Teblog

Be heard. Be seen. Be green.

The push for environmental sustainability must have been music to the ears of those involved in videoconferencing and its many derivatives. It provides another strong weapon in the vendors' sales armoury. Now, not only can organisations save staff time and reduce travel costs, they can also cut the use of fossil fuels into the bargain.

Add a couple of other things into the mix, like the growth of IP-based broadband and the advent of high definition screens, and the scene is set for an explosion of online face-to-face activity ranging from top-end lifelike telepresence systems right down to desktop applications using webcams. Each plays its part in an organisational collaboration strategy, depending on who the users are and what they're trying to achieve.

Task-oriented people who work together and who know each other can probably put up with lower fidelity or less comfort than strangers who might feel more at ease if they feel they're 'sitting around the table' with other participants. Broadly speaking, the environments could be summarised as boardroom, meeting room and desktop. Although you could add venues such as hospitals and police stations for remote consulting and interviewing, respectively.

As you might expect, you can pay from very little to a great deal depending on the level of sophistication you need. The major vendors are Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, Teliris and Hewlett Packard. You can get a specially fitted multi-screen room, a 'room within a room', facilities added to a room, a deskside system, a desktop system or, at the lowest level, something that will run on your laptop or other mobile device.

Some services are managed, so you have no technical hassles. Others are provided as equipment to be managed by IT or whoever. At the bottom end, the user is in charge. In terms of hard ROI, Teliris claims that its payback period can be as short as 28 days. In one particular example, 52 business trips between Sweden and Japan were cut to eight or nine. Bingo! Every trip saved from then on is a bonus. Apart from the monthly management fee, of course. Mack Treece, Teliris president, said "Every customer has paid back their room in under twelve months."

LifeSize can supply room systems, at a cost, but it takes a more relaxed approach than some others. A couple of screens hung at the end of a meeting room is good enough. One can be used to check what your end looks before using it for presentations, shared whiteboarding or whatever. As the name suggests, the screen image is life size, but the fact that it's halfway up a wall doesn't seem to matter much. Once the conversation is under way, you tend not to notice. And eye contact, as with the central zone of most systems, is fine.

Some systems require some hefty dedicated bandwidth. LifeSize can do a reasonable job across a conventional broadband line. Most, if not all, high end vendors will adapt to the available bandwidth, losing high definition along the way if necessary. When I finished a recent conversation with Texas-based LifeSize CEO, Craig Molloy, one of the UK distribution people turned to me and said, "That cost us nothing, that call." That's because the company already had a megabit available in each direction on its DSL connection. Bear in mind that each participant was using just one screen/camera combination. It is theoretically possible to scale LifeSize to twenty screens or more.

Before long, we won't be speaking of these things as separate systems. They'll become as much a part of the organisational make up as the furniture in the boardroom, a whiteboard in the meeting room or the phone on a desk. Large organisations will probably install a few top-end systems in their main offices, complemented by larger numbers of the more traditional in-room systems and tiny systems that run on laptops or PCs. At this level, expect a great deal of blending with other collaboration and communication systems such as those provided by IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Adobe, for example.

On our desktops, it will become quite natural to flick from looking at each other, to sharing screens, to presenting, to whiteboarding to IM, for example. The work itself will take over from the need to see each other although the option is there if visual contact is needed.

Possibly the biggest downsides at the moment concern interoperability and the local loop. Although lip service is usually paid to standards, some systems still do not play nicely with others. And, if reception flickers and stutters, you can almost certainly point your finger at the local loop. But, weighed against the alternatives, the odd glitch is a pretty good trade-off.

Some reflections on Green IT 08 day 1

Today saw the start of Green IT 08 at the Design Centre, Islington. It's a combination mini-exhibition and conference. It was interesting to see a mix of customers, vendors and analysts sharing their views. And, my, how the field has consolidated in the past year or so.

Then, a lot of IT people were discovering green issues for the same time. Waves of evangelism ensued and, indeed, are still washing over us. But what I found interesting is the stage we seem to have reached with green, or climate change, or carbon - take your pick. I hesitate to mention that I was in IT when decimalisation came along, when VAT came in and, of course, when we had Year 2000. Like 'green' all of these created huge amounts of heat and steam followed by action in the IT world, especially since all three had a specific deadline. Green doesn't really have a deadline but the pattern is being more or less repeated. Lots of confusion, lots of explanation and, perhaps now, a more or less common understanding.

Most of the speakers today were agreed on what needs to be done. I liked the Highways Agency idea of dividing the actions up according to whether they're down to the individual, the ICT department or the Enterprise to take them.

With few exceptions, money was declared the number one driver. Regulation was up there. And green was usually seen as a useful by-product. Nothing new there. Although some people suggested that green was the primary driver - but it seemed to me that, while this might be true among some staff, it wouldn't normally get buy-in from the boardroom.

I liked JP Rangaswami's (MD of BT Design, which embraces ICT) fairly hard-nosed message of, essentially, "cut the carbon" (my words, not his) and cascade the authority for doing so from the board down through champions. These are senior departmental "go to" people who advise and encourage, act as a sounding board and, when necessary, veto things like unnecessary flights. He doesn't believe that all answers are known yet but he does believe in avoiding dithering because this leads to inaction.

I also liked the plain speaking of Her Majesty's Government's CIO John Suffolk. He doesn't like having his agenda driven by IT people who advocate the latest technology without being able to explain what benefits it delivers. He'd rather copy someone else's success. He has adopted the champion/challenger approach in which he champions what he thinks is good and will only consider a challenger if it wins by a sustantial margin.

His bottom line is, "know what good looks like" and challenge suppliers to meet these requirements. To give an example, he mentions people who are pleased that servers are being 30 percent utilised. He asks, "would you run an office that's only 30 percent utilised? He seems to see some of the madness in the IT industry for what it is and continually questions "Why?".

Perhaps the sheen is beginning to go off green and it is heading to becoming part of business, just as has Quality, which was quite a fashionable topic some years ago. This has to be for the good. A green thread which runs through everyone's thinking is probably the best way to impact an organisation's environmental footprint.

A quick route to unified communications?

A cheeky little outsider from Spain has been quietly snitching large unified communication (UC) deals from under the noses of major competitors.

(Reminder: a major benefit of UC is the acceleration of business processes, especially when participants are separated geographically.)

When I was invited to meet with Dialcom, I was amazed that it was still in business. In 1982, I was using Dialcom for my Telecom Gold email account. As it turned out, this is a completely different Dialcom and one that's keen to change its name. It is in the process of transitioning to the more meaningful Spontania, which happens to be the name of its UC software suite.

Yep, that's right, software suite. No hardware at all. Not even an appliance version, it just goes on a Linux server while ActiveX or equivalent controls are stuck in the clients. Clients can be Firefox and Internet Explorer, plus a number of mobile phones and PDAs. Flash, Macintosh and iPhone will be supported later this year, as will SIP. RIM's BlackBerry isn't yet on the radar.

The company has around 100 customers, mainly in Europe, but is beginning to pick up some decent deals in the USA. It targets medium to large organisations as a rule and plans to serve Europe through major VARs. It sells directly in North America but, globally, its ISVs and SIs provide vertical solutions. Vertical markets include health, energy and pharma'. If someone would care to deliver the functionality as a service to smaller businesses then Dialcom would definitely be interested.

IT managers generally don't warm to the idea of 'their' network being used for video or unified communications. But this stuff can be throttled back to suit the circumstances. Bob Johnson, the company's president and COO says, "256k to 512k would support seven or eight people in an active collaboration session."

At the desktop, we're talking about video, audio, application and file sharing, remote control, collaborative whiteboarding and instant messaging. And it works. Its adaptive bandwidth monitoring optimises performance to fluctuating network conditions. Images downgrade reasonably gracefully.

It's pure IP, as you might expect. But the firm has all sorts of edge connectivity bits so that companies with legacy switchboard equipment can still benefit. It also interoperates with H.323 video and can be incorporated into Outlook and Notes.

Price-wise, the Linux-based system, probably comes in below the competition, especially when you take into account that installation is the work of a few hours at most. 25 concurrent users comes in at just under $40k. Obviously, the more users, the lower the per-seat price.

It's an interesting take on the UC business and it's one that will satisfy the demands of the majority whose needs are straightforward. They want to see each other, talk to each other, show each other stuff and exchange files during the session. All this, and more, is available with barely any upheaval for the IT department.

I think I'll close with an "olé".

Unless you'd like to tell me what's wrong with the idea...

Lovelock and Lawson: read 'em both

Well, Earth Day was not the smartest day to jump on a plane to California to, among other things, meet some folk to talk about environmental sustainability. Still, I made up for it a bit by reading a couple of environmental books. Except, of course, they were made from mashed up trees. Oh dear.

One of the books was James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia - a couple of years old now, but worth a read. The other was Nigel Lawson's book, hot off the press, called An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. An interesting juxtaposition of reading materials, to say the least.

Let's just say that the two men aren't even close to agreement when it comes to global warming, or global heating, as Cameron calls it. Lawson can't see what the problem is, even when he takes scientists at their most pessimistic. Lovelock, on the other hand, is convinced we're on the cusp of dramatic and devastating warming, with all of its attendant consequences for humankind.

Although they have different perspectives on the degree danger we face, both agree that something's going on and both think that some action makes sense. Broadly speaking, Lovelock wants all hands to the pumps while Lawson believes that we should behave in a more measured fashion.

But, having said that, I was quite astonished at how much they agree with each other. Not least when it comes to nuclear power. Both regard it as the most sensible way to deliver the power we need while minimising the damage to the environment. This seems to be an emerging theme whichever way I turn these days.

Lovelock tends to be quite respectful of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) while Lawson considers it far too biased for a supposedly objective organisation. He has fun with its estimates for global warming and wonders whether the massive amounts of money and inconvenience to today's population can possibly be justified by the anticipated benefits.

In one example, he uses the scientists' own best and worst case scenarios to show that, in one hundred years, the developing world will either be 8.5 or 9.5 times better off than it is now. Given that both outcomes are billed as equally likely, he wonders what level of sacrifice today would make the higher outcome worth pursuing.

Lawson's book has been diligently researched but he focuses on the narrow issue of global warming. Lovelock takes a more holistic view, essentially urging us to look after the planet, so that it will look after us. Lawson doesn't think that his book will 'shake the faith of the true believers', but it certainly contributes some reason to the debate. As, indeed, does Lovelock's.

Either book may jar with your present way of looking at things but, if we don't think about this stuff from multiple viewpoints, we'll never arrive at an informed opinion. We'll simply be believers of one position or another.

There's more to life (death?) than carbon

In another life, I experienced government targets at first hand. The government in question was the same one we in the UK have now. At the time, I found the targets a source of great impudence because they seemed to owe little to reality and a great deal to wishful thinking.

Of course, we don't get anywhere without realistic, or even challenging, goals. They provide us with yardsticks for our achievements. But they do need to be rooted in some grasp of reality in order to be taken seriously or, if they're unavoidable, to win the respect of those affected by them.

And this is what bothers me about the environmental targets set by the government. Frankly, yesterday's introduction of 2.5% biofuel into our nation's forecourts is a classic example. It coincides with the announcement today that basic foodstuff prices have risen for the fifth time this month and some countries are refusing to export rice in order to feed their own people affordably.

Is there a connection? Of course there is. Do the politicians care? I wonder about that sometimes. Taking over arable land or destroying forests in order to grow crops to create fuel (which some countries do) is an affront to nature, not to mention the people who live there. And the end result is no less carbon pumped out from motor vehicles which, surely, ought to be one of the objectives given that we're increasingly taxed on our emissions. (The narrow argument, by the way is these emissions are reabsorbed by the biofuel plants themselves.)

And here we find the problem. Objectives are generally derived from narrow economic arguments, which take little account of human reality. I recently read a transcript of a speech entitled The Challenge of the 21st Century: Setting the Real Bottom Line by sustainability expert Dr David Suzuki which articulates the insanity of the way we make these high level decisions.

He talks about the wisdom of ancient people who regarded earth, air, fire and water as sacred elements. Everything that we are, and our very survival, relies on the combination of those elements. But, as he points out, anything that nature does on our behalf is regarded as an 'externality'. i.e. it's not part of the economic equation. I guess this is why carbon now has a price on its head. It's a start, but it's only part of the story.

As well as carbon being the number one public enemy (or money-making opportunity, depending who you talk to), we really need to consider what our actions are doing to the entire ecosphere - earth, water and air - if we're really going to tackle the survival of humankind in any meaningful way. Lopsided thinking is not really good enough.

If you're in IT, you might be thinking, "So, what's this got to do with me?" The answer is "quite a lot actually" because you support most business processes. In order for them to meet external or self imposed environmental targets, they need measurement and performance information for themselves and their suppliers. They need the support of teleworking or telepresence technologies to cut travel. In all sorts of ways, they need the support of IT systems to help improve their own environmental footprints.

This is not a one-off, quick fix, this is a change in how we work and live forever. And I believe it will lead to a change in the way that an organisation views IT. It will finally be seen as an integral and beneficial part of the company.

Don't put lipstick on the pig

Today's issue of PR influences covers 'greenwashing' - "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service."

It's good to see professional PR folk in action. Part of their job is to make sure that companies don't get carried away with their rhetoric and make fools of themselves. Of course, there will always be poor PR folk who see their job as "putting lipstick on the pig". We have to take a certain amount of personal responsibility for filtering good PR from bad.

Once upon a time, it was easy to pull the wool over most people's eyes, by writing good press releases, advertisements and brochures. The public didn't have much of a voice - the letters page of the newspapers, the complaints desk of a company or the local advertising standards authority. In other words, except in newsworthy cases, not a lot would happen.

Now, with bloggers galore, some will always be expert enough to see through the greenwash and blow the whistle. And we all know how fast bad news travels through the blogosphere. And how mainstream media organisations quickly pick up juicy stories.

We hear about companies that claim to be carbon neutral which is wonderful, if true. But, if close examination were to reveal that one of the directors drives a gas guzzler or that the heat from the data centre is being vented to the atmosphere, then the carbon neutral claim falls apart and the company risks ridicule.

The best option is transparency. To show what steps are being taken to run a sustainable (financially and socially, as well as environmentally) business and not make any pretence that things are better than they are. Some IT companies - IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Fujitsu Siemens spring to mind immediately - seem to be very forthright in their claims and their explanations.

They still fly people around when necessary, but they'll talk about how much travel has been cut. They still have to run high-powered data centres - even more so for those who offer hosted software services, but they'll talk about how much they've slashed their energy bills through consolidation, virtualisation and other measures.

Of course, they would all like to sell more equipment, software and services and they will dangle the cost and environmental savings that are possible. But they are also well aware that new equipment brings its own environmental costs, including the disposal of old equipment. Honest discussion around these issues will win vendors more customer loyalty than misleading claims based on dodgy premises.

Indeed, they may well find that their revenues rise for hosted services, consulting and software, even if an increasing awareness of sustainability among customers were to lead to a slowdown in hardware sales.

IBM's Bluehouse: a human hub?

Even after 42 years in IT, I still tend to forget that projects are always at their most attractive before they're implemented.

A good idea captivates and it's easy to get carried away with enthusiasm, temporarily forgetting that there's a whole lot of hard work in moving from idea to reality.

In the case of an IT product or service, the hurdles are not just technical. You have inconvenient things like channels to market and user acceptance to consider.

All this flooded into my mind following a visit to Lotusphere Comes To You at the Wembley Stadium the other day. Having visited the main event in Orlando earlier this year and been really fired up by Bluehouse I started to mull the reality behind the idea.

Bluehouse is intended to be a software-as-a-service offering from IBM for companies with 5 to 500 employees. According to IBM/Lotus, it will "provide extranet collaboration services for open social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing." And it is designed to appeal to those with no internal IT.

It still sounds good to me and I am sure that IBM will have no trouble pulling it off technically. But the way ahead is murky. IBM isn't used to dealing with small companies and its channel isn't used to selling subscription services. Nor, in the main, are the users ready for this kind of SaaS.

It would be interesting to think of IBM as a latter-day web business with curvy corners and off-the-page selling. This strikes me as an unlikely route to market. Or it could jump into bed with (or buy) someone with a ready-made channel. But this seems expensive for an idea which might still be ahead of mainstream user thinking.

I suspect that IBM is being driven by wishful thinking and the prospect of all that lovely monthly revenue pouring in from millions of SMBs who are presently beyond reach. Once attached to the IBM mothership, the opportunity exists for lots of additional revenue from an incremental expansion of the services which can be pushed (or is it pulled?) down the pipe.

But then, another scenario occurs to me. What if a company wanted to connect its business partners to its own collaboration services? It might have already bought into the Lotus collaboration story big-time and sees value in extending its reach. This might be possible, right now, using an assortment of publicly available services, but it might not offer the security, accountability or reliability that matches the company's governance and integration requirements.

Auto-makers and insurance companies provide intimate access to their suppliers and agencies for commercial transactions. I wonder if Bluehouse could end up becoming a hub for human transactions?

You calling me a consultant?

Adriana Lukas was the person who first opened my eyes to the potential business value of social computing. She starred in an Online Information conference a few years ago and, soon after, I trotted round to her office for some indoctrination. We talked about blogs, IM, wikis, RSS, feed readers and all the other technical paraphernalia that supports this new form of collaboration.

Today, Angela Ashenden (she works for Macehiter Ward-Dutton) and I whizzed over to the same office to get an update from Adriana on some project work she's been engaged in. A huge organisation knows that it has to engage more effectively internally and externally, but it is tightly regulated and is fairly traditional in its approach to business. Hierarchies come more naturally than networks. And, quite rightly, reputation has to be protected at all costs.

The user-driven style of social engagement does not sit comfortably with this organisation. Yet it is willing to experiment and find out whether there's anything of value to be had from this dangerous new activity. The fact that the project has been going for a couple of years suggests that it is tolerated at least and that some parts of the organisation are extracting benefit.

To cut the story brutally short, Adriana introduced people to information discovery, sharing and collaboration opportunities, then demonstrated some tools which might help. The list included blogging, wikis, Skype, RSS and social bookmarking. The tools are just the supporting mechanism for new ways of working together.

Prompted by our visit, Adriana posted What’s the real value of social software in enterprise  to her blog a few hours after we left. She gave the example of a wiki which was introduced for one task but which touched 41 people. Some of them, in turn, found other uses for wikis to accelerate and improve their collaboration.

Adriana says, "I’d argue that this is the most significant and long-term value of social media and social software tools at this stage of their use in enterprise. If anyone tells me they can put metrics on that, I’ll just call them a consultant (not a nice thing in my book!)."

I'm inclined to agree with her about determining the metrics beforehand. After all, no-one could have predicted these time-saving uses of the technology. So no IT department, or anyone else for that matter, could have planned and cost-justified the introduction of the software.

But, after the event, I'm sure that metrics could be applied and value measured. This would form a useful backdrop for future discussions about the benefits of introducing social computing to other parts of the company. So, I only half agree with her. And if that makes me a consultant, I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Tackling the CO2 issue

Here's a shock for all who know me: I say, "Good on you Tony Blair."

In one paragraph of a speech to the Gleneagles Dialogue on 15th March he gave a clear-eyed summary of the issues facing the world with regard to greenhouse gas emissions. Here it is:

Per capita GHG emissions are over 20 tonnes per year in the USA; in Europe and Japan over 10 tonnes; in China close to 5 tonnes. Some estimate they will need to be around 2-2.5 tonnes as a world average by 2050 to allow the necessary reduction of 50% in the global total. But since the poorer nations will see their emissions rise as they industrialize and since the world population may well grow from 6 to 9 billion, the emissions in the richer nations will have to fall close to zero and those in the poorer countries will have, over time, to fall as they industrialize.

Of course, this assumes that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of climate change. That's not a discussion to have here. Suffice it to say that our methods of production are fairly ruinous and if carbon awareness is the catalyst for change then this is all to the good.

Back to Tony Blair. Whatever you think of him, he has access to the world's power brokers. Thanks to his closeness to people like Sir Nicholas Stern, he is clearly aware of the issues and he is still has the ear of the great and the good acquired when he was Prime Minister of the UK.

A lot of talking is taking place, as is the way of the world, and global agreements aren't going to happen suddenly. This is the downside of the political process. But he is optimistic that these agreements can be achieved with a recognition that developing countries cannot be held back from their aspirations.

Here are some of his conclusions:

Personally I see no way of tackling climate change without a renaissance of nuclear power. There will have to be a completely different attitude to the sharing of technology and to the patent framework that allows it.

We will need a focus of a wholly different order on clean coal technology and carbon sequestration. Energy efficiency - often wrongly seen as less sexy as a means of reducing emissions - will have to be translated to its proper place at the centre of any global strategy.

Nuclear power stations take years to build while China, according to the Guardian, is cranking out the equivalent of two coal-fired power stations a week. The BBC reported China's plans to build 544 of them but didn't give a time-scale. While on the subject of China, it has a number of out-of-control fires in coal seams. A few years ago, the New Scientist reported a speech in which estimated that "the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere from underground fires in China are equivalent to the emissions from all motor vehicles in the US"

Blair mentioned 'carbon sequestration'. This is usually done by grabbing CO2 at the point of emission and selling it to people who need a supply of of the gas or, more likely, by burying it somewhere safe. Pushed into oilfields, it not only fills the space left by extracted oil, it also helps recover more oil. (I know ... to generate more CO2 when it's burnt ...)

Localised sequestration - on factory chimneys and power stations - is a great idea and no doubt we'll see a lot more of it. But the third greatest emitter of greenhouse gases is the transport sector, at around 20 percent. This is difficult to grab and sequester and it becomes part of our atmosphere. The same goes for the Chinese coal seam fires and other CO2 sources - humans breathing out or animals venting perhaps. A number of scientists have been working on 'air capture' devices which grab passing CO2 molecules as they flow through.

The method requires electricity but, since the devices can be placed anywhere in the world, they could capitalise on local geothermal or other green energy. One of these 'artificial trees' the size of a shipping container would be able to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere per day.

This is not a 'get out of jail free' card, but it's a promising idea which has already been demonstrated at laboratory scale by Global Research Technologies. It would be nice to think that this could go into general production and be funded by all polluting nations. It promises to be a "quick fix" while we get on with the more serious business of slashing our emissions in the first place.

What's wrong with our world?

I make no apologies for introducing you to a short movie called The Story of Stuff. If you're still wondering why people like me bang on about sustainability, this 20-minute recording will give you a pretty good idea.

You will disagree with some of the detail. Heck, I did too. And you may worry about the provenance of some of the 'facts'. It doesn't matter, it really doesn't. The general drift is correct. So when you're told that only one small piece of a computer changes year on year, but you have to change the whole machine, treat it as a metaphor. [Update: here's a pdf of the full text with accreditations.]

The movie takes you through the traditional linear approach to making, selling and disposing of things. It looks at the roles of big business and government and the impact of our consumption on the lives of all the people on this planet, rich and poor alike.

It is quite finger-pointy and while explaining the problems in detail, it is less explicit about the solutions except that, fundamentally, they boil down to taking a sustainable approach to satisfying our requirements. I deliberately avoided saying 'needs' because this has other implications - for example, is a movie a 'need'? I could get more picky and suggest that the concluding 'closed loop production' graphic is slightly misleading because we get a continuous nett energy input from the sun, after the earth's radiation is taken into account. This should actually help us, were we better able to exploit it.

Do visit the blog, where 163 people (at the time I blogged this) had praised the movie, railed against it or added fresh information. Despite several appeals for citations, Ms Leonard has not responded, which is a shame. It suggests she doesn't really inhabit our digital social world. [Update: She posted to her blog today. Bless my soul.]

The movie sticks to atomic 'stuff' and doesn't give digital stuff an explicit mention. Yet, our digital world contributes substantially to 'dematerialisation', which is a significant part of the sustainability story. Admittedly, energy is consumed in storing and transporting digital stuff, even Annie Leonard's movie (50MB, by the way), but the movement of bits has to be more sustainable than buying the DVD.

Regard The Story of Stuff as a metaphorical springboard for those oblivious to what's going on, or a reminder to the rest of us.

Here's a thought to finish with: "For every dustbin of rubbish you put out, seventy dustbins of waste and pollution will have been created upstream".