Moving faster with IT isn’t an all or nothing, legacy or replacement equation. There are many different paths. At Covanta, we have a set of systems and technologies that are in place, and we can call that legacy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s whole. There will always be the priority of business alignment and driving business and business value, but the reality is that the basics have to run as flawlessly as possible.
On the other end of the spectrum we have a growing business, and growing sales teams, the Internet of Things, mobile first, and moving to the cloud, and the things that you have to jump at, realizing that you’re not going to be able to plan it all up front. When it comes to respond to change you’re not going to be able to go in a straight line. A squiggly line is okay, knowing that we’re moving forward, but we’re going to make some adjustments along the way. It’s not perfect.
In the middle, where you have technology that affects both, our business is driving an incredible amount of change. Covanta is growing, requests from customers are maturing, and so they’re getting more sophisticated and complicated as well. That means we have to balance those requests against current systems and maintain a standard and stable environment so things keep flowing. And we have to balance that against, “Wow, this is new and exciting.”
How we’re going faster
Mobile is a challenge, and to go faster it involves a lot more than, “I want to use an iPhone.” It’s more like, “We want our legacy information available on mobile at any point in time, at any point where we are.” And that’s a challenge because we’re not going to rewrite some of our heavily invested applications, which were done before the time of mobile, to a mobile role. So there is a kind of give and take around what data users need. And instead of rewriting applications, we are looking at how do we take a little bit at a time and give it to them in an incremental way.
Another example is that expectations of both employees and customers are dramatically changing because of the way that they have access to their online banking, and even Amazon. There may not be a lot of incredible business value in some of it, meaning the business can run the way it is, but the expectations have changed dramatically. Customers want to do the same thing they do with their bank and with companies like Amazon. They want to see bills, they want to make payments, they want to see intelligence reporting.
To keep abreast of all this change, we use a small staff called Business Relationship Management. We have this team truly embedded with our business. They sit on our business leaders’ staff meetings, and that provides us visibility into what’s going on in the business, without it being reactive. That cuts both ways, of course. Their charter is also to bring business knowledge to IT, and to brief IT on what’s going on in these individual departments. Put that together and we find that we connect the dots faster on business needs and drivers coming up. It’s particularly helpful when the business doesn’t know what to ask for.
This is another facet of going faster. With true connections between IT and our businesses we’re light years ahead on our knowledge of a situation. So when the project happens, we have immediate expertise on the business side of things. It prevents the situation where someone from a business comes to us and says, “Oh my God, we have an issue and we need this to be done,” and IT knows nothing about it. When you’re not starting on something after they need it, you’re already moving faster.
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Stuart Kippelman is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Covanta, a world leader in waste-to-energy and renewable energy projects. He is responsible for the global vision, strategy and operations of Covanta's IT organization. As a valued member of executive management, Stuart is responsible for the global vision, strategy and operations of Covanta's IT organization. Stuart is a dynamic business and technology executive who has spearheaded the creation of new product applications and breakthrough initiatives focused on improving revenue generation, business efficiencies and employee productivity. He has been on the forefront of technology innovation, successfully leveraging technology to solve some of the company's toughest businesses challenges.
