Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on a large environmental services company is using HP tools to provide always-on, always-available services to customers and internal users.

1. BSM Enables a Powerful Services Continuum Across
Operations, Infrastructure, Development Frameworks, and
Processes, Says WM’s Gautam Roy
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on a large environmental services company is using HP
tools to provide always-on, always-available services to customers and internal users.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact
on people’s lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as
better business results.
This time, we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014
Conference in Las Vegas. We're here the week of June 9 to learn directly from IT and business
leaders alike how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting
their goals.
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Waste Management in Houston, Texas
is improving the quality of their services and operations in IT for a variety of their users, both
internal and external.
To help us learn more about Waste Management’s experience, we're here with Gautam Roy. He
is the Vice President of Infrastructure, Operations and Technical Services at Waste Management.
Welcome.
Gautam Roy: Hi. Thank you.
Gardner: First, help our listeners and readers understand Waste Management. You're a very
large organization across North America with more than 20 million customers. This size and
scale requires an awful lot of IT. Tell us about the scope and size of your operation.
Roy: Water Management is an environmental services company. We have primarily three lines of
business. First is waste service. This is our traditional waste pickup, transfer, and disposal. Our
second line of business is renewable energy or green energy, and our third is recycling.
Gardner

2. What makes Waste Management different from others in the waste industry is that we also invest
quite a lot of effort in next-generation waste technology. We invest in
companies like Agilyx, which converts very hard-to-recycle waste, such as
plastic, into crude oil. We convert organic food waste into natural gas. We
pressurize, scrub, and dry municipal solid waste into solid fuel, which burns
cleaner than coal.
And we're quite diverse, a global company. We have operations in the US and
Canada, Asia, and Europe. We have our renewable energy plants. We have
quite a large array of technology and IT to support these business processes to
ensure that there is consistent business-service availability.
Gardner: And with many organizations, gaining greater visibility into their operations, having
earlier detection of problems, and therefore earlier remediation, all mean faster operations and
better performance. What were some of the drivers for your organization specifically to try to get
a more mature and comprehensive view of your IT operation?
Business transformation
Roy: I'll give a few business reasons and a couple of technology reasons. From the business
side, we started business transformation a couple of years ago. We want to ensure that we unlock
the value for our customer and for us and to institutionalize the benefit for Waste Management.
Customer care, providing outstanding, world-class customer service is aligned completely with
our business strategy. We want to ensure that the business service availability is
crucial in our DNA. Our IT business service availability scorecard a few years
ago wasn't too good. So we had to put focus on people, process, and technology
to ensure that we are providing a very consistent service to our customer.
Gardner: Moving across the spectrum of development, test, and operations can
be challenging for many organizations. You seem to have put in place
standardized processes to measure, organize, and therefore better perform across the DevOps
spectrum. Tell us how you accomplished that. How you were able to make the bridge? Testing
quality and apps leads to better performance and operations. How did you get there?
Roy: That's a very good question. For us, IT business-service availability is really not about
having a great monitoring solution. It starts even before the services are in production. It starts
with partnership with our business and business requirements. It starts with having a great
development methodology and robust testing program. It starts with architecture processes,
standardization, communication. All those things have to be in place. And you have to have
security services and a monitoring solution to wrap it up.
What we are trying to do is not to fight the issue at the back end. A service is down, our
monitoring software picks it up, our operational team and engineering team jumps on it, we are
Roy

3. able to fix the problem ASAP before it impacts the customer. Great. But boy, wouldn’t it be nice
that those services aren't going down in the first place? So we try to approach it from the front
end, instead of chasing it from the back end.
Gardner: So it’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Business Service Management
(BSM), not one or the other, but really both and simultaneously, if you can.
Roy: Exactly, ALM, BSM, testing, and security products. We want to also make sure that the
services are not down from intentional disruption. We want to make sure that we produce code
with quality and velocity and code that is consistent with the experience of our customer.
With our operational processes, ITIL and Lean, we want to make sure that the change
management and incident management are followed to our prescription. We want to make sure
that the disaster-recovery (DR) program, the high-availability (HA) program, the security
operation center (SOC), the network operation center (NOC), and the command centers are all
working together to ensure that the service is up 24/7, 365.
Gardner: And when you do this well, when you have put in place many of the capabilities that
we have been describing, do you have any sense of payback? Do you keep score? Do you have
anecdotal evidence or examples that can show just how powerful it is when you start to operate
on that continuum consistently?
Availability scorecard
Roy: A few years ago, when we were not good at it, we started rebuilding it from the ground-
up, our availability scorecard was pretty bad. Our services were down. At times, we didn’t know
that our services were down. Our first indication of a problem was from customers calling us.
Now, fast forward a few years down the road, with making the appropriate choices and
investments in technology, people, processes, our scorecard is very good. We know of the
problems. We proactively detect problems and fix the problem before it impacts our customer.
We have a 4 9s availability for our critical applications. We're able to provide services to our
customers via wm.com, our digital channel, and it has been quite a success story. We still have
work to cover, but it has been following the right trajectory.
Gardner: Here at HP Discover, are there any developments at HP that you're monitoring
closely? Are there some things that you're particularly interested in that might help you continue
to close the gap on quality?
Roy: Sure. Things like understanding what's happening in the world of big data and HP’s views
and position on that. I want to understand and learn about testing, software testing, how to test
faster and produce better code, and to ensure, on a continuous basis, that we're reducing the cost

4. of running the business. We want to provide optimal solutions at a right price point for our
customers and our business.
Gardner: On that topic of big data, are you referring to the data generated within IT in your
systems to be able to better analyze and react to that, or perhaps also data from your marketplace,
things that your customers might be seeing in social media, for example, or is it all the above?
Roy: It’s all the above. We have internal data that we're harvesting. We want to understand what
it’s telling us. We'd like to predict certain trends of our system, the usage of our applications.
Externally, we have 18 call centers. We get user calls. We also want to know our customer and
serve them the best. So we want to move into a situation where we can take their issues, frame
them into solutions, and proactively service them the best in our industry.
Gardner: I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how Waste
Management is improving their IT operations across the spectrum, from development through
operations, and embarking on more use of big data to analyze their business requirements as well
as their marketplace.
So a big thank you to Gautam Roy, the Vice President of Infrastructure, Operations and
Technical Services at Waste Management. Thanks so much.
Roy: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And thank you too to our audience for joining us for this special HP Discover new
style of IT discussion. We're coming to you from the HP Discover 2014 event in Las Vegas.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on a large environmental services company is using HP
tools to provide always-on, always-available services to customers and internal users. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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