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July - 2003 - issue > Technology
The CIO Of Business Process Reengineering
Karthik Sundaram
Tuesday, July 1, 2003
TECHNOLOGY EXPERTISE IS A GOOD QUALIFICATION to become a CIO,” says Ashwin Rangan, himself the senior Vice President and CIO of the Newport Beach, CA-based Conexant, [NASD:CNXT], a $1.23b semiconductor solutions company for communications applications. “But it is not sufficient qualification to aspire for the post.” To be a CIO, says Rangam, it is important to be a businessman first. “Technology is only the enabler,” points out the Conexant CIO, “not the business itself.”

Conexant provides broadband pipes to the digital home, focusing on media conversion and transmission platforms to enable this. Conexant traces its roots back to the 1950s, to Collins Radio—a crystal radio company that was acquired by Rockwell International. The business acquired grew independently on two platforms. Rockwell-Collins provided solutions to the aerospace and defense sectors and Rockwell semiconductors focused on connectivity solutions for electronic communications.

In early 1999, the modem business was spun off as a seperate company after what was possibly the largest IPO to the debt shareholders. Conexant was born. Conexant took a steep growth curve, growing organically and inorganically—acquiring close to ten companies in 18 months. “From 1999 to 2000, we had added more than 70 plants worldwide and over 10,000 people working,” says Rangan. “As a business process re-engineering head, it was my job to see how we could integrate all this growth without much pain. It was like changing the tyre on a car—excepting that the car was on the road and doing a smart 60mph!”

In 1995, when Rangan joined Rockwell, most IT services were being provisioned by the parent Rockwell International. “It was very clear that the mandate before us was to be self-sufficient in our IT needs—wide area networking, data warehouses, the staffing necessary for a 24x7 platform, extending the WAN to accommodate our growth beyond the U.S., building redundancy and so on,” recalls Rangan. In the same year, Rangan led a global big-bang implementation of SAP across the 70-plus units, possibly the first semiconductor company to do this.

“The challenges in this implementation were many,” Rangan says. “At that time, we were a semiconductor company that was growing very fast, and the staffing required to keep pace with this blistering speed was a tough hurdle. Not only that, SAP was a new product—not just in the U.S., but worldwide too, and the challenge was to find sufficient talent base to implement and maintain this large project.” Rangan recruited his team from the world over, hard put to find experienced talent in the U.S., and worked very closely with SAP for the implementation. “We are probably one of the earliest adopters, and the next versions have been influenced by our inputs,” says Rangan.

Early on, the office Rangan headed at Rockwell was named Business Process Re-engineering and Information Technology. “This gave me a gavel that I could bang once in a while,” laughs the CIO. M&A activities were treated as part of business process re-engineering and Rangan was able to set some very clear guidelines on integrating newly acquired systems into the Conexant/Rockwell framework. “Every acquisition is unique and does not bring any familiar framework at a given point in time,” comments Rangan. Creating a framework itself was a challenge and Rangan and his team learnt from others who had been down this path—Cisco, a major customer and many others—and came up with a “cook book.”

The acquistions came with their own infrastructure, but Rangan lead with the proposition that time would be the only “negotiable” element, and the final end state would be an integration of the acquired infrastructure within the Conexant framework. “On the sunset day, the end state was a complete integration with the new company,” says Rangan. “It made sense.”

The enterprise-wide implementation also gave Rangan good scope to re-engineer many of the company’s internal business processes. “At the time, we were planning to become an independent company, and this inflection in our business process maturity was a very good benefit,” recalls Rangan. “It gaves us the means to re-engineer our processes and institutionalize them.”

The Conexant CIO has now implemented the latest upgrade of the enterprise software. “Upgrades are a given. You can either stay on the treadmill and pay the costs, or get off the treadmill and still pay another cost,” quips Rangan. For Conexant, the upgrade has been an advantage. “As an early adopter of SAP—when the technical manuals were still in German and we had to hire E&Y teams from Europe to translate—we have benefitted from our status as a key player in the software’s next generations,” Rangan says. Many of Conexant needs have been used as frameworks for the upgrade versions, and this has delivered some superior investment returns to the IT experience.

Conexant started an outsourcing experiment with HCL in 1999 and today has increased its business with the Noida-based IT services provider. “From pure services, we now give them development work,” says Rangan. “The strategic experiment has worked well for us.” Rangan now leads a team of 30 staff and has a budget that remains around two percent of the annual revenues. “As the CIO, I rarely talk about technology these days,” says the IT lead. “What I really focus on is the business space and how we could visit unexplored avenues to leverage our position. I see the CIO’s role increasingly connecting with direct business dynamics, and IT remaining a pure enabler of the company’s agility.”

From business process re-engineering to CIO, Rangan has played a key role in Conexant’s growth. “After a phase of acquisitions, we are now spinning off various technologies into independent polyps, where the business value comes from being a specialist in a particular space,” remarks Rangan.

In all this, Rangan says, he has found some key lessons Indian IT people may find useful. “It is not a bad thing to disagree in a dialogue. People from this region are hesitant to disagree and consequently come up against unforeseen hurdles,” observes Rangan. “Conclusions of a dialogue may be an agreement or a disagreement, but the dialogue should be true. This is a key to business success.”


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