cricket in India Industry Sports & Entertainment Offering National governing body for cricket

With BCCI’s new web site, cricket fans can watch their favorite matches live on the Internet. Thanks to TCS’ backend architecture for the hosting servers with adequate load balancing features, the site has served fans

without a glitch. Soon, fans will be able to create their own profiles on the site.

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an a Sachin Tendulkar fan get to watch all his movements during a high-drama India-Pakistan match? Can he watch a video that captures the match with Tendulkar in spotlight, whether or not he scores a century? The answer depends on who you ask. If it’s a spokesperson from a TV channel, the reply will, most likely, be a no; citing that broadcast capabilities are yet to take that leap. But if you ask Gaurav Saxena, Project Manager, BCCI, the answer is “yes, in the very near future.”

FINE START

This drive to delight the Indian cricket fans with something special was re-ignited around a year ago by an assessment of what BCCI stood for. In June-July 2010, the working committee of BCCI decided to review the expectations that Indian cricket fans had on them. By August, they had decided to rope in TCS as their consultant. “BCCI recognized that the huge fan base is the building block of this great sporting edifice and facilitating the involvement of well-wishers and folThe futuristic lowers of the game is essential video-feed option to the well-being of the sport,” EIGHT MONTHS, opines Prof Ratnakar Shetty, NOT OUT would take Director–Tournament, BCCI. Saxena’s optimism is welladvantage of the Headquartered at Mumbai, grounded. For more than six numerous cameras BCCI is the national governing months now, BCCI has been on the field. body for all organized cricket streaming live video of matchin India. As a member of the es that the Indian cricket team International Cricket Council (ICC), plays. As of now, no one has had it has the authority to select players, any reason to complain. The video umpires and officials to participate in broadcast project has emboldened BCCI international events, and exercises total control to plan more ambitiously, and a user-controlled over them. Without its recognition, no competitive interactive video footage seems very much within cricket involving BCCI-contracted Indian players the realms of the possible. can be hosted within or outside the country. No The futuristic video-feed option would take addoubt then, the manner in which BCCI promotes vantage of the fact that there are numerous camthe game has a direct eras on the field. A television impact on rousing the broadcast shows feeds from excitement levels among only one of them based on cricket fans. the broadcaster’s judgment of which camera will capture the game best. “How A NEW INNINGS can we utilize other camWhat BCCI needed was eras?” Saxena pondered. In a revamped website that the scenario where a viewer could act as a one-stop wishes to watch feeds from place for all matters peronly a specific camera (for taining to Indian cricket. example, the one that trac“Whether a user wished to es Tendulkar’s movements), relive the golden moments can it not be provided? Viewfrom sporting history or be TCS answered ing video feeds on a PC is updated about all the latest technically possible. “And developments, our aim was our call for with TCS as the technology to have the content easily efficient arm, that, too, is practically accessible,” Shetty says. designing and management possible ” Saxena says.

The challenge for BCCI was of our new portal with a If the feeds from all the to find one company that would cameras were offered to the provide design, technical and willingness to collaborate viewers, they would have a CMS services, and, at the with our in-house team” lot to choose from. “With the same time, which had a keen Internet, it is easily possible sense of evolving technology.

PROF. RATNAKAR SHETTY to pick and choose” Saxena For this to be possible, Chief Administrative Officer, BCCI says. “In that sense, the InBCCI felt that it was critical ternet has an advantage. that a dedicated team of

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

professionals, responsive to the organization’s ideas and needs, be present. “TCS answered our call for efficient designing and management of our new portal with a willingness to collaborate with our in-house team on all key areas on a regular basis,” says Shetty.

The vendor’s ability to provide a complete solution for the BCCI portal was another key factor. “We were looking for a long-term partner who would complement our rich stores of content – archived and current – with user-friendly platforms,” Shetty says.

BCCI wanted an assurance of being provided the best quality and service all year round. “The need for a reputed company with an unblemished record governed our decision to hire TCS,” Shetty says.

streaming on the site. “We have never had a problem with the streaming of the video,” says Rego.

“We wanted an interactive, user-generated, live streaming and live broadcasting platform. The idea was to provide free coverage on the Internet so as to build a fan base and also establish our Internet brand - BCCI.TV,” says Shetty.

We have been streaming live video of matches on our portal for the past few months. So far, we have never had a problem.“

BEHIND THE SCENES

For the BCCI site, TCS used the ‘Agile approach’ which breaks tasks into small increments with minimal planning, and does not directly involve longterm planning. Iterations JAMES REGO, are short time frames Director - Broadcast, BCCI that typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration involves a team A FINE PITCH working through a full software development The TCS-designed portal, www.bcci.tv, went live on cycle, including planning, requirement analysis, the 4th of October, 2010. The site covers all major design, coding, unit testing, and acceptancetournaments involving India, providing commentesting when a working product is demonstrated taries, statistics, reports and other features. Comto stakeholders. This minimizes overall risk plete information on cricketing venues, upcoming and allows the project to adapt to changes fixtures and information about national, women’s quickly. Stakeholders produce documentation and junior sides is also provided. Apart from keepas required. An iteration may not add enough ing users updated, the site also aims at engaging functionality to warrant a market release, but the users in meaningful discussions and capturing usgoal is to have an available release (with minimal ers’ opinions on key issues. bugs) at the end of each iteration. Multiple The most attractive feature of the site is iterations may be required to release a product , undoubtedly, the facility of live streaming. or new features.

“Implementing video on BCCI’s own platform was TCS could foresee that, thanks to the popularity challenging,” Shetty admits. With the advent of of the sport, the site was going to have a TCL’s (Tata Communications Limited) live lot of visitors soon. To take care of streaming service, BCCI began providing the high number of visitors, TCS broadcast services on the Internet to used hash code algorithm which viewers. “We were able to broadcast To manage the generates a unique hash code the New Zealand tour of India large traffic on the for each video at runtime and across our worldwide network – website, TCS has enables playing video on the all without a hitch. The traffic was browser itself. huge but we were able to sustain used multiple web To manage the large traffic it with seamless audio and video servers and a load on the website, TCS has used broadcast,” says Shetty. balancer multiple web servers and a load James Rego, Director-Broadbalancer which distributes the cast, BCCI, says that the video traffic appropriately, so that the site feeds that they get from the camwould not get down due to high traffic. eras are processed and sent to TCS for

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SNAPSHOTS OF INDIA’S MOST POPULAR GAME BCCI’s new website (www. bcci.tv) has articles and features about Indian cricket, announcements about upcoming matches, a photo gallery and readers polls.

The organization streams live coverage of matches involving

the Indian cricket team. The site has been largely popular in India. This is fuelled by the fact that the popularity of the game has always been rising in the country.

Indian cricket has indeed come a long way. Once an

BCCI’S NEW WEBSITE

“We have designed the project architecture in such a way that at any point we can add more web servers to the load balancer with minimum down-time,” Shetty explains.

SOCIAL NEXT Over the past few months, BCCI has garnered a fan base of more than 1.5 million cricket fans on the organization’s Facebook page. It also has a verified Twitter handle (@bcciindia) to cater to the fast-paced and communication-tools-driven audience.

BCCI’s piece de resistance, when it comes to social collaboration, has yet to make an appearance. TCS has designed a tool that will enable fans to create their profiles and interact with other fans using Facebook-like features.

This module is currently in the testing stage. “We want to have an application that lets fans group together, post discussions and create their own groups,” Shetty says.

TCS also helped BCCI understand key user demographics for content optimization and gather important user insights through web analytics. Site traffic was improved through better Internet visibility.

amateur game, cricket has emerged as a billion dollar industry worldwide. The cricket industry is spread out across all cricket playing nations of the world. Cricket accessory manufacturers, sponsors, broadcasters, and major tournaments like the World Cup and ICC Trophy form this industry. Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and West Indies are the main centers of this industry.

Kenya, Canada, Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Zimbabwe are the emerging markets.

Puma, Slazenger, Gunn & Moore, Duncan Fearnley, Gray Nicolls, Kookaburra, and Surridge are the major accessory manufacturers.

BCCI’s customer business team was able to view the “funnel visualization” of visitor behaviour which helps determine the reason for visitor site abandonment. The website got hits not only from fans in India, but also from the UK, the US, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, etc. The high point for BCCI was when the website touched the traffic of one lakh visitors a day.

BCCI is also working on a multi-channel delivery platform. “Soon, the BCCI WAP version will be released and the iPad version will follow suit,” Shetty confirms. The organization is also normalizing content and encasing it in a layer of rich metadata to make syndication simple and conform to RSS & XML. “RSS feeds and push e-mails are also in the pipeline. Consumers are increasingly moving towards subscription-based, content-on-demand channels,” Shetty says. As matters stand, customers have come to expect content delivered directly to them. “This forms the basis for a long-term customer relationship.

Whether speaking to them via email, newsletters, podcasts, online video, or through RSS readers, the ability to maintain a dialogue with them is crucial to customer retention which is where our focus is,” says Shetty.

TRANSFORMERS INTERVIEW

INNOVATION

HELPS EXPERIENCE

CERTAINTY Innovation is not just about ideas. It’s about extracting value from ideas, big or small, by bringing them to market before others do, says

K Ananth Krishnan K ANANTH KRISHNAN Vice President & Chief Technology Officer.

Tata Consultancy Services

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As part of the TCS corporate think tank, how do you drive innovation?

Do you believe in early adoption of technology?

What are its pros and cons?

At TCS, we recognize that innovation is not just about ideas, big or small. It’s about extracting value from those ideas by bringing them to market before others do. We have built a systematic roadmap to innovation. Our Innovation Engine comprises the 19 Innovation Labs we have across the world. Through our internal social network, we run a very large idea platform and encourage all our associates to contribute to the ideation process. We also take the ideas which originate outside the company, from our co-innovation network which include our partners, our start-up firms, academic institutions etc. We ensure that the resulting business outcome clearly improves the capability of either TCS or our stake holders. It could either be an increase in our revenue, measured in profi ts, or measured in customer and employee satisfaction. Innovation process is ‘ideas in and impact out’. The impact could be across three segments — derivative innovation by which we continually provide improvements on current services and solutions, platform innovations by which we swiftly move to visible adjacencies in terms of emerging technologies as well as markets, and disruptive Innovation by which we create breakthroughs and evolve potentially game-changing business models.

New technology is always exciting, and everyone would like to experiment with it to check how it can be applied to existing or future tasks. Going back to the three categories of innovation, each of them would treat early adoption of technology differently. In case of derivative innovation, the focus is on introducing an innovation which can deliver results quickly, without disrupting existing service levels and quality. The tolerance of risks and failure is very low in this category and the possibility of adopting a completely new technology is reduced. In case of platform innovation, since the projects take anything from 18 to 24 months to execute, the risk tolerance is a little higher. So we have the time to adopt new technology, try it out in pilot, make sure it fulfills its promise and then deploy it in the form of a new platform. In the case of disruptive innovation, the risk tolerance is the highest and we can leverage radical new technology. Here, the early adoption of technology is certainly required; otherwise it will not be disruptive.

Can you give us an example of some products that are a result of the innovation labs?

The software engineering tools program is an excellent example of derivative or sustaining innovation as it has resulted in a faster, better, cheaper, business outcome. These tools help in software development, requirements management and software lifecycle. Though this is not available commercially, we use them extensively in the TCS labs, software engineering and platforms development. The internal social network platform allows our over two lakh employees to collaborate easily and is a good example of transformational improvement or platform innovations.

Demographically, we are a very young company with an average age of 28 years, and the usage of this platform is extremely good. We have now taken the next step of applying social network capabilities to different business processes across customer verticals such as banking and manufacturing. The iON and the mKrishi program are examples of products resulting from disruptive innovation. The mKrishi program connects farmers with an ecosystem that empowers them to make sound decisions about agriculture, drive profi ts and conserve the environment. This is still work in progress.

How do you see the CIOs’ role evolve in the face of ever-changing business scenarioes?

CIOs are now seen as business leaders who not just run IT, but are advisors to business, and that is the predominant role that they would play going forward. In fact, about a year ago, we had collaborated with the Center for Information Systems Research - MIT Sloan, where we surveyed global CIOs and CEOs about how they view the evolution of a CIO’s role. The results showed that running IT is less than half of the job description for a CIO. The other half is connecting with the business, evangelizing new technology, connecting with the customers, looking at the impact of technology through business processes, and playing a transformative and innovative role in the organization. CIOs should be able to solve existing IT problems in a credible way. Only then will they transform from being just a trusted partner to being an advisor to the business. That will give them the perch to talk about the impact of new technology and how new business problems can be solved with technology.

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