Context
Over several years, the India Global Capability Center of a leading global healthcare enterprise had built a strong foundation around cost efficiency, talent, and reliable technology delivery. The model had worked. The GCC had scaled across multiple technology domains, established Centers of Excellence, demonstrated strong retention, and successfully taken on work previously delivered through external providers. In selected areas, India teams were already demonstrating solution ownership and end-to-end delivery.
But the enterprise was reaching an inflection point.
Several long-standing managed services arrangements were approaching renewal, technology costs were rising, and critical digital platforms increasingly required deeper institutional ownership. At the same time, global leaders were beginning to question whether the GCC should continue to be primarily an efficient execution center, or evolve into a more substantive enterprise capability. The question was no longer whether the GCC had delivered against its original mandate.
It had.
The more important question was:
What should the GCC be allowed, and expected to own next?
The Challenge
On the surface, this appeared to be a familiar GCC maturity challenge: moving from execution excellence toward greater strategic relevance. But several possible explanations existed.
- Did the GCC lack the leadership capability required to take on broader accountability?
- Did global stakeholders lack confidence in India?
- Was business knowledge insufficient?
- Was the GCC leadership team not demonstrating enough ownership?
- Or had the enterprise operating model itself become the constraint?
Bridgepath was engaged to conduct an independent strategic diagnostic and separate perception from evidence. The assessment deliberately examined the GCC from three independent perspectives: more than 25 VP/SVP-level global leaders, the India GCC leadership cohort, and a broader group of over 50 enterprise stakeholders through a structured survey.
The populations were assessed independently. Yet they converged on substantially the same conclusion.
The GCC's technical execution was broadly credible. The constraint was increasingly around strategic voice, business ownership, leadership authority and enterprise context. Survey respondents, for example, rated technical quality positively and largely regarded the India organization as a peer rather than a conventional vendor, while far fewer perceived it as a strategic enterprise asset.
The Intervention: An Enterprise-Wide Strategic Diagnostic
Rather than assessing the GCC in isolation, Bridgepath treated the engagement as an enterprise operating-model question.
The diagnostic combined senior stakeholder interviews, India leadership discussions, a broader leadership survey, analysis of existing delivery models and review of areas where greater India ownership was already working.
The objective was not simply to identify gaps. It was to determine why those gaps existed.
Three questions became central to the intervention:
- Was the GCC genuinely ready for greater accountability?
- Was the enterprise genuinely prepared to transfer the authority required for that accountability?
- What would both sides need to change for the transition to work?
This distinction proved critical because a capability problem and an authority problem demand fundamentally different interventions. If capability was the primary constraint, the answer would be skills development, leadership training and hiring.
If authority was the primary constraint, those interventions alone would leave the underlying operating model unchanged.
Key Insights
Several important findings emerged from the diagnostic.
Execution was not the fundamental problem. The GCC had established credible technical capability, strong delivery relationships and multiple examples of work being performed successfully from India.
Leadership development needs were real, but they were not the complete diagnosis. Strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, change leadership, business context and executive presence all required strengthening. But many of these behaviours were also being expected from leaders who had limited authority and limited exposure to the forums in which those capabilities could be exercised.
Responsibility and authority had become disconnected. GCC leaders were accountable for delivery while important decisions around hiring, timelines, vendor engagement and programme ownership frequently continued to require global approval. A majority of India leaders interviewed highlighted the authority deficit as a material issue.
Business context could not be created through documentation alone. Global stakeholders repeatedly identified greater business immersion as necessary. Yet only a small proportion of GCC leaders had experienced meaningful exposure to enterprise headquarters and business leadership.
The future model was already working in pockets. Several teams were already operating with greater end-to-end ownership, solution authority and operational accountability. This was significant because the transformation did not require the enterprise to invent an entirely new model. It needed to understand why greater ownership worked in certain areas, and systematically replicate those conditions elsewhere.
The most important diagnostic reframing therefore became:
Was the enterprise looking at a capability ceiling, or an authority deficit?
The evidence suggested that both existed, but treating the challenge primarily as a capability problem would lead to the wrong intervention.
The Shift: From Delegated Work to Earned Ownership
The engagement reframed the GCC's next phase around a co-created model of authority and accountability. Greater ownership could not simply be demanded by the India GCC. Nor could headquarters transfer accountability without changing the decision architecture surrounding it.
Three constituencies therefore needed to move together.
The Global Organization needed to provide clearer decision rights, greater business exposure, structured leadership immersion, stronger participation in enterprise planning and deliberate opportunities for India-led ownership.
The GCC leadership team needed to demonstrate that it could convert authority into outcomes, taking full programme accountability, strengthening strategic voice, building business context, showing operational commitment and arriving at enterprise discussions with recommendations rather than waiting for direction.
The executive sponsor needed to make the strategic intent explicit. This included defining the GCC's place in the enterprise capability strategy, naming leaders with genuine ownership, establishing a decision-rights framework and creating structural mechanisms through which appropriate work would be considered for the GCC rather than automatically defaulting to external providers.
The result was an important shift in philosophy:
Authority would not be given without accountability. But accountability would no longer be expected without authority.
From Diagnosis to a Three-Horizon Roadmap
Bridgepath translated the findings into a three-horizon transformation roadmap.
The first horizon focused on consolidating ownership by placing a small number of programmes under genuine India accountability, clarifying decision rights, naming solution owners, increasing business immersion and demonstrating credible operational ownership.
The second horizon focused on deepening ownership by expanding accountability across portfolios, progressively taking on appropriate responsibilities, increasing business engagement and changing the relationship between the GCC and the external provider ecosystem.
The third horizon focused on strategic leadership by positioning GCC leaders as peers in enterprise technology planning, increasing their role in ecosystem governance, creating enterprise-wide capabilities such as AI and automation, and building a sustainable internal leadership pipeline.
Importantly, progression was not designed to occur simply because time had elapsed. Each horizon was earned through demonstrable outcomes. This converted the roadmap from a conventional maturity model into a practical contract between enterprise leadership and the GCC.
Outcome
The engagement gave the organization a shared diagnosis of what was preventing the GCC from moving to its next stage. It established that the center's first chapter of cost efficiency and dependable delivery, had been successful. The issue was not whether the GCC could execute. The challenge was that the operating architecture surrounding the GCC had not evolved at the same pace as its capability.
The diagnostic resulted in:
- A fact-based view of GCC capability and stakeholder perception across three independent leadership populations
- Clear differentiation between genuine capability gaps and structural authority constraints
- Identification of existing internal proof points that could serve as templates for broader ownership
- A co-created model defining what the global organization must enable and what the GCC must demonstrate in return
- Explicit executive actions around decision rights, business immersion, programme ownership and provider strategy
- A three-horizon roadmap linking progressive authority to demonstrated accountability
Most importantly, the executive conversation changed. It moved from:
“Can the India GCC do more?”
to:
“What must we change as an enterprise for the GCC to own more, and what must the GCC prove in return?”
Why This Case Matters
Many mature GCCs eventually reach a similar point.
They have proven that they can deliver. They have built scale, talent and institutional knowledge. Yet the organization continues to evaluate them through an operating model designed for an earlier stage of maturity. The natural response is often to ask the GCC to become more strategic, demonstrate greater leadership and take more ownership.
But there is a structural contradiction when the same organization continues to centralize the decisions, business context and authority through which those behaviours must be demonstrated. This case reinforces an important lesson for enterprises seeking to move their GCCs beyond execution:
Before asking whether a GCC is ready for greater ownership, ask whether the enterprise has created the authority, context and accountability through which that ownership can actually be demonstrated.
The transition from cost efficiency to capability leadership is therefore not simply a GCC transformation.
It is an enterprise operating-model transformation.
About Bridgepath:
Bridgepath Innovations is a practitioner-led advisory firm specializing in Global Capability Center (GCC) strategy and transformation. We help enterprises design, build, and scale high-impact centers that go beyond cost to deliver innovation, capability, and strategic value. Our approach is grounded in real-world execution, not theory — enabling organizations to unlock the full potential of their global talent ecosystems (https://www.bridgepathinnov.com)