Teblog

R. Todd Stephens on Enterprise 2.0

Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by new ways of working. Enterprise 2.0, for example, has crept up on us over the past few years. Those who've tracked it from the start have something of an advantage in that they pretty much know what all the elements and issues are. Anyone coming to it cold might find themselves misled by evangelists or confused by the propellor-heads.

It's not easy to get on top of things and see all the elements in a sensible perspective. Three cheers then for R. Todd Stephens who is Senior Technical Architect of Collaboration and Online Services for the AT&T Corporation. He has been involved in corporate IT for 25 years with a high focus on enterprise information management since 1999. He has produced an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint, a chart which can act as a checklist for all the elements of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint (click chart to get download)

The chart totally avoids product names, with the sole exception of 'Office', but even that is a functional description rather than an explicit plug for Microsoft. The chart is in five columns: Business Drivers (for investing in Web 2.0 technology); Actors (the people involved); Technologies (and related technologies); Methods (how the technologies are used); and Value-Add (to the employee, the department and the business).

The chart is enterprise-centric, in the sense that the final column doesn't mention value to customers. Or, for that matter, suppliers. Mentions of clients and customers are dotted around the chart, so it's not as if they're being ignored. But such an extension to the Value-Add column might help stimulate more consideration of who the business exists to serve.

Clues do exist in the minutiae of the chart. Sub-boxes contain items like Education, Training, Consulting, Self service and so on, but you sense that these are primarily seen as revenue or cost-saving opportunities. A box for 'Customers' has 'Consumers' and 'Producers' as sub-boxes. Quite often customers have their own forums where they help each other out. It costs the enterprise very little but is a tremendous value-add for the customers. But then again, you could argue that this drops the support costs for the company.

Perhaps I need to wake up to the fact that value-add for customers will nearly always brings a reciprocal benefit for the company.

The good thing about this chart is that it is pretty comprehensive in terms of identifying all the Web 2.0 elements and shows how they fit into an organisation's activities. While setting up an 'under the radar' blog, wiki, IM or whatever is a trivial exercise, to derive real business value someone somewhere has to look at the bigger picture and figure out how to turn skunk works initiatives into corporate processes while retaining the spirit that made them attractive in the first place.

I think it was Napoleon or Nelson who used to toss a coin when faced with difficult decisions. If, when the coin landed, he was disappointed with the outcome, he'd go with his instincts. A chart like this is similar. Without it, you'd be trying to make this stuff up. With it, you have a framework and if any of it jars, just alter it or extend it.

IMHO it makes a fine starting point.

How ICT can help broad environmental initiatives

For some time, I've been banging on about the opportunities for ICT to improve the environmental performance of organisations, even if it results in more energy use by the data centre. The whole point is leverage. It's like spending a few hundred pounds on new tyres to avoid an expensive accident. Probably a lousy analogy, but it's enough to introduce a report called The potential global CO2 reductions from ICT use. The subtitle is 'Identifying and assessing the opportunities to reduce the first billion tonnes of CO2'.

If that sounds dull as ditchwater to you, then all you need to know is that ICT, instead of being that perceived gobbler of ludicrous amounts of energy, can help us turn things around and save even more energy elsewhere. In fact, the report identifies and explains ten areas of solid opportunity. It looks at both savings and side effects, not all of which are good. But, in general, the good outweighs the bad, usually by a substantial margin.

The ten areas covered are: Smart city planning; Smart buildings; Smart appliances; Dematerialisation services; Smart industry; I-optimisation; Smart grid; Integrated renewable solutions; Smart work; and Intelligent transport. If, like me, you're puzzled by I-optimisation, it's about designing production plants.

The report was written by Ecofys for the World Wildlife Fund and was sponsored by Hewlett Packard. Ecofys made a substantial contribution (eleven authors) to the report from the IPCC which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

This kind of backdrop made me nervous. Will HP force an IT industry view on the content? Will the authors be 'right on' environmentalists? Apart from a bit of a plug for HP's Halo teleconferencing, I've not read anything so far that makes me uneasy. Apart, of course from the obsession with greenhouse gases, and CO2 in particular. Judging from our (Freeform Dynamics) research, as long as environmental action improves operating margins and helps conform to upcoming regulations, then what's not to like?

The report (which, I confess, I'm still only two thirds of the way through) comments on, and draws from, all the important literature on the subject. It highlights the gaps in our knowledge, of which there are many. And it offers us an extensible taxonomony which will enable us to discuss and compare our information on the subject in a mutually comprehensible way. It also provides a number of tables for each application area with anticipated impacts under different scenarios. Where the future is concerned, some of it has to be of the best/worst/middle estimate variety. But, without question, this sort of thing provides a good framework for thinking about the issues clearly. And, indeed, for mapping what will probably be a growing body of ever more detailed knowledge on the subject.

Existing information ranges from the anecdotal to the specific. But each has its place - too much detail would be unwelcome if 'raising awareness' but vital if being used to set government policy. The report notes that most of the material (although not all - there's some good stuff from China) relates to the developed economies. Yet, many of the challenges and, indeed, the opportunities, lie in the developing economies. Cleverly-designed buildings can achieve zero or even a negative operational carbon footprint. But, of course, the construction materials cannot be side-stepped and both steel and concrete happen to be notorious contributors to CO2 emissions.

I have to say that at one point, I thought the report did go into la-la land. It started speculating about a future possibility of private cars doubling up as public transport. Can you imagine the issues: public liability insurance, the nightmare of an accident, the danger of predatory drivers or predatory ride-seekers for that matter? I'll put that one down as a 'no', no matter how environmentally desirable.

Having said that, this was the only time thus far that I felt the report veered away from a pragmatic assessment of the possibilities that face us.

Anyone who has to consider environmental issues in the context of ICT will find this report helpful. It provides a baseline for thinking about how ICT can help organisations achieve their fiscal and regulatory obligations at the very least. We know from our research that staff will generally welcome such measures, a potential PR benefit exists in the short term and shareholder benefit in the longer term. And all this with an environmental by-product.

I think these authors have done a fine job of parsing the current state of our knowledge into identifiable and potentially measurable components. Were we to forget our knee-jerk instincts to reject NIH (Not Invented Here) and accept this as a basis for future discussion, it will have served its purpose and raised the level of debate.

Who controls your personal information?

Doc Searls is a long time blogger, a deep thinker, a co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, an open source wizard, and too many other things to mention. He is held in massively high regard by all the social computing pioneers I've met over the past five or so years. He's currently on a mission to invert the relationship between us and the data about ourselves. Instead of repeatedly providing different cuts of information to everyone with an interest in us, we actually hold the information once and let it out according to need. (If you're reading this, Doc, I apologise for the horrible simplification.)

Doc recently found himself in the world of his namesakes - doctors. He'd undergone a medical exploration which resulted in him contracting pancreatitis. This in turn resulted in hospitalisation and a period of considerable discomfort. After watching the progress of his illness, it was good to follow his recovery and eventual discharge on Twitter. (Why do I care? Because I met him a few years ago and thought he was a good egg with some interesting insights.)

Not surprisingly, on his emergence from the 'health care' system, he had a few words to say on the madness of big systems which are not at all patient-centric, despite any assurances to the contrary. You can read his blog post for the specifics of his situation. The key point is that we know a lot more about ourselves than any doctor can hope to absorb from a medical history.

In his blog post, Searls chose to cite Fred Trotter, a US citizen amd open source software advocate, who said "Given current primary care reimbursements, my doctor is incented do everything in his power to spend under 10 minutes talking to me." I don't suppose it's hugely different anywhere else in the world. They just don't have time to unearth the key facts that lie in our medical history and, of course, the stuff that *we* know that lies outside our medical records is totally inaccessible.

In our own family, we make great use of a cranial osteopath. None of the information relating to his work finds its way into our official medical records. I also know that dairy products affect me within a few minutes of consuming them, but I've never bothered to share this information with the doctor. In fact, I rarely go to the doctor. The last time I went, I had a very swollen eyelid which, as well as looking unsightly, was causing double vision. The doctors in the local practice and the the hospital were all baffled. After several weeks of unsuccessful experimental treatments, I ran into a friend in the street and she said "that's an allergic reaction." She was right, we'd bought a goose down duvet just before the eyelid swelled up. I didn't bother to tell the doctor. It's still in the official records as 'lid-lag'.

There is a point to all this, and that is that we should somehow (no-one's figured out the details yet) become the custodians of information about ourselves, letting it out to others under our control. Doc Searls and Adriana Lukas are just two of the people who are investigating slightly different flavours. It's a bit like the early days of social computing, a bit 'wild west', but the fundamental ideas make sense. It's been christened VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which strikes me as a bit restrictive, even if it does resonate with and oppose CRM.

If you're interested in keeping up with, or contributing to, progress then you might like to head over to the ProjectVRM blog.

FrEDI: Freeform's Environmental Discussion Image

We've just released a research report called ‘Green Computing: The role of IT in the push towards environmental sustainability’. While doing the research and validating the findings it rapidly became clear to me that few people are constantly aware of the big picture and their part in it. IT is, after all, just an enabling component in an organisation's strategy yet, to listen to some people, 'greening the data centre' is the start and end of its environmental contribution.

The report examines the broader role of IT and actually gets inside organisations and looks at the drivers for green (and 'green', incidentally, isn't high on the list), cultural issues - including attitudes to IT, where responsibilities for action lie, and how IT can support the organisation's sustainability objectives. The statistical content was based on feedback from 1474 IT professionals while the interpretation was a combination of experience and consultations following the report's first draft.

Anyway, the point of today's post is to introduce you to FrEDI, an illustration which reflects all the areas that need to be considered when participating in an environmental sustainability strategy. The acronym stands for Freeform Environmental Discussion Image although, in retrospect, perhaps 'Illustration' would be a better last word. Its purpose is to keep people's minds open to the bigger picture when discussing and planning their environmental activities.

As you can see, there's a certain amount of blurring between the various elements of the illustration, this reflects the fact that nothing happens in isolation except, possibly, the determination of the drivers which are best decided at board level, even if some of them are informed by others within the organisation.

You will also notice that the drivers are two-tone - one for internal drivers, such as budget or PR value, the other for external drivers, such as government regulation.

The only way for the drivers to be implemented is through people and they are reached and inspired through leadership. Which, of course, comes from people. Hence the blurring. You may notice that both drivers and leadership fade out at the bottom, leaving the field clear for people, processes and ICT to intermingle and bring about the necessary change.

People are on top of the stack, quite deliberately because nothing at all happens without people. Processes are created and carried out by people and most of them are intimately supported by ICT.

The bottom part of the illustration hints at sustainability in that equipment and resources have to be chosen, acquired, used then disposed of. They are split in two, to reflect the different nature of hardware and resources. Servers, storage, cooling, PCs, laptops, thin clients, mobile devices, printers, etc on the one hand and electricity, paper, ink, toner, water etc on the other.

We believe that it is useful to have an illustration like this to hand whenever debating environmental matters so that the bigger picture is never lost. Organisational and individual benefits will be maximised through harmony and environmental benefits will drop out as a by-product.

Do take a look at the report if this subject interests you. And, of course, your feedback is always welcome.

PS In case you were wondering, the fact it looks like a tree wasn't lost on us. In fact, it looks most like an Evergreen Oak, but we realised that if we called a tree, then this would lead to hierarchical expectations when, in fact, we're all in this together.

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.

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.

Vendor Relationship Management UK-style

One of the most challenging, charming, intelligent and irritating people I've ever met is one Adriana Lukas. She was a leading blogger in 2001, long before most people had ever heard of blogging. She understood the ramifications of social software before we knew that there were any ramifications. That would be at the end of 2002. She really was a classic voice in the wilderness and, through speaking engagements, massive amounts of networking and, in my case, arduous discussions, she brought many people to an understanding of the potential of social computing.

Now, she's mounted her charger again and her lance is firmly tilted at people's control of their personal data. In classic Lukas fashion, she's looked askance at the accepted ways of doing things and asked 'why?' Incremental developments creep up on us and we don't realise that the status quo is possibly not where we'd be had we realised the implications of each micro-step.

In this particular case, we're talking about the data that other people hold about us. Banks, social software sites, wine merchants, anyone, in fact, with whom we have dealings. Adriana's view is that we should be in charge of our personal information and reveal appropriate parts when it suits us. Thus, a bank might be given permission to check our address. This would be done through a standard feed mechanism (probably Atom) and the bank would be given an access key. It could poll the address whenever it felt like it. And, if it were a new account, the bank would be given the key and all the relevant pieces of information could be picked up, without the individual having to do yards of typing. At the end of the relationship, the ties can be cut and potentially valuable new personal information put beyond reach.

A wine buff might decide to expose their drinking habits and wine-tasting findings to the local wine merchant. Same thing. Merchant subscribes and, in the gift of the information owner, gets a glimpse into their client's life. Some people might mix their feeds (no pun intended) and others might feel more secure with separate feeds for separate 'friends'. Some might want to encrypt information. Providing the standards chosen are those which are acceptable to the accessing party then this is possible too.

This is an inversion of the relationships we have come to expect. It makes the supplier the supplicant. It puts the buyer in charge. Or, if we're talking government and civil service scenarios, it makes them the servants and the citizens the masters, which is as it should be.

This is all part of the vision of Project VRM. And, yes, this stands for Vendor Relationship Management, a deliberate inversion of the Customer Relationship Management term which, of course, is nothing of the sort. While born from the same roots and overlapping to a large extent, you will notice that Adriana's take on it is totally individual-centric, while the American-led version is more all-embracing. But, in each case, the aim is to restore some balance into the relationships.

In 2001, when Adriana started blogging, people probably thought her mad. In 2002, when she started articulating the value of social networking inside and outside organisations, she was still alone. In 2003, when Google bought blogging service Pyra, she knew she was on to something. And then, in 2005 she was finally vindicated as the mainstream media picked up on social networking.

Right now, I suspect she feels as lonely with respect to VRM as she did when she was blogging in 2001. It will be interesting to see if, once again, she has managed to hit the nail on the head.

UC, you see

Avaya, BT and Cisco teamed up to explain the benefits of the IBM Unified Communications ecosystem. This is an ecosystem, like so many these days, in which the participants are both collaborators and competitors. They carefully laid out their pitches so that they appeared not to compete too much.

What became clear is that they see IBM's UC game being played out in the higher and middle reaches of the corporate world at the moment although this might change later. You'll find some information on SMB offerings, Foundations and Bluehouse, in a recent Information World Review blog.

If you listen to two of the partners, the principal driver for UC, or UC2 (for Unified Communications and Collaboration) as IBM has branded it, is money, in one form or another. While acknowledging the monetary value of UC2, IBM took a slightly different tack which I'll come to in a moment.

BT dropped a slogan in near the end of its presentation: "we get to the money faster." Avaya talked of "reducing headcount and costs" on the one hand and "improving efficiency" on the other. Perhaps it was late in the day when we got to Cisco; we didn't ask and it didn't say, what the benefits to the customer were. But it talked plenty about market potential - in essence a $500M per annum pot to be shared over the next few years.

So, back to IBM. It made the point that squeezing out costs and improving efficiencies is a done deal. It itemised four challenges facing business today, culled from the bi-annual survey of 765 of its client CEOs. The topmost challenge was innovation. The next challenge was securing and retaining top talent. The third concerned their organisations' speed and agility and item number four was green business.

Guess what? All four are handily addressed by better communications and collaboration tools. Innovation happens more quickly when communication and collaboration are facilitated (think social computing behind the firewall and between trusted partners). Top talent will be attracted by having the right tools to hand and culture to operate in. Speed and agility are self-evidently improved by removing friction from communication. And, finally, green is enabled by having the tools to work remotely and reduce travel.

Looking at the slides, I sometimes got the feeling that 'green' or 'GREEN' in one case, appeared because it is more or less obligatory. It happens to be true that the environment benefits from these technologies, but since the commercial case was already a good one, 'green' seemed to be a handy, and very welcome, bonus.

So, with that in mind, I'll leave the last word with Avaya's Martyn Lambert who, rather poetically, came out with this line with regard to UC adoption:

"It's driven by cost, enabled by broadband and blessed by green."

Classic.