CIO Anurag Gupta on taking the private equity plunge

This pressure compounds when the PE managers invest their personal wealth in the assets they acquire, which they often do. “One of your owners likely has a substantial stake at hand,” says Gupta.

To drive the performance of their PortCos, PE firms will pull many levers beyond the well known tactic of cost optimization. These might include capital allocation, lean ways of working, digital transformation, and operational effectiveness, to name only a few.

PE firms see the CIO organization as “a swiss-army knife,” capable of pulling many of those levers to transform a company and improve its offerings, says Gupta. Though exciting, this puts immense pressure on CIOs to deliver measurable value fast and on multiple fronts.

“You do not have the luxury of linear thinking,” Gupta says. “You can’t think, ‘In my first two years, I’ll focus on foundations. I’ll get cyber right, then service desk, then infrastructure.’ You must address all of those, even in the first six months. You will simultaneously have to play the role not only of the CIO but of the CISO, chief digital officer, and chief transformation officer, and likely more. And this is where the excitement is.”

You can also expect to do much of this without any additional funding, perhaps with less. This might seem ironic — companies generally sell to PE for access to capital — but one of the reasons PE firms have the capital they do is because they manage it fastidiously. You must manage your budgets accordingly, tracking every dollar and measuring its value. “Every cost is under scrutiny,” says Gupta.

One way to create value quickly while protecting your budget is to put process before technology, as process will be what sustains most capabilities after the project ends. Process, Gupta feels, should account for more than half of most solutions. “You can’t be excited about technology only. You have to want to solve the problem. If technology has a role to play, okay, but don’t let it account for 80% of the solution by default.”