Teblog

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".

Green IT: We're getting there. Slowly.

One of the great things about working for Freeform Dynamics is that we get to find out what's actually going on inside organisations. How? Well, we are able to survey the readers of The Register; one of the most successful online IT publications in the world.

Recently we've conducted a couple of surveys and participated in a four-hour online debate, all around the subject of Green Computing. The surveys attracted about 2,400 responses and the conference hundreds of delegates. These people were all, naturally, interested in the subject and, by and large, involved in IT in some way. But the view that they gave us was enormously interesting and we were able to slice and dice the numbers by geography, type of company, company size and their attitudes to environmental issues.

You can listen to the presentations now so, rather than go over old ground, I thought I'd flick through the stack of unasked questions and deal with a few here. Even though we allowed over two hours for questions and answers, quite a few fell by the wayside.

People were demanding a reduction of the environmental footprint of equipment manufacture. If, as one speaker claimed, 75 percent of a PC's environmental footprint is accounted for before it is switched on, then it's clear that the manufacturer has the greatest potential to reduce the environmental impact of its machines.

This would have to include the supply chain - if components are made in China, for example, does this mean the energy is derived from coal-fired power stations? It needs to cover the packaging and transport of the elements and of the finished goods. It needs to take account of the consumption of raw materials, the pollution of the land, the air and the water. And it needs to take account of end-of-life recyclability.

This is all way too complicated for buyers to assess. They need ratings such as the EU Energy Labels on white goods which rank products from A to G.

The environmental impact figures are more or less inverted for servers. According to some, their working life accounts for 75 percent of the overall impact. I would imagine that this refers to energy alone, but it still suggests that attention to usage could pay significant dividends, especially as electricity prices continue to rocket.

Hanging over all the decisions is the big one: cost justification. Many people asked how they can convince their finance departments to cough up for greener but more expensive products.

In due course, environmentally-focused regulations and taxes will start to put pressure on various bits of the supply chain and on a company's own environmental performance. It would be nice to think that some carrots might be mixed with the regulatory sticks but I won't be holding my breath.

Some companies, of course, are already seeing a PR value in going green and others, such as Sun Microsystems, IBM and Cisco have found ways of slashing their travel, accommodation and office expenses by adopting various forms of teleconferencing and teleworking. This rather neatly fits a green agenda too. So, in certain types of organisation, simple cost justifications can be made already.

None of this is easy. Prioritising actions is difficult. Some people were worrying about the difference between leaving a computer powered up to read stuff on screen and printing it and powering the machine down. (My vote would be to keep the machine running, but I fully expect to hear a counter-argument.) The data centre consolidation and virtualisation story is a good one from all perspectives. Smarter cooling, too, can be cost justified. But once you've done these things, then what?

This is where measures and guidance are sorely needed. I have spent masses of time rummaging around to try and find some decent measures. I've asked experts in the field and we're all agreed: we're not there yet. Bits of guidance exist - Energy Star, the EPEAT programme and the Greenpeace Barometer, for example. But nothing that makes it easy for people to make sensible decisions.

However, in the UK at least, several organisations - the British Computer Society, the cross-government CTO Council, the Market Transformation Programme and others, are working on various parts of the measurement jigsaw. Some results are expected this year. Organisations like the Carbon Trust and the Environment Agency are trying to keep a handle on what's going on so that efforts are complementary and not wasted.

Data centres will figure largely early on but the CTO Council will make public a list of topics, prioritised by practicality and the amount of benefit which will accrue. Scorecards, benchmarks, strategy templates and procurement guidelines are all part of the mix.

It's astonishing that we've known about upcoming environmental problems for decades now, but we're only just beginning to take things seriously. This is why the help and guidance we need is still not readily available. We're just going to have to use common sense for now and make environmentally friendly choices whenever possible.