The glossary

The vocabulary behind how we build. See these ideas in context on our approach page.

Global Capability Centre (GCC): An offshore centre owned and operated by a multinational to deliver technology, operations, R&D or business services for the parent company, instead of outsourcing that work to a vendor.
Captive: A GCC set up and run directly by the parent company on its own payroll, as opposed to a vendor-run or build-operate-transfer model.
Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT): A model in which a partner builds and runs a centre or capability, then transfers it, including people, processes and assets, to the parent company on pre-agreed terms.
GCC Procurement Cascade: Scutiger’s name for the 20–30 purchase categories a new GCC triggers in its first two years, from incentives, entity and leases to security, automation and process transition.
GCC Demand Network: Scutiger’s model for serving GCCs: GCC intelligence, agent-assisted procurement, and a supply layer in which Scutiger delivers high-skill work and vetted partners fulfil the rest.
GCC City Index: Scutiger’s sourced scoring of Indian GCC locations on education-institution density, labour catchment, connectivity, cost, state incentives and GCC momentum.
Labour Catchment: The area a centre can realistically hire from: districts within a 60–90 minute commute, plus feeder cities that send talent through migration.
GCC Incentive Policy: A state government policy offering GCCs capital, payroll, recruitment, training, rent, bandwidth or power support, usually tied to investment and employment thresholds.
Specialist Pod: A small, outcome-owning team (e.g. AI platform, IAM/PAM, data platform) that delivers while a GCC’s permanent hiring catches up, with a pre-agreed transfer path.
RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing): An external partner running all or part of a company’s hiring process, often used for volume hiring in a new GCC.
BGV (Background Verification): Employment, education, identity and criminal-record checks on new hires, a volume bottleneck for fast-growing GCCs.
Transfer Pricing: The pricing of services between a GCC’s Indian entity and its parent, which must meet arm’s-length rules and documentation requirements.
Landing Zone: A pre-configured, governed cloud environment (accounts, identity, network, guardrails, cost controls) that lets new teams start building safely on day one.
AI Control Plane: A shared layer governing AI use in an organisation: approved models, access control, logging of prompts, outputs and agent actions, evaluations and guardrails.
Process Transition: Moving a process from HQ or an outsourcing vendor into a GCC, including knowledge capture, parallel run and stabilisation.
IT 2.0: Scutiger’s name for a modern software services model that uses agentic AI to ship production software in weeks, replacing sprint theater, PRD handoffs, and manual QA gates.
Agentic Delivery: A way of building software in which AI agents handle scaffolding and repetitive code while engineers focus on architecture, verification, and hard problems.
Two-Lane Model: A delivery structure with a fast prototype lane (AI-generated) running alongside a hardened production lane (verified), so speed never compromises reliability.
Prototype Lane: The fast lane of the two-lane model, where AI-generated prototypes validate ideas and flows in days before any commitment to a full build.
Production Lane: The hardened lane of the two-lane model, where verified software runs in production backed by continuous guardrails.
Hardening Gate: An explicit transition point where a prototype is evaluated for production readiness — security, reliability, performance, and compliance — before it goes live.
Guardrails Over Gates: A governance principle that replaces manual end-of-line QA gates with continuous automated quality, security, and compliance checks.
Golden Paths: Pre-approved, paved development routes — vetted tools, templates, and pipelines — that make compliance and best practice the default, automatic choice.
No-Handoff Methodology: A way of working in which product, design, and engineering co-create from day one instead of passing documents over the wall between teams.
Executable Intent: The idea that a working prototype, not a comprehensive document, is the clearest shared expression of what a team intends to build.
Sprint Theater: The ceremony-heavy, story-point-obsessed rituals of traditional agile that produce incremental outputs without necessarily producing outcomes — the practice IT 2.0 replaces.
AI Agent: An AI system that can carry out multi-step software tasks — generating scaffolding, boilerplate, and repetitive code — under the direction of an engineer.
MLOps: The practice of taking machine-learning models from notebook to production reliably, using pipelines, feature stores, and model-serving infrastructure.
Platform Engineering: Building internal developer platforms — golden paths, design systems, and shared infrastructure — that let teams scale quality across many projects.
Feature Store: A system that manages and serves the data features used to train and run machine-learning models consistently across development and production.
Guardrail: An automated check — for quality, security, or compliance — that runs continuously during development to catch issues as they appear rather than at the end.

Want to see these in practice?

Read our approach, browse the handbooks, or book a GCC call.