The Thrill—and Challenge—of Private Equity IT

Given the accelerated operating tempo and focus on financial outcomes, there’s no more exciting place to practice IT leadership today than in the private equity space, argues veteran CIO Scott Hicar. But it requires extra effort in terms of strategy, communication, execution, and flexibility.

After serving as a corporate CIO in multiple transformations across varied industries over my career, I was looking for a new mountain to climb. What I discovered is that, in today’s market, IT transformation work within the private equity (PE) space is some of the most challenging and complex work happening anywhere.

Working as a fractional CIO in this space for the last 18 months, I’ve been able to leverage learnings and best practices for building actionable roadmaps and delivery teams and adapt them for PE. PE CIOs operate in a high-pressure, messy environment focused on rapid value creation—typically within a compressed 3- to 5-year investment horizon. Unlike traditional corporate CIOs, they must blend strategic IT leadership with urgent operational execution to drive EBITDA and Free Cash Flow (FCF) growth and—ultimately—a successful exit.  

The chaos becomes especially acute in newly formed or acquired platform companies that emerge from rapidly acquiring several smaller companies with disparate IT systems.  

I experienced this as a CIO of TwentyEighty, a roll-up of several corporate training companies that lacked a coherent IT strategy for efficiency and value creation. Building and communicating that IT strategy allowed the team to focus on prioritized execution of a common ERP and CRM system for the merged entity as well as a strategy to transform acquired company products to digital offerings.

If you’re already working in this space, congratulations! If not, you may want to consider it. PE offers some of the most exciting IT work happening today if you are the type of technology leader who is energized by navigating an IT portfolio through a fast-paced, high-change environment. As 2025 ended, I stepped back to consider what I’ve learned over the last year and a half that might be helpful to other technology executives working in this space. 

Leading IT in PE: Four Truths to Guide The Effort

When spearheading technology strategy and execution in PE, the need for speed intersects with—in some cases—the substantive technology consolidation challenges of an industry roll-up or—in others—the need to establish a baseline technology capability for a recently carved-out business unit. At the same time, senior leaders may be in flux, driving further acquisitions or divestitures or entering new markets and opting out of others. Add the seemingly insatiable desire for AI capabilities throughout the value chain and you are facing some unique challenges.

There’s rarely a dull moment. But there are some guiding principles that can help CIOs traverse the inevitable twists and turns and deliver the outcomes PE firms seek.

1.    Strategy matters more. My recommendations start and end with strategy. A clear business-focused strategy is the best way to keep the technology roadmap and priorities front and center. While this is not unique to PE, it’s especially important here. IT strategy should be aligned with corporate and PE strategy, the latter of which factors in unique considerations like potential future transactions. Something as simple as a four-quadrant strategy—addressing demand generation and branding, people productivity, back-office efficiency, and product and production processes—goes a long way.

a.    Demand generation and branding: In PE, where multiple companies have been acquired, merged, and consolidated to transform fragmented, regional markets into a unified, dominant company, the need for a technology roadmap to support top-line growth is sometimes overlooked. For small and medium-sized businesses acquired as part of a roll-up strategy, marketing may have traditionally been outside of IT’s purview. But growth is paramount to a successful buy-and-build strategy or standing up a carved-out, newly branded company. IT must create a digital demand generation capability—aligned with sales and marketing—that leverages websites, social media, and events to digitize the sales funnel across the various acquired brands, markets, and products.

b.    People productivity: Here, the focus is on applying technology to ensure maximum productivity of end users. Traditionally, in IT we talk about end-user support, but when you reframe this as enabling the productivity of our people and teams, you can more effectively measure IT’s contribution (via uptime, availability, and AI-driven automation) to gross margin and free cash flow generation.

c.    Back-office efficiency: In PE, especially in situations involving industry consolidation or business-unit carveouts, streamlining the back office by establishing or consolidating ERP systems to create or standardize a common operating platform takes up a large chunk of IT capacity. The focus here should be on overhead efficiency— a crucial, often untapped, lever for improving profitability in PE, that allows companies to increase operating income without cutting direct production costs. AI opportunities to scale these combined ERP back-office processes while keeping a lean staff should rank highly on the AI priorities list.

d.    Product and production processes: While there may be some overlap with ERP implementation, the emphasis here is on aligning IT to the COO’s mission. The focus is on the aspects of the IT agenda that support operations: from manufacturing to supply chain to order fulfillment, with improving gross margin and EBITDA as key KPIs for success.

The strategy sits on a traditional infrastructure and cybersecurity foundation for continuous management of connectivity and cyber risk. Each of the business-focused quadrants is overlaid with data and analytics, aligned to corporate KPIs and anticipated outcomes. And AI is embedded into all strategic and foundational IT focus areas and—given its popularity and high rate of change—should be incorporated and tracked across the four-quadrant strategy for alignment and consistency.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with several clients forming these roadmaps and then infusing them with AI opportunities identified through the organization or through best-practice AI solutions. 

2.    Communication is critical. The best way to align technology strategy and roadmaps with business strategy is having the IT leader report to the CEO. But even then, it’s not always possible to foster the right kind of ongoing technology conversations as most of the time spent with peer executives focuses on business strategy and decision-making. Additionally, while PE leaders have likely experienced major IT initiatives in their careers, many haven’t faced a complex IT challenge like what emerges in a fast-paced, multi-company roll-up.

In IT, we typically use steering committees for major programs, and that model works well in PE. Inviting PE leaders to join the steering committee creates a structure similar to a board meeting and the opportunity to spend time discussing roadmaps, priorities and problems that emerge in high-pressure transformation programs. When the best outcome must balance speed and feasible change among competing priorities, these conversations are paramount. Pairing the steering committee structure with a documented change control process ensures that the business is on board with the roadmap and up-to-date on inevitable adjustments.

I recently helped a client build a steering committee aligned to their IT transformation. Ensuring executives had clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities allowed the team to dive into the transformation and program delivery at hand. 

3.    The program office must build credibility. With a well-communicated and business-aligned strategy in place, attention shifts to building trust in execution. The program office and its managers play a key role here, establishing priorities within each of the focus areas. I like to help the business visualize this by illustrating which programs address each strategic focus area.

The goal is to drive for a balanced portfolio of initiatives, with a highest-priority item in each focus area, but sometimes major programs like an ERP consolidation consume the bulk of resources and extend across multiple areas. It’s also possible that some initiatives may leverage the same technology (like an ERP platform) to deliver business outcomes in various strategic focus areas.  

The program office should stay on top of the highest priorities and know what can be done to make any backlog projects “shovel ready” in the event of change, such as a strategic reprioritization. A well-vetted change-event calendar keeps the steering committee apprised of what projects are active, what their priority level is, what in the backlog is “on deck”, what exists in the deeper backlog, and how ready the organization is to digest the changes being delivered.  

I’ve deployed this approach in both public companies and PE. It’s a great complement to agile principles: constantly evaluating the backlog for priority and value as business conditions change while keeping the focus on active, critical projects through a PMO and execution lens. 

4.    Flexibility rules the day. With an aligned strategy, an active steering committee, and a program office delivering outcomes, the IT operating engine is firing on all cylinders. But there is no steady state in PE. The technology team must be able to pivot on a dime. Leadership changes happen, acquisitions are announced, divestitures occur, business conditions change. The IT function’s ability to step back from a well-oiled IT operating process and do what’s necessary to not only navigate through major change, but embrace it, is the ultimate challenge.  

At a recent client, as we approached design freeze, several steering committee members left the business. This leadership gap would have likely impacted change acceptance. So, we chose to adjust the schedule and de-scope some of the more difficult organizational changes planned, which allowed the team to keep the program moving forward. 

Ultimately, the combination of operating tempo, substantive IT work driven by rapid M&A, AI infusion, and the central role IT plays in outcomes makes PE a challenging, target-rich environment for CIOs who believe IT is the most effective way to drive transformation forward.

Technology-driven transformation, expressed in terms of EBITDA and FCF generation, is imperative to the business mission and the outcomes of acquired companies. And IT is the driver of exponential change in both top-line growth and operational effectiveness—when you have a clear IT strategy, effective and ongoing communication, a dedication to execution, and a passion for flexibility.