360 degrees of digital innovation at Waste Management New Zealand

After being in telco and consulting for over 20 years, Lena Jenkins got the change she was looking for when she became the chief digital officer at Waste Management New Zealand, the country’s leading materials recovery, recycling, and waste management provider. The customer-centric emphasis that has maintained throughout her career, however, continues since she joined last year, as well as a focus on how tech and the business are more inextricably linked than ever in light of increasing uses and benefits of AI. “I really like working in the intersection of tech and business,” she says. “But I’m not deeply technical. I’m more of a generalist; leadership is my core skillset.”

Many people think about waste management as the trucks that turn up to your house and collect waste, but there’s a lot more going on. Beyond the everyday recycling, for instance, there are other technical service divisions that look after medical waste and hazardous waste, and there’s gas capture off the company’s landfills as well. “So as the waste breaks down, we capture the gas and convert it to electricity,” she says. “That’s the input back into the grid. So my team is responsible for all non-engineering technologies like IT or digital. And we support around 1,800 people across more than 70 sites and over 900 trucks.” So every aspect of digital progression is part of the pillars that make up WMNZ’s Porohita, or circular, strategy.

“We have quarterly reviews and planning to make sure we maintain that alignment,” she says. “But for me, the biggest things are transparency and feedback. So that means sharing what we’re doing, understanding what others are doing, and gathering feedback to maintain alignment.”

Part of that transparency, of course, extends to tech partners, considering WMNZ’s IT is a relatively small team. Building trusting relationships with partners who can take the time to understand the business, and know that the focus is around digital strategy, is vital.

“We’re heavily operational, rather than other corporates that might have a lot of knowledge workers, so you need to think slightly differently,” says Jenkins. “Another thing that’s important for me is do what you say you will. If we’ve agreed something is going to happen, then it will. I’m always interested in hearing about ideas that might help us to deliver more value, but not the hard sell.”

O’Sullivan spoke with Jenkins about building capability, scaling, and the importance of starting small. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On the digitalization journey: We’re currently working through our digital strategy this year called Porohita, which means to be circular. At the moment, we’ve got an agreed digital vision, and are working through the use cases that’ll be organized into a roadmap. That roadmap will then inform the business case and then we’ll need to go through all the steps necessary to get that approved all the way up to the board. That’s the big focus for this year. And that digital strategy will include work around foundational work in our core platforms. We also need to implement a data platform. But in addition to the foundational work, there’s some innovation opportunities like AI-based routing. With 900 trucks, I’m really excited to look at that. Predictive maintenance is another thing. But more than just the tech, it’s a shift in our processes, mindset, and culture.

On inspiring people: The focus for me is making sure our people are set up for success, so that means making sure everyone has clear expectations on what they need to do, sharing strategic context around what we’re doing and why, and making sure we share knowledge and decisions. Transparency is really important as well and providing support when necessary, but not micromanaging. We need to ensure people have opportunities for learning and to do interesting work. One of the things I’ve focused on over the last year is creating a culture of partner. When I started in this role, there was still some remnants of IT as an order taker, both across our business and a little bit within my team as well. So I spent time making some changes, like talking about our business because we’re part of the business, too. And I refer to internal stakeholders rather than internal customers just to change that dynamic and relationship to one of partnering rather than order taking.

On attracting people to IT: One of the most important things is we communicate and bring the possible opportunities to light. I think there’s an assumption that to work in digital more or IT is that you need to be super technical, or you need to know how to code. I’ve never written a line of code in my life. There are different career pathways. So it’s important to share our stories. After I started at WMNZ, we had a profile on our internal portal about me and my background. And someone from our finance team was absolutely amazed that someone non-technical could have a role like mine. It’s so important to share our stories.

On innovation: It’s still early days but over the next couple of years, we’ll have a lot of focus on foundations. I want to make sure we carve off some capacity for experimentation, too, and the approach I think we’ll take is starting small. So test, learn, and scale from there. One learning I took from earlier in my career was to centralize to build capability with a smaller team, and then decentralize that to scale. But managing legacy tech is a challenge. At the moment, most of our focus is on maintaining what already exists because we have some legacy tech that requires lots of attention. But that will change with our digital strategy, and as we start to work through foundational work. We have pockets of innovation within the projects we’re delivering, too. For example, we took over waste collection in Marlborough from July 1. To prepare, the team had to roll out 36,000 bins to households, so we created a solution that was a lot more efficient and effective for bin labels. Sounds like a small thing but having those with the right features was a good innovation.