Nancy Cooper faced quite a challenge when she joined CATechnologies as its CFO and executive vice president in August2006. The IT management software company was under a deferredprosecution agreement after a Justice Department investigation intoaccounting irregularities, and Cooper was brought in not only tosee the agreement through to its conclusion, but to rebuild thefinance team.

And she has reshaped finance into a tactical advance team with awell-articulated strategy. “I'm on a whole new path with thefinance team―having them focus not just on basic accounting butviewing finance as a source of information to help run thecompany,” Cooper says. “We worked toward articulating a strategy tobe as efficient as we can.”

The key was changing finance'sidentity. “They are not just bean counters but analysts,” sheexplains. “They have to be able to look at information and say,'What does this information mean and how can we as a company useit?'”

Determining what role finance should play in creating value wasessential, Cooper says. “In a technology company, the businessmodel is changing rapidly, and we have to enable that. So we cancreate value by providing strategic information as the businessmodel evolves.”

After assembling the right senior leaders, Cooper focused ondeveloping team members according to their skills and the company'sneeds. “We set up a new, formal training program and a financeexcellence council,” she says. “The council is like aself-improvement group made up of VPs, senior directors anddirectors, who look at what would create excellence in theorganization. We then break out into teams to make it happen.”

This became a viral and highly effective driver of change,Cooper says. “It is very important when you want to transform thatyou have deep involvement of the leaders beneath you.”

The finance team at CA Technologies now has what Cooperdescribes as “bench strength.”

“If I was taken out of the picture tomorrow, we would be A-OK,”she says. “And that wasn't the case five years ago.”

Cooper clearly thrives on overcoming adversity. “The crisis wasan exhilarating time,” she says. “CA was non-investment-grade with$1 billion of debt coming due at the time. By 2009, we were one ofthe few companies to be upgraded to investment grade.”

CA, which had $4.35 billion in 2010 revenue, initially struggledto refinance its debt. But under Cooper's management, CA improvedits financial strength to the point where the major rating agencieslifted it to the next tier. Suddenly investors could not get enoughof CA paper.

“We refinanced the existing debt, put out a new bond, andwe have been upgraded many times since,” Cooper says. “We werecounter-cyclical.”

See the complete coverage of Treasury & Risk's2011 Women in Finance list here.