Our take
As technology GCCs ascend the value chain, they are increasingly delivering greater business outcomes. Yet their impact often remains unclear to their headquarters.
Rajesh Ojha, Dheeraj Gangrade, and Sayantan Chatterjee make the case for a dedicated value management office as the missing link—positioning value visibility as a core leadership and governance responsibility.
A technology GCC set up by a US-based fashion major delivered close to USD 10 million in cost savings and operational efficiencies for its headquarters (HQ) through a series of digital initiatives over six years. By conventional operational metrics, the GCC was delivering. But it wasn’t long before the HQ began to question the GCC’s value contribution to the broader business ecosystem. The issue was not delivery, but visibility.
The GCC lacked a cohesive and consistent framework to demonstrate not just what it had delivered, but how those outcomes advanced enterprise priorities and how its contribution was evolving as it moved up the maturity curve. As a result, while execution value existed, its strategic significance to the HQ was not always visible or explicitly articulated.
To bridge this disconnect, the GCC partnered with PwC India. Based on a dipstick assessment of the GCC’s operations, strategic positioning, and stakeholder landscape, we proposed a comprehensive value management model anchored in six dimensions: cost/process optimisation; revenue growth; stakeholder experience; legal and compliance; skills and innovation; and environment, social, and governance (ESG).
These six dimensions were aligned to four strategic pillars that reflected the HQ’s core business priorities: consumer centricity, direct-to-consumer, enterprise foundation, and business operations. The result was a model in which every metric reported by the GCC could be clearly traced to an outcome that mattered most to the HQ.
This is how a well‑designed value management framework—one that evolves in step with a GCC’s maturity—can plug the gap between value creation and visibility.
Applicability band:
Rather than being an exception, the case of the GCC discussed above is emblematic of a broader challenge that GCCs providing technology services face today, as they scale and mature. GCCs were once evaluated largely on efficiency metrics such as cost savings, headcount leverage, and turnaround times, which made value communication straightforward. But ever since their mandates have expanded beyond efficiency to innovation, growth, and enterprise transformation, value has become inherently multi-dimensional and thus much harder to define, measure, and communicate.
Technology GCCs, in particular, are playing a significant role in driving the strategic objectives of their HQs. They bring in industry-leading practices, niche capabilities, and advanced technology to deliver best-in-class services across complex portfolios ranging from enterprise architecture and emerging technology integration to product and service innovation.
But the way their value is measured or, for that matter, perceived has not kept pace. Our conversations with leaders across technology GCCs point to a growing disconnect between the value GCCs deliver and how that value is perceived by the respective HQs.
The imperative is therefore clear: Value must be deliberately designed, continuously measured, and strategically articulated. Without a structured value management approach that evolves alongside GCC maturity, even high performing GCCs risk being undervalued, misunderstood, or strategically marginalised. Making value visible is no longer a reporting exercise—it is a leadership and governance responsibility, central to sustaining relevance and influence within the enterprise.
To stay relevant and even become anti-fragile, we must evolve how we communicate our value–not just what we deliver, but how it drives the enterprise’s strategic goals.”
Kartikeyan Ramamurthy,Director - Strategy and Operations, Amadeus Labs IndiaNotably, earlier research by us found that one of the key areas of partial alignment between a GCC and its HQ was the very definition of value. It is therefore imperative for GCCs and their HQs to establish a shared, explicit definition of value creation—more so in an environment where trust in AI and emerging technologies is still tenuous and innovation outcomes are often time- and cost-intensive.
Unsurprisingly, our previous survey found that one of the top actions recommended by both HQ and GCC leadership to improve alignment was maintaining open communication channels across senior management teams at the HQ and GCC. But what makes value communication at the technology GCC particularly complex is the fact that while the definition of value shifts as the GCC matures, the metrics and communication frameworks rarely evolve at the same pace.
As technology GCCs mature, expectations of the value they deliver rise significantly. In the early stages, value is largely assessed through the lens of cost arbitrage. Over time, however, headquarters expect technology GCCs to demonstrate deeper strategic contributions — ranging from building competitive advantage and driving innovation to supporting new product and service development.
Scope expansion becomes a critical part of a technology GCC’s journey as it matures and shifts its focus from a cost-centric value provider to a capability-driven unit that plays a critical role in the overall HQ strategy. To meet the HQs’ expectations of value, technology GCCs could expand their scope of services horizontally by adding new, higher value capabilities or vertically by deepening ownership across the existing service stack.
Horizontal expansion refers to the addition of entirely new capabilities. For instance, a GCC that began with IT platform support may over time take on technology R&D, new product development, advanced analytics, or cybersecurity, thereby widening the breadth of services it delivers to the headquarters.
Vertical expansion, on the other hand, refers to deepening ownership within an existing capability. In this case, the GCC may begin to handle customer support IT contact centres and IT platform enhancements, or move into data entry and processing.
Across technology GCCs today, clear shifts are underway — both in the value they deliver and in how they organise themselves to deliver it. This evolving landscape is shaped by changing business priorities, rapid technological advancement, and the growing need for resilient, innovation-led operating models. Six trends stand out:
As critical engines of enterprise value, the mandate of technology GCCs now centres on delivering measurable business outcomes—improving speed to value, increasing agility, and enabling growth through technology‑led transformation.
Moving beyond traditional SLAs, performance metrics are increasingly aligned with enterprise priorities such as innovation outcomes, stakeholder experience, and operational resilience. KPIs are being redefined to capture GCC contributions to strategic objectives, not merely operational efficiency.
Agentic AI, generative AI (GenAI), cloud, cybersecurity, and advanced analytics are redefining what technology GCCs can deliver. These capabilities are driving measurable returns through intelligent automation, enhanced business analytics, and innovation-led initiatives — positioning GCCs as hubs for next-generation digital solutions, not just service providers.
Technology GCCs are consolidating functions that were once siloed—R&D, infrastructure, cybersecurity, application development, and data engineering. This integration enables faster product innovation, stronger security posture, and improved operational efficiency across the enterprise.
To ensure accountability, GCCs are establishing dedicated centres of excellence tasked with defining, monitoring, and reporting value delivery against business-aligned objectives. The aim is to ensure that IT investments translate into measurable business outcomes with clear stakeholder accountability across the value lifecycle.
GCCs are embedding agility into their operating models to navigate tight talent markets and inflationary pressures. Attracting and nurturing specialised talent in AI/ML, cybersecurity, and cloud engineering has emerged as a strategic priority.
As technology GCCs move up the maturity curve, the metrics they capture and communicate to their HQs must also evolve, with the emphasis shifting from cost efficiency alone to measurable topline and business impact.
When HQs are unable to trace how a technology GCC advances business priorities, value remains invisible. This chapter outlines the approach technology GCCs must adopt to bridge this gap:
It is imperative for technology GCCs to undergo a recursive cycle of value generation, measurement, and articulation to ensure that they continue to align with the broader strategic objectives of their HQs. Enabling this alignment demands a focused emphasis on four critical levers—the 4Ps: practices, productivity, performance, and perception. As business processes mature, GCCs are able to drive higher levels of productivity. Improved productivity, in turn, enhances service effectiveness and performance, shaping more positive stakeholder perceptions of the GCC’s contribution. To sustain and strengthen this perception over time, GCCs must reinforce mature processes with rigorous governance practices, ensuring that value delivery remains consistent, visible, and credible.
By prioritising the 4Ps, technology GCCs can institutionalise six core outcomes that collectively form the foundation of a mature value management framework:
Business and IT strategy operate as a single, aligned system—ensuring that value generation is continuous, not episodic, and that every technology initiative can be traced back to an enterprise priority.
The services the GCC provides to the HQ are transparently defined, catalogued, and communicated, giving stakeholders a clear line of sight into what the GCC delivers and setting precise expectations against which performance can be measured.
Tools, processes, and governance metrics are standardised across all projects, eliminating operational fragmentation and creating a consistent, repeatable foundation for delivery at scale.
Governance cadences are established for regular KPI monitoring, with every metric tied to business-critical success measures.
A fungible pool of resources is built and maintained—one that can be dynamically deployed to support strategic, high-value initiatives as priorities shift, rather than remaining locked into static project assignments.
Technology spending is directed toward high-impact projects that demonstrably augment value for the HQ, replacing broad, undifferentiated IT budgets with disciplined, outcome-linked investment decisions.
We no longer define success by what we deliver, but by how our delivery accelerates the enterprise’s strategic priorities.”
Prabhakar Varadarajan,Head of GCC and MD, ANZ Group Capability Centre, BengaluruTo ensure that the value generated by technology GCCs remains aligned with the strategic objectives of their HQs, it is essential to map business priorities and outcomes to individual IT initiatives and to continuously monitor, measure, and communicate the linked outcomes. This enables technology GCCs to focus their efforts on delivering clearly defined outcomes that matter to the HQs.
Technology GCCs can operationalise business outcome-driven value management by following a structured four-step process:
In order to enable business-outcome-driven value management, technology GCCs need to first define the results they would be working towards. These results should be aligned with the HQ's strategic objectives. Once the expected outcomes are formalised, technology GCCs should define the set of initiatives which can enable them to achieve the results. Each of these initiatives should also have defined metrics for monitoring their success.
To transition from traditional project execution to value-based delivery, technology GCCs can focus on twelve key dimensions — each designed to produce measurable business outcomes and align IT initiatives with the strategic goals of the headquarters.
To remain indispensable, we must shift from describing outputs to demonstrating strategic impact, aligned to the enterprise’s strategic goals.”
Vijay Padmanabhan,Managing Director and Head of Hyderabad Office, OaktreeAs technology GCCs evolve from cost optimisation centres to strategic assets, the need for a dedicated function that embeds value realisation into daily operations — rather than treating it as a periodic reporting exercise—becomes critical. This has led to the emergence of the VMO, a strategic enabler that institutionalises value management as part of business as usual, aligning technology services with the GCC’s maturity milestones and the HQ’s strategic agenda.
The VMO functions as a centralised structure to ensure that IT services delivered by GCCs are not only aligned with enterprise strategy but also contribute to measurable business outcomes. It empowers GCCs to go beyond transactional service delivery and function as transformation hubs with shared ownership towards enterprise goals. This transition is relevant in the context of GCCs operating in high-scale or preliminary stage, single or multi-region environments where IT capabilities typically drive innovation, agility, and competitive differentiation.1
The VMO has four fundamental pillars which can be established through a systematic value chain:
The VMO’s KPI framework spans five domains, each designed to monitor a distinct dimension of value:
Assesses how effectively IT strategies, investments, and services are aligned with business goals. This entails cohesiveness between IT projects, business priorities, budgeting, cost management, and returns on IT investments, while also capturing the HQ’s perception of IT’s responsiveness, relevance, and collaboration.
Evaluates the performance, reliability, and efficiency of IT infrastructure, systems, and service delivery. The focus is on sustaining a stable, resilient, and well-governed technology environment.
Measures IT’s ability to drive innovation, adopt emerging technologies, and respond rapidly to evolving business and market needs. This includes the adoption of technologies such as AI, cloud, and IoT as well as progress on enterprise digitisation and modernisation.
Examines the GCC’s effectiveness in identifying, protecting against, detecting, responding to, and recovering from cyber threats, while managing IT risks, compliance, and regulatory obligations. This covers the robustness of security architecture, defensive controls, and vulnerability management.
Determines IT’s capacity to attract, develop, retain, and empower a skilled and engaged workforce while fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, and adaptability aligned with enterprise values.
As technology GCCs mature, many are shifting to service-oriented models, where the value delivered by IT services is quantified in financial and tangible terms. This shift elevates the role of the VMO, making it central to ensuring the GCC’s operating model remains aligned with the HQ’s strategic direction. The VMO interfaces with the GCC operating model across the following four touchpoints:
In its role as a shared value creator across multiple entities, a GCC must transition its narrative from transactional updates to strategic storytelling that emphasises measurable impact and future potential.”
Indradyumna Datta,Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Jindal Steel LimitedThe India-based GCC of a UK-based pharmaceutical giant undertook a transformation programme for its source-to-contract journey. The programme involved multiple initiatives across process orchestration, third-party risk management (TPRM), contracting automation, and post-signature analytics.
But two critical gaps undermined the programme’s ability to demonstrate value to the HQ.
First, the initiatives lacked clearly defined KPIs. There was no structured measurement framework to capture the evolving value these initiatives were generating. Without defined metrics, the GCC had no consistent language in which to articulate progress, quantify impact, or demonstrate return on investment to its HQ leadership. Second, the initiatives had no AI-driven components. In a landscape where the HQ increasingly expected its technology centres to lead on new-age technology adoption, the absence of AI across the transformation programme was a missed opportunity.
Our proposed approach included embedding AI across the transformation programme. We replaced the existing procurement system with a single, AI-driven orchestration tool for all source-to-pay processes, automating sourcing workflows to ensure compliance, maximise commercial opportunities, and enable a frictionless, policy-compliant experience for users and channel partners. For TPRM, we proposed replacing the existing TPRM tool with a new AI-enabled risk framework incorporating pre-screening and risk-based assessments to improve turnaround time and overall risk posture.
In parallel, we developed a comprehensive KPI framework—20+ metrics monitored across five solution areas—designed to give the GCC a measurable, reportable vocabulary for the value being generated.
As technology GCCs establish themselves as key value generators for their HQs, they must ensure sustained value delivery governed by a well-articulated and clearly defined value management model.
We offer various services within the value management vertical of technology GCCs — from strategising the key tenets of setting up a value management model to operationalising the VMO. These services enable centralised governance for monitoring and measuring the value generated by technology-focused GCCs, and also articulate the associated issues and risks across business and IT, driving end-to-end accountability.
| Challenge | Enterprise applications struggled to reliably integrate with systems. Complex open data control/OpenAPI services, authentication handling, tenant isolation, and frequent outbound communication failures created instability and unpredictable system behaviour across distributed environments. | The company required cloud-native applications capable of supporting multiple tenants, scaling on demand, and maintaining resilience across environments. Building this from scratch significantly increased development time, cost, and risk. | Testing was a critical bottleneck for integrated applications. Manual test creation, inconsistent execution, slow feedback cycles, and lack of automation impacted quality, delayed releases, and hindered continuous delivery. | Enterprise workflows spanned multiple systems. Orchestrating these reliably was complex, error-prone, and susceptible to failures and latency issues. | The organisation faced significant gaps in recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and talent development. These inefficiencies reduced team productivity and directly impacted R&D effectiveness and business outcomes. |
| PwC India’s solution | PwC India built applications that integrated seamlessly with the client’s services without dealing with low-level complexities. Java enabled secure connectivity, authentication, multitenant routing, and resilience features including caching, retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, and rate limiting, ensuring stable, predictable communication across the enterprise landscape.
Java features utilised: Secure connectivity, authentication, multitenancy, caching, retries, circuit breakers, timeouts, rate limiting, resilient communication APIs |
Our experts used Java and a cloud software development kit (SDK) to build multitenant SaaS applications running efficiently on a leading cloud business technology platform. The SDK abstracted tenant handling, outbound requests, and resilience mechanisms, allowing development teams to focus on business logic while delivering scalable, secure cloud solutions with faster time-to-market.
Java features utilised: Cloud SDK support, multitenant abstractions, scalability, security, faster development with SDK |
PwC India built the Future of Testing (FOT) platform using Java with Spring Boot microservices. This automation platform orchestrates test generation, execution, and reporting through event-driven and asynchronous workflows, significantly improving test accuracy, reducing manual effort, accelerating delivery cycles, and enabling continuous integration/continuous delivery practices.
Java features utilised: Spring Boot microservices, event-driven programming, asynchronous workflows, and concurrent processing |
PwC India leveraged Java’s robust ecosystem to build modular, event-driven architectures capable of orchestrating complex workflows across ERP and non-ERP components. Java services communicated seamlessly with databases, external APIs, and cross-language microservices, enabling reliable automation and smooth data exchange across the enterprise.
Java features utilised: Modular design, event-driven architectures, APIs integration, cross-language microservices communication |
We built Java-based integrations with a cloud-based HR software to automate and streamline HR workflows, including hiring, performance reviews, document management, and employee lifecycle processes. This ensured that business and R&D teams had timely access to skilled resources while HR processes ran smoothly across the enterprise.
Java features utilised: Enterprise integration, automation via Java backend services for cloud-based HR systems |
Adopting a structured value management framework—anchored in by strong governance through a VMO—enables technology GCCs to secure sustained strategic buy in from HQs. In an environment of rapid technological disruption, innovation may provide competitive advantage, but value communication determines whether that innovation is funded and scaled. A well-run VMO ensures that the most impactful ideas are systematically identified, measured, and amplified—positioning GCCs not just to keep pace with change, but also to lead it with confidence.
