DXC Technology’s Seelan Nayagam saved from Sri Lanka’s civil war
Seelan Nayagam believes a higher power rescued him from certain death as a teenager, and that escape now drives his passion for inclusion at global giant DXC Technology.
Seelan Nayagam believes a higher power rescued him from certain death as a teenager, propelling a passion for inclusion that has made his global firm a top employer of autistic people.
Nayagam has always regarded his survival story as nothing short of miraculous.
Born into poverty in the town of Jaffna, the capital city of the Northern Province of Sri Lanka (two hours boat ride to India), as a teenager he and his three siblings experienced first hand the horrors of the Sri Lankan civil war in the first half of the 1980s.
“I remember one day after school finished we were going to the library. I was standing behind a tree when we saw the army come along. Shooting broke out and bullets were landing right next to my feet,” he recalls.
During the worst of the violence, he also saw people being killed in front of him. “The first time it is hard and then you kind of get used to it. You know that’s just how things happen.”
In 1986 his father, Rasa, became their family’s beacon of hope.
Having moved to London several years earlier to earn and repatriate money for his family, sponsored by his brother, who was an engineer and had earlier escaped to the United Kingdom, Rasa managed on the second attempt to get his family accepted into the UK as refugees.
Seelan, then 15, joined his parents and siblings in the UK, escaping a war-torn land for the promise of safety and opportunity.
Now, nearly 40 years later, he is a leader in the global technology sector as president, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, for the New York Stock Exchange-listed international software and services provider DXC Technology.
Based in Sydney, his team helps large local government and corporate organisations such as the Australian Taxation Office, Beyond Bank, Jemena and BlueScope to run their critical systems and operations.
Despite his international success, Nayagam never forgets the place where it all began. Every three years, he returns to the country of his birth.
He has even taken his two children to the town where he was born and to his old primary school, where there are still bullet holes in the walls.
“In Sri Lanka I was lucky to be alive. When we went to England, there was the opportunity to make something of life and it was all about hard work. I learned that from my parents,” he says proudly, noting his mother Radha lost her own parents in Sri Lanka when she was 22.
Radha sold peanuts in plastic bags to bring extra money into the household while her children were growing up.
In the UK Nayagam, his parents and his three siblings – remarkably – lived in a single bedroom at a shared house at Hendon Central in north London.
Racism rife
His parents eventually went into the service station business and earned enough money to buy a council flat, and then eventually a house.
But racism was rife in 1980s England. Nayagam will never forget being beaten up by five thugs one evening while doing his local newspaper delivery round. He was only saved from suffering fatal injuries by a neighbour who stepped in and called the police.
That night he promised himself he would train in martial arts. He eventually achieved a black belt in self-defence.
These lessons of resilience and adaptability have become the foundation of his leadership style and propelled him to success in the global technology industry.
“All these experiences teach you resilience and purpose. I was convinced after I learned martial arts that no one was going to beat me up again,” Nayagam says.
“There are always barriers and you have to figure out a way to get around them. You never let the barriers get in the way of progress.”
Today the favourite part of Nayagam’s day is at dawn, when he walks his two Samoyed dogs, Koda and Lana, at the dog park not far from his Sydney home.
After decades of being a cat lover and owner, he was begged several years ago to bring home a Samoyed by his daughter, who turns 21 in March. He also has a 22-year-old son.
Nayagam has always been an early riser, courtesy of his grandmother, Maheswary Ethirnayayagam. “Back in Sri Lanka she used to wake me up very early in the mornings, like typically between 4.45am and 5am, to do maths,” he recalls. “She always believed that you memorise and learn more things in the morning compared to the afternoon.”
Today she lives in London and is set to turn 100 in October, when the family is planning a birthday celebration and reunion for her back in Sri Lanka.
All of her grandsons’ immediate family now live in Australia. “Mum and Dad are here, my siblings are all here and we actually had one more addition to the family who is also here, my brother’s best friend who lost both his parents and had nowhere to go. So we kind of adopted him and I now call him my fifth sibling,” Nayagam says.
Nayagam first visited Australia from the UK in 1991 on a university cricket tour, when he was studying accounting and computer science at the University of Buckingham.
He was captain of the team, which played in every state except Western Australia.
After working in various IT jobs in different countries following his graduation, he spent a decade with IBM in senior roles before being asked to be responsible for IBM’s Applications Management Services business for Asia-Pacific in Sydney in 2014. But three months later he was headhunted to be Computer Sciences Corporation’s Asia-Pacific boss.
In March 2017, CSC merged with the Enterprise Services division of HP Enterprise to form DXC Technology. Today, the company has staff in 70 countries who assist in servicing almost 6000 clients, facilitating their transition to digital systems.
Throughout his career, Nayagam has emphasised the importance of diversity and inclusion, in his leadership style and in the initiatives he champions at DXC.
Providing pathways
A testament to this is the DXC Dandelion Program, which assists neurodivergent individuals on the autism spectrum in building careers in the IT industry – a cause close to his heart after the loss of a dear friend’s son, who had autism.
“It is about providing pathways for people to succeed,” he says. “People on the autism spectrum have an incredible ability to recognise patterns, and are very good in analytics and cybersecurity.
“Autistic people typically struggle to enter the workforce and if you meet anyone with autism, they are usually shy. They generally don’t like to interact with people. So we wanted to create an environment that made them feel comfortable and at the same time one where others actually understand how to work with people with autism.”
The program now has 350 participants and a 92 per cent retention rate.
Last December the Australian Federal Police received the inclusive communities trophy at the National Disability Awards for its Dandelion initiative to provide specialised employment pathways for neurodivergent people, run in conjunction with DXC.
The success of the Dandelion program prompted DXC in 2019 to launch a Social Impact Practice to help its clients and the community develop and run programs that benefit individuals and society.
“You meet the families involved and the stories are pretty tough, especially for the siblings of autistic people,” Nayagam says. “They also go through that journey as well. So we are very grateful that we had the opportunity to create something that has been very successful thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people.”
Today DXC Technology is a world leader in supplying cloud-based software solutions for the life and wealth, global specialty and reinsurance industries.
Its Global Infrastructure Services segment, which represents its portfolio of technology solutions, is also growing.
DXC’s prime focus is helping clients unlock the full potential of generative artificial intelligence technologies by ensuring their data is clean, current and reliable so they can implement secure deployments and scalable solutions tailored to their needs.
Building on DXC’s deep automotive expertise, the firm has also recently expanded its partnership with Italian car giant Ferrari for the software that powers the next-gen infotainment system for the recently launched F80 supercar, a Formula 1-inspired hybrid that is Ferrari’s new flagship model. DXC revealed at its most recent quarterly results that the new digital cockpit in the car provides real-time performance data through seamless high-speed displays for public road use that transforms into a racing display when the drivers are on the track.
Of DXC’s 121,000 employees worldwide, two-thirds are based in the Asia-Pacific.
Nayagam believes Australian companies are firmly keeping pace with the evolution of Gen AI and new technology opportunities, but he worries about the burden of regulation. “In Australia it is very hard,” he says. “A lot of companies are spending time on compliance versus spending time and effort on innovating for impact.
“For us as a nation to be leading, we need to be able to do things more simply. You still need to have regulation, you still need to have laws that protect rights and so forth, but they need to be simple enough for people to follow.”
Nayagam also worries that psychological barriers and organisational cultural factors are stopping some business leaders from moving forward with AI installations, despite recognising their potential for innovation and operational efficiency.
‘Technical debt’
While there is plenty of incentive for firms to invest quickly in technology that maximises revenue and minimises operational costs, he says the race to modernise can often leave in its wake operational and technical issues referred to as “technical debt”.
“You still have lots of Australian organisations that have a technical debt – effectively technology that is old and needs to be replaced and made current,” he says.
Despite his success, Nayagam remains humble. While born into the Hindu faith in Sri Lanka, his religious beliefs became ecumenical from a young age.
“My background is Hindu, but where I grew up there were also Catholics and Christians around,” he says. “So we celebrated Christmas. When I was growing up, religion was important but it was multiple faiths and that gave you the foundation for living.
“When I am in Dubai, I actually go to the mosque as well. So I believe you ask every God and they help you. It doesn’t matter which faith it is.”
He still recalls the bullet cases smoking at his feet in the Jaffna school yard decades ago like it was yesterday, and wonders if divine intervention saved his life that day.
“You know, somebody didn’t want to take me at that point and must have said, ‘You can contribute a little bit more’. So maybe that is what happened,” he quips.
“I absolutely believe somebody is controlling all of these things. I don’t know whether that is a particular God or anything else. But in a society you have to have some beliefs to provide a foundation.”
More Coverage
