Q&A: Colin Bannister, UK CTO, CA Technologies

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As part of our leadership series, IT Pro spoke to Colin Bannister, CTO and vice president of technical sales for CA Technologies in the UK and Ireland.

Describe your role in three words

Constant change. Challenging. People-oriented.

Without that insight from the other side, it would be really hard for a vendor to clearly articulate to and deliver products for customers.

How did you get to where you are today?

By mistake! I ended up in the IT industry purely by accident - most probably like an awful lot of people do. I did a degree in geology. I was on the other side of the fence and spent half my career on the user side before I switched to the vendor side.

There are a number of reasons why I changed sides. I worked for Natwest just before the RBS acquisition so it seemed like a good time to change. I was ready for a change so I moved from being a buyer of software to the other side. I was really interested to see what the other side of the coin was like.

After Natwest, I went to Amdocs. I was there for about three years and I absolutely loved it. It was a fantastic company.

Around the time it expanded into distributed environments, I was headhunted by CA. I've been with CA for 15 years now.

Having been a consumer of CA technologies at Natwest, [I knew that] it had the best software in the market but the worst customer relationships. I saw that as a great challenge.

Today, more than ever, IT has to tackle some big problems. Without that insight from the other side, it would be really hard for a vendor to clearly articulate to [and deliver products for] customers.

What's the biggest challenge of being a modern-day CTO?

The most challenging thing from a CTO perspective is driving the ROI of our products so that they are much easier to use and much easier to install. If the gap between business demand and IT's ability to deliver is growing, as a CTO I have to make sure our technologies are able to help bridge that gap.

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