Teblog

Decarb' the supply chain

Seeing the pictures of lorries blocking a main route into London as their drivers get themselves bussed in to protest against fuel prices made me realise that these poor people are a link in an unfortunate chain of events which is probably beyond their, or the government's, ability to change.

Sure the government can dish out tax breaks to protect the industry from fuel price increases, but it will not change the underlying problem which is that, one way or another, we're going to get clobbered for moving goods around in fuel consuming and air polluting vehicles. And the cost has to be borne by the people who want said goods. We are in for a structural readjustment, the like of which we've seen frequently in the past as industries change shape or even disappear. It's tough on the transport companies who can't react swiftly enough to the ever changing prices of fuel. They book jobs or secure contracts at one price and, by the time the work is done, their gross margins have been seriously eroded.

All this brings to mind some work that IBM Global Business Services and IBM Research has been doing on optimising the supply chain in order to balance cost, service, quality, and carbon. It has announced a 'Carbon Tradeoff Modeler' to help organisations assess their supply chains for optimal results. It, through the IBM Institute for Business Value, has also published a short (16-page) paper on the subject called Mastering Carbon Management which you may find interesting.

One of the hardest aspects of this whole carbon/green/sustainability business is to think about it in a clear and structured way and to find immediate sources of help. Fortunately, companies like IBM are beginning to step up to the mark and assist. Of course, it's not altruism, it's good business sense. IBM wants to be seen as a place to go for solid environmental consultancy. But at least it is getting to grips with the issues right now, enabling companies to act intelligently instead of waiting for regulation to force them into rushed decisions.

You may also be interested in IBM's simple framework for looking at your own organisation's environmental impact using its House of Carbon. This includes supply chain as part of the bigger picture.

Whatever you think of mad fuel prices and carbon as the enemy of mankind, the fact is we are on this particular treadmill and it's just not going to go away. The argument is "you wouldn't want to be seen to have done nothing, by later generations". And, of course, anything that leaves the world a better place for our descendants is good. And, at least high fuel prices and forthcoming carbon taxes are likely to accelerate the development of alternative power sources and carbon sequestration equipment.

As for the poor transport firms, I guess they will have to operate more like airlines and standardise on fuel surcharges until they can switch to more sustainable vehicles. Even so, with their customers looking at ways of slashing their supply chain carbon, it's likely that demand for haulage is likely to reduce in the developed countries.

Microsoft and EEA's environmental early warning system

Confession time: I get a horrible sinking feeling when I hear terms like 'EU', 'human rights' or 'observatory'. When they come at me all at once, my usual temptation is to run away. But, this time I didn't. Perhaps it was curiosity about Microsoft's involvement, perhaps it was the hint of democracy, but I stuck with it. The 'it' being a recent announcement by the European Environmental Agency (EEA from now on) that it had entered into a five-year alliance with Microsoft to create an environmental observatory.

The observatory's purpose, as the name implies, is to gather information about local environmental conditions and share this with any interested party, including members of the public. The data will come from a multitude of sources including data satellites, NGOs, ornithological and wildlife organisations and the hoi polloi. Much of it will be real-time and it will be aggregated, analysed and presented back to enquirers in an appropriate form. That can include data tables for further processing or geo-spatial images in Microsoft's Virtual Earth. The hope is that such information will lead to rapid local action such as when a factory is spotted polluting the air or soil.

Microsoft will be playing its part in each of these elements: collecting, storing, analysing and sharing the results. It has been working with the EEA since the summer of 2007 and has gone public on the five-year agreement which it believes is entirely complementary to the company's own commitment to environmental sustainability.

Suspecting the worst, I investigated Microsoft's environmental credentials. After all, in cahoots with Intel, it did spend a lot of years more or less enticing people into equipment upgrades. My conclusion is that the company is sincere in its intentions and has already made great strides in dealing with its own environmental footprint, especially with regard to cutting travel and single occupant vehicle usage. It even runs a huge bus fleet for its staff which aims to reduce car traffic in the Redmond area by more than 250,000 miles per week. Not to mention saving the Microsoft campus land area needed for parking and garaging facilities. This is one of the sad aspects of environmental actions, they often save the company money so bragging runs the risk of appearing somewhat two-faced.

But, returning to the EEA project, Professor Jacqueline McGlade, its executive director, suggested that, "To sustain the improvements in the environment made over the past few decades, everyone needs to be involved and understand the consequences and impact of their actions." She added, "The only way to do this is by reaching out to the widest audience. This collaboration with Microsoft is a groundbreaking approach to bring environmental information to as many people as possible." This rather assumes they have a) access to a suitably equipped computer and b) the will to look. I would have thought that traditional media will be the best way to reach these people. The other issue with this statement, taken as a whole, is that she refers to improvements made over the past few decades. This suggests that the actions required are already understood and merely need communicating.

It seems to me that although this project is being billed as a citizen information system, it is actually much more of a citizen spying system. Most people would be more interested in snitching on local sources of pollution than in logging in periodically to check local environmental conditions. However, you can be sure that certain powers-that-be will be very keen on this sort of real-time information. It's a chance for them to swiftly crack down on miscreants, for which we should all be grateful, assuming that things don't get too petty.

In the end, I remain puzzled by the publicity exercise around this. I suspect that Microsoft considers the EEA to be a good notch to have in its corporate social responsibility stick. And maybe the EEA wanted a bit of profile and Microsoft provided an ideal delivery vehicle.

But I'd like to think I'm wrong. Perhaps you see it differently...

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.