Along with other edglings, I’m a huge fan of Web 2.0 technologies and especially the frequently borked Twitter. Most folk I know are addicted to Twitter so that despite its many failings, we keep hanging on in the hope that one day, the management will hire a team of engineers that actually knows what it’s doing. That won’t wash in enterprisey land where buyers expect services to be at least fit for purpose and not suffering continuous outages and glitches. This morning for instance, the only way you can reliably see @ replies is to use Summize and enter @username as a search term.

Anyhoo - some enterprising people are thinking of building an enterprise class Twitter clone - well not a clone exactly, an enhanced version that works for enterprise. What makes this project interesting is that it arose almost spontaneously as a result of this Plurk conversation that spilled into Twitter. I found out about it because a person I was searching upon in Twitter mentioned it.

It turns out that a number of the players are people I know through my involvement with SAP’s community network as an un-remunerated mentor. (Disclosure: I do some paid work for SAP’s business process expert community.)  One of them requested I join the project as they needed some business use case scenarios as a guide to the kind of functional requirements the design team will need. I’m no nerd (though I can code a bit of PHP and a fair bit of CSS) but I do understand how business processes work so I signed up for what is now known as ESME.

Serendipitously, around the same time, I was scheduled to talk with Aaron Williams who manages some of the advanced technologies being worked upon at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. We were due to discuss Collaboration Workspaces, a Jive Clearspace based platform that I have used in the past and which is being enhanced by Williams’ team for internal use.

As part of the discussion,Williams mentioned the magic ‘w’ word - widgets, saying that CW will include an Adobe Connect widget at some stage in the next couple of months or so. That’s cool in its own right because it means CS members can schedule and hodl conference calls with all the shared desktop features that Connect offers. I casually mentioned that a team is in the design phase for ESME and asked whether Williams is up for ideas like that which can be incorporated into his initiative. ‘Why yes, even if they’re really crazy ideas,’ came back the reply. W00t! How often can you say that about a behomoth like SAP?

Why should this matter? CW and ESME are firmly in the Web 2.0 camp, offering facilities that enable collaboration and which can be used as part of informal networks designed to solve specific problems.  But; context without process is a waste of time. When problem solving, you still need to be able to have those contextual thoughts expressed through business process - in other words you need to be able to act upon the outcomes. The way I’m looking at this is as an environment that allows business people, business process experts, who may also be technical analysts and developers to come together in a way that collapses time to value for customers. Adding in ESME allowscommunication to takeon an extra dimension that might prove useful in cases where near immediate answers and actions are required. An example might be clarification around policy documents.

ESME is a fascinating idea which is currently considered a ‘thought experiment.’ Its fascination comes from the fact I’ve heard plenty of talk about such projects among Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle (MISO)_ people, but not seen anything get under way. ESME will be entered for consideration as a potential short listed solution for TechEd DemoJam. If successful, it will be interesting to discover how just how far such a service can go and whether it will be possible to get a widget into CW. That only leaves the BPX’ers to get enthusiastic about the project to amplify use cases so they are more ‘real’ than the ones we have at the moment. It will be an interesting ride.

The other day, I wrote a post about Carbon Accounting as articulated by BT for the SAP Community Network:

I am dismayed. While I appreciate the efforts being made by companies like BT to promote the notion of solving sustainability issues, imposition of what are arbitrary standards and methods is not the way to go about it. In looking at BT’s approach I note they are attempting to apply a model that can be summarized from this reporting in Computing:

Developed by BT director of sustainable development Dr Chris Tuppen, the Climate Stabilisation Intensity (CSI) model links data on a firm’s carbon emissions and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), to global emission reduction goals recommended by the UN, to work out an appropriate emission reduction target for the firm.

The nub of the problem lays in the fact that it is almost impossible to arbitrate across industries on standards of this kind without an understanding of the different inputs and outputs that constitute a particular carbon footprint. At the same time, what matters to one company may not matter to another when it comes to discussing carbon emission reduction effectiveness. For example, if the cost of adding solar power requires a payback that’s outside the company’s usual rate of investment return do you do it for the sake of going green? The answer to that is clearly ‘no.’

It might instead be more effective to lobby local politicians to pressure solar companies into finding ways to reduce their costs so that you can justify the investment.As I say plenty and often, carbon emission reduction may be a top C-level item in boardroom discussions, but it has to take place within the context of an economic environment.

I have an upcoming trip to the UK which involves going to both Bangor and Leeds. There are two of us on the trip. Trying to figure out the most cost effective way to manage the trip is hard enough but then I also need to factor in the carbon emissions element. Here’s how it goes:

• Booking with RyanAir from Granada to Liverpool comes in at €219
• Flying with Jet2.com from Malaga to Leeds-Bradford costs €470
• The train from Liverpool to Leeds costs £37.80 (single) while Bangor to Leeds is £44.00. I’ve not factored in Liverpool to Bangor because it is possible we can get a ride for that part of the journey, assuming we fly into Liverpool and go to Bangor first. I could hire a car at Liverpool which would come in at around £100 plus fuel for the time we will be in the UK.
• If we travel from Granada then long stay parking works out at €40 but is free in Malaga but the journey to Malaga is an extra 130km in both directions which will cost roughly €28 and involve an extra hour’s driving each way. If we fly to Liverpool then on the return we either book a hotel for possibly 4 hours sleep at a cost of £65 or hang out in the airport and conserve some cash. Any thought of getting sleep on a RyanAir flight is wishful thinking. Returning from Leeds means a cab ride costing aorund £13-15 as there is no reasonable public transport option that allows us to reach the airport for check-in.

It seems to me that which ever way we organize the trip, we’ll end up with roughly the same cost because the savings in flight fares in going to Liverpool will be swallowed up by additional costs elsewhere. I’m not sure we gain anything from flying to Leeds because we still have the problem of making the Bangor journey. I’m not convinced there is any real difference in carbon emissions cost as the flight times are virtually identical and the train journey times are not so far apart as to make a demonstrable difference. I’m prepared to be flexible if I could only work out the best combination of travel methods.

What I really want is a service where I can input those parameters and have it spit out the optimal combination of cost, time and carbon emissions load so I can then assess the best way to make the journey. Unfortunately, I can’t find a site that does this. Surely if we’re going to get serious about traveling in a cost effective yet least harmful manner, then a service of this kind makes sense? Today, we have discrete aggregator services like Kayak, that focus on flights or Travelocity that only factor flights, hotels and car hire. And yes, I also want SMS notification in case there are any likely delays. Some might argue that is good enough but I’m far from convinced. I’m reasonably certain I’m not an edge case on this one so if anyone does know a service that provides the information I’m trying to find then I’d love to hear about it.

Two entirely unrelated posts caught my attention today. Tom Raftery asks whether SaaS saves greenhouse gases. Quick as a flash, Chris Yeh from PBWiki does some back of fag packet calculations and comes up with the startling conclusion:

That means PBwiki could be saving the world up to 585,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or the equivalent of driving an SUV around the world 50,000 times!

Tom is sceptical of the assertion, qualifying it to say:

Now, obviously not all 500,000 hosted PBWiki’s are replacing an individual server but say 100 PBWikis replaces one server, or 1,000. That’s still somewhere between 600 and 6,000 tons of CO2 PBWiki are saving the planet per annum.

That’s still pretty impressive but like Tom, I’d like to see harder numbers. Elsewhere, Simon Wardley, whose thinking is generally both out of the box yet spot on talks about finding new ways to shed extra pounds.

Anyway for reasons of vanity I’ve decided to do something about my additional mass. Having caused environmental damage gaining it, I’d rather minimise the environmental cost of removing it. Whilst one obvious option is to spend time down the gym, I was wondering whether anyone has done a study of how much additional co2 such pointless exercise causes. I say pointless because there are usually no additional benefits to gym exercise other than the exercise itself.

What I’m looking for is exercise with some form of point, such as an allotment or forestry work or volunteer gardening. However, I’d still be interested to know what each kilo of my additional mass means in unnecessary and unsociable environmental damage caused.

That seems like an eminently good way to look at the problem of exercise that yields a net-net positive outcome. Until I read Simon’s post, I was thinking about investing in a WiiFit. But then I’d also have to calculate the amount of energy I’d be consuming by running the Wii. Ugh!

It seems that sometimes, you just can’t win. Unless of course you’re prepared to consider Simon’s option.

This article about ‘green explosives‘ caught my eye. The author takes a sideways look at the issue noting that:

If you’re worried about the environment but still need to blow people up, a new class of nitrogen-based bomb materials is for you. Popular explosives like TNT and HMX react to form nitrogen oxides when detonated, the major culprits behind smog and acid rain. This is a big no-no if you’re the type of warmonger who drives a hybrid tank, obviously, so weapons experts at the University of Munich devised an alternatives that are cleaner, more stable, and even more powerful than those other explosives.

Apparently an alternative use would be as rocket fuel.  While struggling to find any meaningful justification for the invention of ever more powerful exploseives, it makes me think about another set of vague connections. Alfred Nobel was both an inventor of dynamite who ended up giving his fortune away in a supreme act of philanthropy. There is a certain paradox in those events. On the one hand we have the invention of something meant for industry that has become much more closely associated with destruction. On the other, a enduring gift that retains its prestige to this day.

Could we by any chance make the same connections between Bill Gates and his mastery in beating out competition, in the process having his company dubbed ‘evil’ yet bequething his wealth to a philanthropic foundation that will no doubt benefit for years to come?

In the last 10 days I’ve been either in Boston or Orlando at events sponsored by SAP. At both events, representatives from a number of NGOs were present in part because sustainability is high on SAP’s business and product agenda. While I am aware of Web 2.0 style projects at some NGO’s those more closely aligned to business have had little exposure to these technologies. It always seems to be the way but by the time the NGO attendees reached Orlando, it seems they had been well and truly bitten by the Web 2.0 bug.

In one post on the OpenAccountability wiki (invitation required but open to those genuinely interested in sustainability in IT) developed by Redmonk and Greenmonk, Steve Rochlin, head of AccountAbility North America said:

I’m just returning from the high of a stimulating, provocative, challenging and altogether mind-expanding dialogue at SAPPHIRE Orlando.

Graham Baxter of International Business Leaders’ Forum, in comments to Steve’s breathless post added:

So we have established that there are at least two categories of application for web 2.0 in the corporate responsibility space. The first, is perhaps the easiest to understand - as a new tool to drive responsible business behaviour. The new Guardian post (thanks Derek) shows the potantial of this enabling a whole new group of people (community) to get active. It begs, again, the question of legitimacy of the community. But I understand that that isn’t really the point - its a group with a voice which is sometimes loud - so companies had better work out how to listen and respond.

For me though, as I said in the discussion the really interesting part is where web 2.0 can enable new and innovative ideas and create new opportunities for entrepreneurs to pick up and run with which in turn address the pressing and seemingly overwhelming challenges we face. Are there solid examples of this happening yet?

I can understand why NGO’s and other campaigning organizations get excited at the potential for these technologies. However, they need to understand that business needs convincing that sustainability has a bottom line value otherwise they simply won’t play. In this context, while they may think Web 2.0 technology gives them a bigger foghorn, that doesn’t necessarily translate into corporate actions. My sense from the Boston meeting is that NGOs see partnership as the way forward in helping business define those profitable measures that contribute to a more sustainable future. But again, NGOs will only get invited to the table if they can offer concrete help and don’t try throwing their campaigning weight around. It’s a delicate balance and one that’s not easy to achieve. How for example do campaigning NGOs sit down with polluters in an atmosphere of trust? Or how might NGO’s advise business in responding to the recent report from The Independent that asserts:

More than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change, according to a new poll.

These and other significant challenges have to be met as part of the framework around which business is encouraged to adopt sustainable policies and actions.

It is perhaps paradoxical that the technologies we now have - especially wikis and community building solutions - can serve both sides of the sustainability debate and both together. The OpenAccountability wiki is one step in what I think is the right direction where business managers in technology companies, tasked with sustainability issues, can ‘meet’ and thrash out the issues in a safe environment. That’s a debate I hope to jump into in Berlin, where we have the second round of SAPPHIRE, SAP’s set of global customer conferences.

As an aside, Max Gladwell has an excellent post covering 10 ways to change the world through social media. While I’m not a fan of the term ’social’ in the business context, Max provides a solid rundown of tools that can be usefully applied towards developing awareness and action.

Eddy de Clercq is my kinda guy. A software engineer who works at a Belgian university, Eddy is widely known among his community for his sharp wit and incisive points of view. He makes the kind of connections many miss and tries really hard to live the sustainable life. This from a recent post about bottled water:

I’ve seen somebody drinking O2 water the other day. Not only it had artificial kiwi and apple flavour but also extra oxygen added. According the ‘manufacturer’, it uses patented technology from Life Technologies, Inc. to put extra oxygen into ordinary water. The resulting beverage has 10 times more oxygen (72mg) as ordinary water and provides an extra boost of energy by increasing the amount of oxygen in your blood. What a load of crap! Who needs this kind of water anyway? Nobody compos mentis does.

Eddy then goes on to rant about the resources that go into producing different kinds of bottled water and the impact it has on the environment. Given that our industry uses a LOT of water, not just to quench our individual thirst but also as a resource for data centre cooling, should we not give this apparently innocent aspect of our lives greater consideration?

Eddy has been helping me out on a sustainability project I am working upon. He may be The Grumpy Old Man, but he’s got a heart of gold. How many others might you know who fall into that category?

On a related economic note, my wife told me that a 500ml bottle of Pennine water in a local supermarket cost her 39p. The same bottle in a shopping centre not five miles distant was £1. I know there’s money in O2, I just didn’t realize there is quite so much.

Courtesy of my old mucker James Governor, I see McAfee is leading the charge in greening up its events. Reporting about a recent conference held in Las Vegas, McAfee made sure it was as close to being carbon neutral as possible. By the numbers:

In support of its environmental commitments, McAfee took steps to “green” the event in advance. According to ICF International’s measurement, through a series of event planning decisions and participant education efforts, McAfee reduced the event’s carbon footprint by 16% of its total non-air travel emissions. Specific CO2 emissions savings included:

• 25 metric tons saved by facilitating the sharing of rooms by participants
• 3.2 metric tons and 56,357 gallons of water saved through participation in the hotel’s towel and sheet reuse program
• 0.5 metric tons saved by providing a shuttle for airport and event transfers rather than travel by individual taxicabs
• 0.5 metric tons saved by eliminating bottled water and providing tap water only

“Companies who are committed to sustainability and minimizing their environmental footprint must first understand where their material impact can be made,” said Craig Ebert of ICF International. “For companies in the knowledge economy, often that material impact is in their electricity use, business travel and corporate events. We applaud McAfee for its industry leadership in corporate sustainability by conducting this in-depth measurement project, taking steps to reduce and offset the environmental impact and being transparent in sharing the results with others for the common good.”

Among the overall findings of the formal measurement project of the remaining environmental impact:

• The carbon footprint of the overall event was approximately 1,856 metric tons of CO2, or 1.03 metric tons of CO2 per event attendee
• 90% of the event’s carbon footprint resulted from air travel to and from the event
• Excluding air travel, of the remaining 10% of the event’s carbon footprint, the breakdown was as follows: food (35%), hotel rooms (33%), amenities (19%), facility use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) (5%), solid waste (4%) and the event’s conference center (3%)

MacAfee used carbon offsets to compensate for the travel element, contributing to a reforestation project in Louisiana.

Ironically, James Governor’s Greenmonk is holding an Energy Camp unconference next week - in Las Vegas.

Business travel among software companies is a major contributor to CO2 emissions. One of the ways to overcome this is to organize virtual events. Like the one I recently ‘attended’ along with more than 2,000 SAP employees. Savings amounted to 724,000 km in travel alone for the three day event.

Next week I will be attending a meeting of Business for Social Responsibility in Boston. The meeting will be interesting as it is seeking to develop a framework that looks at the materiality concept as it applies to issues of importance to stakeholders.

One of the more interesting problems comes in finding the balance between what matters to stakeholders and what matters to business. What struck me from the graphic below is that in some cases, there is almost an inverse relationship between stakeholder importance of issues that get plenty of attention such as climate change risk and what influences business. Clearly there is an education process to be undertaken though the question I want answering is whether it is possible to develop software that adequately addresses both dimensions. For instance, data centre usage is high in the agenda but how might software be developed that uses less energy cycles than existing systems?

Immediately afterwards, I go to Orlando to attend SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual customer shindig. I will be taking part in a round table discussion on issues around sustainability, a topic that is taking on increasing importance for companies like Intel, HSBC and others. Alongside this, a wiki has been opened that has the support of SAP, AccountAbility, and RedMonk in association with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), and the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF).

It’s first post refers to the use of Web 2.0 tools in the context of developing policies and actions that not only address issues of importance but do so in a way that allows business to prosper.

Web 2.0 revolutionizes how we regulate business, how we govern business, how we design and implement future business models, and how we innovate. But, there’s no guarantee that everyone – or anyone – will be pleased with the results of this revolution. Web 2.0 is an enabler. But what it enables is up to us and billions of other individuals.

• How do we want Web 2.0 to enable responsible business performance?
• How can we collaborate effectively to utilize Web 2.0 tools to enable stakeholder engagement and citizen voice that enhances the business and society relationship?
• How can Web 2.0 enable innovative, collaboratively generated solutions for pressing environmental, social, and governance-related issues?

In talking with OpenPages earlier this week it is abundantly clear that those businesses which understand risk management also understand that executing against risk management strategies can lead to significant business advantage. From my perspective, we can talk all day about whether it is right or wrong to undertake sustainability measures in a risk based environment but unless there is a benefit to the business then it won’t happen. I don’t expect to find definitive answers to these problems but I hope that fresh light will be shed on the nature and scale of the problems with which business has to wrestle.

I was saddened to read Miya Knights report that significant number of UK IT managers are confused or in the dark about the greening of IT. What’s worse is that:

The Datamonitor survey of 245 CIOs and IT managers found over 75 per cent considered eco-friendly computing as an important element in their IT strategy while a further 15 per cent rated it as their top IT priority.

Why should this be worse? If something is top of agenda then you’d have thought that people would know what they’re talking about. In any event, I’d argue that the baseline argument is not about ‘greening’ but sustainability. There is a huge difference. Earlier, Miya reported that:

But most of those with an existing policy (85 per cent) were more likely to outsource IT functionality. Although only 27 per cent insisted on checking the green credentials of a supplier, a further 21 per cent admitted to having no knowledge if such checks were even in place.

“Faced with these findings one has to question the current ethics of outsourcing green IT,” said Antony Young, director of Bell Micro’s services, security and networking divisions.

With respect to Mr Young, it’s not a question of ethics, unless of course he is implying that by outsourcing, UK IT managers would effectively be moving the problem from one place to another. That seems to be the implied assumption in what followed:

“It is also worth remembering that if green IT does become subject to legislation it is highly unlikely that such unregulated outsourcing would be acceptable,” he added. “UK businesses clearly must introduce more vigorous vetting procedures when outsourcing to third party organisations. What is apparent from these findings is that IT departments require a quantifiable green education and structured response.”

Legislation is NOT the answer. I am currently engaged in a project where the notion of sustainability is being baked into ideas around business process software. Business is not going to adopt sustainable measures unless it sees a tangible business benefit. Simply mandating that companies do X or Y is not the answer. You only have to look at the extractive industries to realize that the number one agenda item has not been sustainability but about the extent to which companies can push the boundaries without getting caught.

My group is proposing (among other things) that developing assurance measures that become part of provisioning processes, you encourage the business to measure and assess its sustainability credentials in a constructive and structured manner. Moving forward, we believe that assurance will provide a pathway to external assessment and audit that can usefully adopt techniques designed to assess materiality in the same way that auditors use the term when testing financial statements. Our view is that by looking at sustainability from an end to end process perspective, companies will have a far clearer picture of the impact they have, both directly and indirectly on the resources they consume. We believe this approach will work well in a horizontal fashion across a variety of business processes. However, the real challenge will be in assessing the materiality elements for any particular business. So while it is convenient to pick on IT, it may not be the primary focus in industries where consumption of water (as an example) is a significant ecological drain. Unless your name is Google.