by Peter High, published on Forbes
9-14-15
For years, people have predicted the demise of the chief information officer role. First, it was because it was deemed to be a back-water support organization, and ironically of late it has been predicted because it has become so strategic to all parts of the enterprise that division and business unit leaders would simply take over the function. When Puneet Bhasin was promoted above the CIO role in earlier this year without a successor named, I was fascinated to see if this was a rare example of a company buying into the logic of the end of the CIO role. As it turns out, the decision is not so black-and-white.
I have interviewed Bhasin before about his interesting career path, and his significant “CIO-plus” responsibilities, and I hoped to learn more about how his career had progressed in the many months since he and I had last caught up, and what these decisions might mean for the future of the CIO role.
(This is the 23rd article in the “Beyond CIO” series. To read the prior articles featuring executives from HP, Schneider National, American Express, Aetna, and AllState Insurance, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left-hand side of this page.)
Peter High: Puneet, I thought we’d begin with your current role. You are the Senior Vice President of Corporate Operations and President of Waste Management Recycle America. Can you give a bit of an overview of that role?
Puneet Bhasin: As part of my role as senior VP of Corporate Operations I run our Collection Operations, which is the 20,000 trucks that we have that get onto the road every day. I run our maintenance operations. So those are the two core pieces of our operations that I am running. Then I also run our back office, so I run our shared services function, which is credit and collections, billing, payroll, etc. And I run our supply chain group. So that is what I would call our “back office.” Within the first piece of operations, collection operations, maintenance operations, I would throw logistics into that. As far as my role as President of Recycling, I run our recycling business unit, our recycling line of business, which is about $1.5 billion revenue business unit for us.
High: You have had such an interesting career progression at Waste Management. You began as “just the CIO” at Waste Management, but you proposed to the CEO, David Steiner, the formulation of the logistics operation which you were then put in charge of while still maintaining your CIO responsibilities. You then had a customer-centric role added to that, again while maintaining these other two roles. Now, you have a different set of responsibilities, as you just described, and you no longer maintain the CIO role. Please reflect on the series of events and augmentations, and how your having been a CIO multiple times over at companies like Monster and Ryder before Waste Management provided the experience to make this happen.
Bhasin: First and foremost I would say is that while I am a technologist, I am a business leader first and a technologist second. From the very first day I came to Waste Management, people would ask me what was my technology strategy, and I would somewhat proudly say “I have none.” To me, a technology strategy was really a series of initiatives or project that supported the overall business strategy. And so, when we in 2010 at Waste Management embarked on an initiative that we called transformation, I really modeled my IT initiatives around the key elements of Waste Management’s transformation. I tied technology and technology initiatives to the core elements of the business strategy.
