Phil Stunt, vice president for international IT at software giant CA, has come through some hair-raising scrapes. From his days playing for Loughborough University’s rugby team to joining CA just as the corporate governance maelstrom surrounding the company was at its height, Stunt is used to being right in the thick of it.

In his early days at CA, meeting the deadline for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was paramount, said Stunt, especially after the high-profile governance scandal hit. The company launched an intensive compliance process. “We needed to embed compliance into the DNA of every business process,” he said, to make sure governance and risk management became an everyday component of operations.

Having successfully met the Sarbanes-Oxley challenge, Stunt turned his attention to consolidating CA’s enterprise applications, with the aim of standardising on a single SAP implementation. As Stunt explains, that is an overall objective, not an absolute diktat. While SAP will serve as CA’s core business application, a handful of other systems will hang off it, including CA packages, on-demand software and bespoke systems. Stunt has recently been focused on determining what that application stack should look like.

Working for one of the world’s largest software developers introduces other challenges for the IT function, such as managing career development. As Stunt explains, he encourages his IT team to take a “zigzag” career throughout the company. A member of staff could start on the IT service desk and then quite easily move to customer support. Having then built up a good level of knowledge about a product, they could move on to a development role.

This flexible approach to staff management is designed to support Stunt’s overall goal of ensuring every member of CA’s IT department has a good understanding of the business. And while Stunt claims to hate the term “business-IT alignment”, his annoyance seems to stem from a desire to challenge the lazy assumption that IT is not part of the business, rather than any fundamental objection to the underlying sentiment.

Stunt encourages his staff to understand the language of the sales and marketing teams. That does not mean they have to become sales or marketing staff, “but they need to have credibility in both camps”.

But his attitude towards developing staff is also testament to his belief in allowing people to use their initiative. The IT team needs to be given the opportunity to explore things that fire their imaginations, he said, so that they can deliver business-enhancing innovations.

One area where Stunt hopes his team may be able to pull a rabbit from the hat is green technology. CA is still in the process of fleshing out a green strategy. There is a great deal on the agenda, from server virtualisation to increasing its use of fresh air cooling. One of the biggest difficulties facing the IT department is working out which green strategies are actually effective, because the task of benchmarking energy use is inordinately difficult, he explained.

However, green IT could be an ideal area for Stunt’s team to demonstrate its ability to innovate. The whole initiative is fundamentally about making the organisation more energy efficient, and that should lead to significant savings. It is precisely the sort of business-enhancing innovation that appeals to Stunt.