CA's journey of change & improvement

After leading the world’s fifth largest software company through a challenging transformation programme over the last three years, I can see parallels between CA’s experience and the scenario facing a number of India’s industrial heavyweights as they go multinational.

CA was the first software company to reach $1 billion in revenue and was once bigger than Microsoft. We entered the 21st century with more than 14,000 employees and customers in more than 140 countries. So far, so good then — but CA needed sharper focus and clarity of mission because we had grown through acquisitions and had thousands of products with no specific targeting in terms of business areas essential to our future growth.

So the first steps in our transformation was to identify the space in which CA should compete, then devise strategies for competing successfully. As an enterprise software company, we decided that CA’s core business going forward lay in infrastructure management solutions.This clarity of thinking gave rise to the belief that CA should become a global leader in unifying and simplifying the management of IT.

This led to what we now call Enterprise IT Management (EITM), which helps our customers to govern, manage and secure their IT environments. We then worked to explain our everyday mission in life to employees so that CA advanced with a shared mindset.

A lesson learned is that never before has IT been so central to global business, because strategically-managed IT is the only answer to the all-pervasive complexity we have to grapple with on a daily basis. So organisations in sectors such as telecommunications, systems integration, finance and government find themselves asking the question: What is the best way to achieve maximum efficiency, effectiveness and security amid this complexity?

To me and the customers I speak with, this is truly the central question in IT today. Better processes and employing people with better business acumen helps — but what’s really needed is a more holistic approach to managing IT.

In short, globalising enterprises need to ensure that technology advances can be managed in order to pave the way to global success.

(The author is president & CEO, CA)