My Story
I started close to the machine, and never entirely left.
My first years were spent close to the hardware, and then keeping servers and mail running for people who expected them to work when they arrived in the morning. That period set a habit I still keep: before believing a report, I try to find the thing underneath it.
Over three decades the scope changed: more countries, larger portfolios, higher stakes. The recurring failure mode did not. Programmes rarely fail because the technology was wrong. They fail because ownership was ambiguous, complexity was underestimated, or the organisation was never asked whether it could absorb the change.
I still describe myself as a student. Each stage below is here for the lesson it left behind, not for the title that came with it.
Selected stages
A journey, not a job history.
- Stage 01 · 1991–1996
Hardware and study
After an engineering degree, I spent three years as a hardware executive at Agro Computer Systems. In 1994 I left for Australia to complete a Master's in Management of Information Systems at Griffith University, and presented my first conference paper in Melbourne in 1995. It was the first time I studied technology as something organisations use, not just something engineers build.
- Stage 02 · 1996–1999
Systems across borders
I returned to India and joined Human Base, a Japanese multinational, then Mastech as a systems consultant. That took me to Tokyo as a systems manager for a capital-markets firm, and then to Chicago. Working inside other people's organisations, in other countries, taught me how much of a system lives in the habits around it.
- Stage 03 · From 2000
Infrastructure, operations and consulting
In February 2000 I joined Digital GlobalSoft in India. Part of the work was outages: servers down, mail down, incidents to fix and problems to remove so people could start their day as if nothing had happened. I designed the campus infrastructure and rolled it out to 8,000 users. This is where I learned that most outages are explained by something ordinary. Alongside operations, I was already consulting: systems integration and implementation projects for clients around the world.
- Stage 04
Global delivery and automation
The work grew into consulting and delivery across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and EMEA, including the Middle East, with teams in India, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, the Philippines and Malaysia. Delivery became as much about handovers and language as about engineering. Automation work, including the Engineer-to-Zero programme, taught me the difference between removing effort and removing the reason the effort existed.
- Stage 05
Transformation at scale
Later came enterprise architecture and transformation: a €150M programme covering more than 1,200 applications and 2,500 servers, and the migration of SAP workloads to AWS. At that scale, the technology was rarely the hard part. The organisational absorption decided the outcome.
- Stage 06 · 2022–2026
Executive leadership
At Fujitsu I led architecture for complex pursuits up to $100M, then delivery optimisation, a global community for service delivery managers, and workforce governance across delivery locations. Alongside that, I studied the chief digital officer role at the Indian School of Business and AI for leaders at UT Austin. Decisions improve when the evidence is visible and someone owns the review.
One job, many names
I joined Digital GlobalSoft in 2000 and did not change jobs for more than twenty years. The company changed around me: Compaq, then HP, HP Enterprise Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and finally DXC Technology. I have been on the receiving end of mergers and integrations many times. It is one reason I write about transformation from the side of the people who have to live through it.
What stayed constant
Three things did not change.
Curiosity
The habit of looking underneath a report before believing it, formed in the years of fixing outages before the working day began.
Ownership
Programmes rarely stall for want of effort. They stall because nobody can say who decides when reality differs from the plan.
Learning
The subjects move quickly, and a good part of what I know will need revising. Writing is how I do that revising in public.
My advisory work is presented separately through DK Transformation.