Teblog

HP raises the green bar

Most vendors are very uneasy about discussing the accumulated environmental harm in their backward supply chain (materials, manufacturing and assembly world-wide). The usual excuse is that it's too difficult to lay their hands on the numbers. So they start counting from when they take responsibility for the inbound supplies.

Many will discuss the obligations they try to place on the supply chain but no-one, until now, has actually come up with any hard information. Perhaps they're all poised to announce. Or maybe they know, but are shy of sharing. Who knows? But what we do know is that Hewlett Packard raised the bar yesterday by announcing real supply chain figures.

Rather than try to paraphrase the declaration, it's probably best to quote HP directly, "In 2007, the aggregated carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions associated with more than 80 percent of HP’s first-tier manufacturing expenditures totaled approximately 3.5 million metric tons."

A clarifying paragraph added, "Aggregated CO2e emissions represent the sum of HP-allocated suppliers’ emissions and are calculated by factoring the total supplier emissions by the percentage of HP dollar volume to the suppliers’ total revenue."

Sounds like a reasonable basis for calculation. And good for HP for doing something. It's taken a macro view of the supplier and made an intelligent guess at the allocation due to HP. Perhaps this is a stop-gap method that others could consider. It certainly seems easier that trying to allocate emissions and other environmental harm product by product.

To set the figures in some kind of context, in 2007 HP's own operational emissions were approximately 1.5 million tonnes. Business travel takes it up to a shade under two million tonnes. Contrasting the figures shows how significant the supply chain is when calculating an organisation's overall impact on the planet.

You might be interested in HP's suppliers list published earlier this year. This represents 95% of the company's supplier expenditure. It probably won't help you identify the top 80 percent, but it does give you an idea of who HP is prepared to deal with.

HP is a member - along with most of the other major vendors - of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) - which, among other things is working on a calculation tool to ensure consistency among suppliers’ self-reported emissions accounting. It also intends to participate in the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol Supply Chain Initiative, which will develop a methodology for quantifying and reporting product life cycle and supply chain GHG emissions.

It would be easy to hide behind the lack of standardised approaches to measuring and reporting supply chain emissions. So hats off to HP for seizing the initiative.

Will we hear cries of "foul"? Or will other manufacturers now follow suit?

Home-grown Enterprise 2.0 at GE

The recent Office 2.0 conference appeared a well-organised and serene affair, totally hiding the furious hidden paddlings of organiser Ismael Chang Ghalimi and his team. He put the event together in two months, again, which makes it nightmarish for people like me who like to plan their time. Do you trust Ghalimi and book tickets and hotels? Or do you wait until the agenda crystallises, usually two or three weeks before the event? I did the latter, but I'm delighted to hear that he's going to be making the event organisation a year-round affair in future.

So what tipped me into going this year? (Apart from other people picking up large chunks of the tab.) It was the promise of some pretty large companies talking about their Web 2.0/collaboration experiences and the unconference that I wrote about in this blog while I was there. Add to that a high degree of networking with knowledgeable people and meeting up with a new US-based member of our team (Hi IdaRose) and I was all set.

The event did not disappoint. The highlight for me was hearing Dr Sukh Grewal from GE (General Electric, as was) and chatting to him afterwards. In 1999 he was invited to move from engineering to bring a user perspective to IT developments. He guided the creation of SupportCentral, GE's internal collaboration system.

Like another large user, Wachovia Bank, which was also speaking at the event, neither was using any of the 'usual suspects' for its in-house collaboration activities. Wachovia built its system on MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) while GE built atop an Oracle database running on a Sun midrange server.

This was a bit of a wake-up for people like me who went into the sessions expecting to hear about the triumphant penetration of the enterprise by a Web 2.0-style company such as Socialtext, Jive, Atlassian or WordFrame.

Sticking with GE for this blog post, its SupportCentral was backed by the CIO for its first eighteen months. The aim was to bring together individuals, communities, knowledge and processes. Bear in mind that this was in 2000 and the 'social networking' phenomenon was yet to hit the mainstream.

The basic principles were that people wanted and needed to be seen and connected, communities needed to communicate more effectively than just through mail lists, knowledge was everywhere, a lot of it inside heads, and repeatable processes were the means by which organisations generate value. This structure was not apparent at the start of the project, but, once realised, it gave it the focus that continues to this day.

SupportCentral became a platform to digitise processes rapidly. The developers had created a user-driven point-and-click workflow and mashup system long before the 'mashup' term was adopted for IT processes. It is also a place where knowledge is shared and expertise discovered, through Q&A and document uploads. About half of the community information lies in the Q&As. It also gives access to about 2,000 internal databases.

The whole thing is web-based, so it's accessible to all and desktop updates are not required. Setting up a community is a matter of minutes and, if it doesn't work out, no problem. About 50,000 communities exist in this company of 400,000 people. To which you can add about 30,000 external users who have been invited to join specific communities. The system watches communities for activity and closes down any that become moribund - about a third of those started.

It's easy to see, with these numbers, why Dr Grewal believes that an internally developed system costs a lot less than paying for per-user software licences or external services. In the interests of keeping costs down, he's also investigating the possibility of switching some users from Microsoft Word to Zoho.

SupportCentral has enabled the right people to get together, with the right documents, creating and serving organisational processes, with a high degree of transparency. The IT department is responsible for building the enabling infrastructure.

A new release of the platform is rolled out every other Thursday - 1500 enhancements per year are made. User requests have to be justified with a thought-out ROI and a preparedness to pay for the development. This has bound IT and the lines of business together in mutual trust. A survey facility, for example, saves the organisation something like four million dollars each year. It's used about 100 times a day.

This has not been a top-down roll out even though the development was centrally directed in the beginning. It's been a case of "if it doesn't help you, don't use it". The growth chart might resemble that of a social networking success story, but it's happened over years rather than months. And people tend not to drop out. It is very much a business environment although Grewal cheerfully admits that some people use outside services. He said, "about 1000 people belong to the GE Facebook group. That's how many people in GE who have diarrhoea every day." Ooer!

You can watch Dr Grewal's presentation if you're interested in the details of SupportCentral. Suffice it to say that, whether by accident or design, it has ended up as a great exemplar of Enterprise 2.0 in action. And, as the man himself says, "this is beginning to represent the heartbeat of our company."

By the way, SupportCentral is supposedly available from Tata Consultancy Services, but it is impossible to find on the website. Here's a link to a pdf brochure.

Adobe Genesis addresses real needs

Breaking ranks with the 'browser-only' brigade, Adobe is planning to introduces a desktop client to integrate the worlds of web and enterprise applications. Code-named Genesis, it was given its first public airing at last week's Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Private pilot trials will be up for grabs in October.

With Genesis, users are able to create workspaces which contain related clusters of applications and data. For example, for sales, they might have a collection of applications already open for each prospect - business intelligence, company information, relevant web pages, sales history, brochures, contracts and so on.

The user creates workspaces by dragging and dropping 'tiles' for the the relevant applications and documents from catalogues straight into the workspace. These catalogues can be public, published by anyone, but typically software publishers and aggregators. Or they can be private, created by the IT department. Tiles include web browsers and a file repository. The company is working on a viewing mechanism which displays file contents without the need to open the application.

Once the workspace is assembled, the user logs in to each application and navigates to where they need to be. The state of open applications persists so that the next time they return to a folder everything is exactly as they left it.

The Genesis desktop software will be free of charge. Users can create workspaces and just get on with this new way of working. Although targeted at enterprise customers, there's nothing to stop individuals using it.

But, it's likely that they'll want to share information with others and this is where the money comes in. Adobe will run a SaaS collaboration service. Teams can subscribe or the organisation can subscribe. In the first case, it's a credit card arrangement with the users determining who belongs and what permissions they're given. In the second case, it's more closely integrated with the corporate directory system. Outsiders, such as business partners, can also be included.

Workspaces can be shared with others, but their access to applications will depend on their own authorisation level. If they are allowed to update application data, this is reflected to all subscribed users. The system has a locking and check-in system to prevent clashes.

In the first instance, Adobe is pushing the value of the system to sales and legal teams in the 'deal room' environment where projects are on fairly long time-scales. As time goes by, additional people are brought into the team and the workspace enables them to get up to speed and access much of what they need to do their work, whether they're support engineers, lawyers or finance folk. One nice touch is that tiles can intercommunicate - a tweak of a graphic can change the underlying information in the provisioning application, for example.

Once signed up to the collaboration service, things like presence indicators, IM, videoconferencing, screen-sharing and whiteboarding become available. Whiteboard sessions can be saved as workspace tiles for future reference. The instant messaging is based on XMPP which means that chat can take place with users on other IM systems. The SaaS element is restricted to synchronisation and real-time collaboration, which means that all workfiles are available to users when they're offline.

It will be a long time, if ever, before all applications live in the cloud and are delivered to the browser. In the meantime, we will be living in a mixed world of enterprise, desktop and cloud applications. With Genesis, Adobe promises to integrate the three worlds, plus collaboration, into a desktop that reflects its classy values when it comes to user interface design.

If you want to put your organisation up for a trial, write to Matthias Zeller at Adobe.com. His email name is matzeller. He was the man that gave the presentation at Office 2.0.

Office 2.0 unconference

Went to an unconference today. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's based on the assumption that the folks in the audience often know more than those on the platform. So why not invert the normal process and let the audience join in?

As you might expect, it wasn't an unqualified success because the usual mix of humanity was there. Shy people, knowledgeable people, egotistical people, idealists, evangelists and sheep. No names, no pack drill. But, given that the day started with a blank sheet, it ended up providing some useful and relevant insights to the attendees.

It cost next to nothing to attend ($50) but, of course, it did cost people's time. Given that the day included plenty of opportunity for networking and a drinks/nibbles party at the end, you'd have to be really hard-hearted to say it was a waste of time.

The event as a whole is called Office 2.0 and this is the third time it's run. Judging from peoples' interests at the unconference, 'Enterprise' was the highest ranked topic. "Thank goodness," thought I, because that's what I'd come for.

I learnt a bit, maybe a lot. One person was on the verge of buying a collaboration system when she was introduced to WordFrame. In fact, the vendor she was about to sign up with sent a review which happened, in passing, to mention this competitor. She made the necessary call and knew within a very short time that WordFrame far outstripped the alternative. And she knew this because she had prepared a massive specification of her requirements. And this is the point. These social software SaaS tools might appear to be low cost, but that's not a good reason to shirk on specifying what you need.

Another thing that came out of real experiences was that antipathy towards social tools is not a generational or an age thing. It is an attitudinal one. Again, this may seem obvious but, in all the yakking about millennials and generation Y, it's easy to lose sight of this fundamental truth.

When it comes to participation, the Jakob Nielsen rule applies. one percent of participants are heavy contributors, nine percent are intermittent and the remainder are lurkers. A lot of people try to crank up the contribution levels of the lurkers. But that's actually the last thing you want to do. Accept that people lurk. They will usually de-lurk when they have something of value to say.

Next week, I'll give a more complete debrief on the conference as a whole.