Veolia Environnement is a French company with activities in four main service and utility areas traditionally managed by public authorities – water supply and water management, waste management, energy and transport services. In 2011, Veolia employed 331,226 em-ployees in 77 countries. It is quoted on Euronext Paris and the New York Stock Exchange. CIO William Payne has been at Veolia for five years and has around 80 people in his IT department. He says having a good team is crucial, so you should never procrastinate on people issues. He spends time out in the field with the workers he supports through IT, and he insists that other people on his staff do the same. “You can learn an awful lot from working with blue collar workers and taking that back to the office environment. These are frontline workers. They collect the garbage, sweep the streets or work in industrial plants. They perform a lot of different activities, often in a hostile environment. “Whenever you go out and spend time in an operational part of the business, you learn how to interact with people across a wide spectrum of responsibilities. It’s completely different to the office environment. It even teaches you how to handle meetings, because you learn to cut through the nonsense. “If the customer sees you delivering things on a regular basis, there’s a tighter feedback loop and more interaction. That’s better than going off to do a large amount of work and telling the client you’ll be back in six months with the results. It’s a more collaborative approach.” He has a simple rule on prioritising. If a task, meeting or email is not relevant to the business strategy or to delivering satisfaction to a customer, it’s not high priority. “That’s a defensible position,” he says. “When people ask you why something didn’t get done, you can always show that you prioritised it lower because it wasn’t related to a particular customer or issue we consider important right now. It’s very hard for somebody to come back and say they disagree. “People on my team know that’s how I operate, so we don’t have to go through each item in turn. All they have to do is apply the prioritisation rules. “Fortunately, the majority of the 13,000 people in our UK business are blue collar workers. I go out and spend time talking to them. How you support blue collar workers is completely different to how you deal with a group of people working in an office. “As a result, the CIO of the future is somebody who is quite comfortable running and operating a business. “You have to understand the technology too, but often you have specialists in different areas who can cover most of the details. “Where you add value as a CIO is having a discussion about the services you provide to your customers and why they are needed. For example, I also work on innovation within the company. That’s not technological innovation, it’s innovation full stop.” He does feel, however, that the ‘CIO’ title on a business card isn’t automatically indicative of a business-savvy IT leader. “There are a lot of CIOs out there right now who are what I would call IT managers or IT directors. They aren’t CIOs. A CIO is an essential part of the success of the company, whether the business is something physical, like what we do, or something more service- and transaction-orientated, like a bank.” Veolia monitors the way its vehicle fleets are driven to lower fuel costs, it measures the waste materials collects and works out where there are markets to sell those materials. This is an asset and people-intensive business, and William described how Veolia exploits ICT to drive up both margins and service quality in a most focused manner. It is in such low margin but highly competitive businesses that the innovative exploitation of IT can pay dividends. Veolia draws on the products and services of a range of ICT vendors. Veolia and Payne demonstrate an organisation that, like Unilever, understands that in the data your organisation creates or retains are the future revenue sources for the organisation. It was this 21st Century stance on being a CIO that convinced the panel of putting Payne in top 10 of the 2013 CIO 100. IT leader:William Payne, CIO. In role since:Six years, CIO for the last five. Reporting line:CEO How often does the CIO meet with the CEO:A minimum of once a week. Board level seat:Yes. IT budget:Between £15 million and £25 million per annum depending on projects. IT estate and or number of log on accounts under the control of the IT leader:3,000 users ‘staff’ accounts + 1,000 (8%) ‘operative’ accounts (for mobile solutions). Level of the workforce that relies on technology to carry out their tasks:25% of total workforce. IT staff currently employed:94. Split between in-house/outsourced staff:100% in-house. IT management team and reporting structure: The IT team  known as Business Systems is split into three functions; Innovation, Industrialise and the Factory. Innovation focuses on managing the business relationship to ensure systems support the business need and new requirements are fully understood and contextualised. Industrialise includes the design/build/test/deploy teams and the factory manages day to day IT operations and compliance. Primary technology platforms at the organisation:A combination of ERP for back office and industry-specific solutions for front office. Primary technology suppliers:SAP, AMCS, Salesforce.com. Significant strategic technology deals struck in the last 12 months: We recently completed a deal with AMCS for the supply of a new front office operational system and associated in-vehicle technology. Percentage of your applications/infrastructure run from the cloud:Approximately 15%. Major technology or transformation project recently completed and how did it transform operations, customer experience or the organisation: We have recently re-designed the front line service processes for a large part of our business, moving the administration out of the office and on to the front line workers. This approach places the post-service customer experience into the hands of those that understand what happened, when and how. By replacing paper with mobile technology, huge efficiency savings have been made along with greater accuracy of data (reporting, invoices, etc.). The project has allowed the entire £300 million business operations to be re-designed for maximum efficiency. Did the above project reach its cost, timing and transformation objective: The project is still underway, however is on track to deliver on both cost and timeline whilst exceeding both tangible and intangible business benefits. Business transformation programme – beyond technology – that the CIO owns or is a major contributor to:I am head of the business Innovation team and have responsibility for facilitating innovative ideas from concept, through business case to ultimate execution. During 2012, I oversaw 40 projects of this nature, very few of which relate to technology. I am heavily involved in strategy and innovation outside of IT. Strategic aim of the CIO and IT operation for the next financial year: Continue to deliver on the current three year strategic programme, with a particular emphasis on developing new sales channels. Strategy in the use by employees of their own technology, use of mobiles and how social networking is impacting operations, customer experiences or the organisation: The impact of these areas at present is limited. Employee devices are restricted at this point and social networking is encouraged where it promotes the organisation and increases our profile. Expansion of discussions/debates to include our customers and suppliers is increasing. Strategy for dealing with shadow IT and BYOD including influence and engagement with executives, to place the right controls around employee choice: Shadow IT is well controlled. Strong governance and credibility with the senior business stakeholders means that this is relatively self-policing. If people have ideas, there are good channels to follow to develop this further as a business challenge, rather than jumping to a shadow IT solution (using the Innovation team described above). A considerable amount of my time is spent in the business looking at their challenges from their perspective which helps manage the shadow IT challenge. BYOD is a bigger challenge that we are just now developing a strategy for. There are many facets to this debate, not in the least being cost that will inevitably be higher. Technologies being considered to enable transformation: Mobile devices are at the heart of our transformation strategy. Either supplied by us for front line workers to interact more with the entire process flows or as a platform to drive new sales and promotion channel. Where do you seek transformational inspiration from?The greatest source we have is our 12,000 employees. We have a strong culture of innovative thinking backed up by an idea logging system and annual cash prizes. Beyond this, we have a large global organisation to tap into. Personally, I read publications such as HBR and McKinsey Quarterly as well as utilise blogs online forums.