Teblog

Frighten the kids, or encourage the grown-ups?

Have you seen the Act On CO2 'bedtime stories' advertisement that our dear government has spent £6M on? Although it's a cartoon, the words are real enough. Fundamentally, it tells children that they're victims of grown-ups' actions and, if the grown-ups change their ways, they may (note: only 'may') be saved. According to the advertisement, over forty percent of the emissions of CO2 are caused by 'ordinary things' that grown-ups do, like warming homes and driving cars.

The Advertising Standards Authority has received hundreds of complaints which it plans to investigate. Good luck to it. According to a BBC report, "An ASA spokeswoman said the watchdog would be investigating whether the claims about climate change could be substantiated and whether the ad complied with taste and decency rules."

The ASA hasn't a hope in hell of validating the climate change science. It should concentrate instead on the taste and decency angle. When Sky News wrote about the ASA complaints, it received masses of contradictory comments (I ploughed through 94 of them). Goodness knows who Lisa is, but she made a good point when she said, "Upsetting children can never be right ... Why worry them so young when they can't do anything right now?!" Quite.

What is clear (if you didn't know already) is that climate change has become a religious debate and, if the Sky News commenters are representative of the population at large, the non-believers greatly outweigh the believers. And the powers-that-be are at their wits' end to turn us into believers.

The stupid thing is that the more rabid they become, the more they will turn off even the most reasonable citizen. Somehow the debate needs to become less accusatory and more inclusive. It might want to take into account that not everyone is the same or driven by the same values.

The latest EcoPinion Survey Report from strategic marketing agency EcoAlign parsed the attitudes of 1250 USA citizens and, in the process, identified five different categories of consumer. In terms of motivation to use new technologies and participate in new energy programs, they were: Cost-Conscious Saver (41%), Value Buyer (20%), Environmentalist/Green Consumer (19%), Traditional Consumer (10%) and Tech Enthusiast (10%).

The same messaging can't work with such a disparate set of people. Judging from that list, only 19 percent look as if they might fit in the 'believer' category in the USA. In Europe it may be different, but you can bet that the different categories exist. And it's therefore clear that a single message is going to fall on largely deaf ears, unless it happens to focus on the needs of the Cost-Conscious Saver.

And maybe this is a clue to the answer. Forget global warming, climate change, CO2 or any of that 'big-brotherish' terminology. Talk about simple financial and environmental sustainability through energy and fuel savings, through the avoidance of waste and other pollution and through the minimisation of raw materials.

In this way, instead of negative, frightening stories from those in power, the environmental tale can become a  positive one put out by everyone who is making an effort to improve our collective lot.

On environmental matters, who's at fault?

Compressed digital video works by having occasional reference frames which are updated by changes. It seems to make sense to publish a reference frame on environmental matters from time to time. So here's my first stab. Comments, as ever, are welcome.

Animals go about their business and leave no rubbish. Whatever they do leave becomes nourishment for something else - microbes, plants or other animals. Humans, on the other hand, have become adept at adapting nature's resources to things that are somewhat less naturally recyclable, either because of their semi-permanent nature (plastics for example) or because they are mixed and, therefore, un-recyclable (silicon chips, mixed fibre clothing and so on).

We also pollute the land, the seas and the air, not to mention inland lakes and rivers. I use the generalised 'we' even though some cultures and individuals live more in harmony with nature than others.

Not only this, but we deplete material resources at an unsustainable rate in order to satisfy the perceived 'needs' of an ever-growing population. Oil, coal and gas are the obvious examples - millions of years to lay down, exhausted in a couple of hundred. Known sources of many metals we take for granted (silver, gold, zinc, tin, lead, copper and uranium etc) are all likely to become exhausted in the next thirty years or so. If the glaciers keep melting, then the hope is that new deposits will be discovered. Which will buy a delay, but the end result will be the same. A rising population and widening consumerism will see to that.

In case you were wondering, natural gas, iron, aluminium then coal will last longest. But that will change as we seek alternatives to materials that are being exhausted.

I sometimes watch television advertisements and they drive me nuts. The worst offenders try to get you into a new habit by inventing a problem you never knew existed and then offer you a 'cure' for the condition. Anti-ageing creams and health drinks, for me, are the worst offenders. It amazes me that anyone falls for it. I cringe in anticipation of the "because you're worth it" and "take care" payoff lines. But then I think, "What am I doing sitting in front of a television that cost God-knows-what in material resources and gobbles electricity?" The answer is the same for everyone else who has a television: it's a low-cost source of information, education and entertainment.

Cars are a low cost, comfortable and convenient way of getting from A to B. It's little wonder we're addicted to them. Incandescent bulbs (RIP) were a great way of lighting the home. We haven't got a decent replacement yet, although a 12 volt lighting circuit of LEDs might prove a good idea.

It seems clear that, if the human race is to survive and thrive, it needs to change its ways. It needs to become more in harmony with nature and to put a proper value on the raw materials that remain. And, indeed, to exploit them while we have them in order to build whatever infrastructure we need for the future.

Mostly, what I see is companies jumping on the green or cleantech bandwagons in order to make and sell new stuff which is going to make the world better after these new things have been bought. And, frankly, I'm not sure companies have a great deal of choice unless they are hit by legislation, loss of markets or shareholder revolt. Yet, paradoxically, these same companies are made up of individuals who probably do care about the future of their families. (I'm not even going to try and square that particular circle.) 

And governments, which require the taxes from companies in order to balance the nation's books (ha!), are hardly likely to welcome too much shrinkage of the economy. They could replace taxes with 'fines' but that's probably not an election-winning strategy. They have much to lose were they to put 'growth' into long-term reverse. Encouragement of the right things and the removal of red tape would seem the right way to go.

And consumers, the people who are persuaded to part with their cash for all sorts of nonsense, are not going to be in a hurry to consume less although they might be persuaded to consume more of the right kind of things and less of the wrong. Providing their pockets don't suffer. Or, at least, not suffer too visibly. The recent car scrappage scheme is a good example - with the lure of a £2000 bribe - a lot of old vehicles went into the recycling loop and a lot of new cars were sold at more or less full price: a win for the showrooms, the recyclers, the manufacturers and the UK vehicle maintenance infrastructure. For the consumer, the lure of getting many times the market value of an old car somewhat eclipsed the repayment schedule and the embedded environmental harm in the new cars. I fell for it, eventually, and consoled myself that I'd bought a fuel-sipping recyclable car from a greenish car maker.

We, in the so-called developed world, are all trapped by our desires for a comfortable life whether we're politicians, business people or consumers. We find it difficult to imagine or face up to the scale of change that's needed in order to give future generations a chance. Professor David MacKay (see my Inside Track) has become the government's advisor on energy. His brutal bottom line is that we (in the UK) need to cut our fossil fuel consumption by 90 percent. Can you imagine that? I'm not sure if he's been hired in order to genuinely advise or as a way of gagging him. Time will tell.

But, if we're to achieve that, we need to invest in alternatives energy sources sharpish and his book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is eminently readable, online (free) or offline (£20 in paperback). Perhaps he could start a 'without the hot air' series, taking a largely impartial look at raw materials and pollution.

The more clearly the facts are laid in front of us, the more wisely we can make our individual choices. In the end though, we will make a single choice: exploit what's left as if there were no tomorrow (our present course) or find ways of living sustainably. The alternative, a sort of in-between approach, will merely delay our tenure on this planet.

Lotus knows, but do you?

With the prospect of a conference call with Lotus today, I thought I'd better try (yet again) to get my head around the extensive and, as a non-user, confusing product set. First stop was the IBM/Lotus product pages. Quite a bit of enlightenment, but you sometimes have to drill down unnecessarily to dig out the information. For example, once you get to 'Alloy by IBM and SAP', why doesn't it have a short explanation like the next item, 'Lotus Connector for SAP Solutions', has? I knocked up my own outline so I could see all the information in one place. Sad or what?

Anyway, having kind of refreshed my memory on the product side, I turned my attention to a recent IBM Lotus event called an 'IdeaJam'. This one bore the theme of the company's latest marketing campaign called 'Lotus knows'. The purpose was to get a lot of people from the Lotus community to come up with, and comment on, ideas for getting the brand better known. The discussion was broken into four categories:

Lotus knows working smarter depends on great technology…

Lotus knows marketing is key to technology adoption…

Lotus knows technology is only great with client success…

Lotus knows the world is getting smaller, flatter and smarter...

A terrific idea, except it's a bit like asking a church choir what songs they should be singing. They're going to choose the easy ones, the catchy ones, the ones that appeal to the choir itself. At least, after such an exercise, the vicar will know how to motivate the choir. But whether the choir's choices match the vicar's or the parishioners' needs is another matter.

Still, Lotus' event was very successful by its own standards. Over 20,000 votes were cast on 928 ideas and 2246 comments were made. Ideas could be voted for or against. The top vote (302 net votes) went to putting Notes in more schools worldwide. Second top (209 net) was raising awareness of Lotus among the rest of IBM sales staff. This is astonishing when you consider that IBM bought Lotus fourteen years ago. Talk about hiding its light under a bushel.

Maybe, just maybe, Lotus would have benefitted much more and been able to direct its marketing efforts much more successfully if it were to have run ideajams with IBM mainstream staff and non-Lotus users out there in the real world. The danger is that they might say "Lotus who?" and refuse to participate.

A most important string to ICT's bow

In crude terms, the computer industry sees itself as the saviour of the planet and all who inhabit it. Take a briefing from any major ICT company and it will tell you a) how it's cleaning up its own act and b) how, by buying more ICT stuff, we and the developing world can create a bright and sustainable future for ourselves. The mathematics are fairly simple, if a computer system can run more efficiently and help companies optimise their manufacturing, mining, transport, power generation, power consumption etc, then it's a win all round. This is built on the assumption that the developing world is doing exactly that (developing) and that the west should help it, providing there's a buck to be turned in the long term.

God, that sounds depressing. But it's certainly the case that ICT can help. Problems start when trying to make things happen. Politicians waver this way and that, according to whether they're trying to be statesmen or representatives of their communities. (Think about wind farms and NIMBYs.) As a long-time sounding board for my rants and self-confessed 'Eco Worrier' (sic) Al Tepper says, "The political layer is where things won't happen." Indeed, individuals also waver hither and thither, according to what authority they've most recently read/heard from. It's hard for them to know which way to turn because of messages emanating from the proliferation of vested interests and fanatics. Exhortation and fanatical evangelism take the place of reason for many of them.

We've been here before, many times. The early days of PCs and the web are good examples. Those who could see value then were a tiny minority trying to persuade a slightly larger minority of the revolution that would affect everyone's lives. In the mid to late seventies, the editor of Computing didn't want to know about 'microcomputers'. Eventually, PCs and the web went mainstream, but the evangelists were at their most shrill five to ten years before everyone else cottoned on.

Greens go back 30 years, sustainability 22 years and the public web about 16 years and, related to this, social networking has been growing rapidly over the past six years. We ought to know what's going on in the sustainability/green space and we ought to have the means to share our discoveries (especially for websites and for bloggers that make sense) with others. In this way, we could create a momentum for change based on genuine understanding. It would be based on us as individuals pursuing what we feel to be right, quite independently of the organisations to which we are beholden (like our employers). Through social software, independent and informed communities could coalesce around relevant topics: energy, pollution, water, food or whatever.

This personal mobilisation is in no way a replacement of the predominant top-down systems. Energy suppliers, governments, the United Nations, newspapers and so on, will continue to exert their influence, but upon an increasingly knowledgeable constituency. Change will increasingly start at the bottom and work up, just as some of it will continue to start at the top and work down. As individuals, we each have the potential to separate the good from the bad and the authentic from the greenwash, through our online community connections. This isn't about exploiting the herd instinct (as much of social media does), it's about reason and establishing or finding 'reasonable' social venues to hang out and sharing your discoveries with similarly motivated others.

None of this could happen without the ICT industry. In fact, this could end up being one of the best strings it could add to its collective bow.

Is telehealth coming at last?

Yesterday at Cisco's C-Scape analyst briefing, we were treated to a presentation by one James Ferguson. And what a treat that was. Cisco chose wisely. He was a good speaker, passionate about his subject (telemedicine, which he prefers to call telehealth) and a medical practitioner to boot. It was a real person talking about real things, not some propellor-head from technoland or, worse, a marketeer. This background, of course, made him a devastatingly effective salesman, and it wasn't until the Q&A that some of my (Scotch?) mist of enthusiasm started to clear.

His pitch was essentially simple. Because the coverage of the Aberdeen-based Scottish Centre for Telehealth (SCT) includes highlands, islands and oil-rigs, it faces some rather unusual problems. Popping into the local hospital is hardly convenient. And doctors can't easily get to where they're needed. Not always in time, anyway. So SCT's been working on getting diagnoses done remotely in order to a) help people to get the right treatment locally and b) to identify those who need hands-on professional treatment urgently. The filtering questions are: "Is this time dependent?" (urgent), "Is it experience dependent?" (need an expert) and "Is it facilities dependent?" (need particular facilities).

We saw people sticking their tongues out and waggling their tonsils in kiosks while remote experts tried to figure out what's wrong. Apparently ninety percent of diagnoses can be done by looking at someone, listening to their chest and looking in their ears, noses and down their throats. It's a slightly dehumanising way of doing medicine: in the same way that we all like to meet in person rather than through a computer screen or over the phone. The truth is, when you're ill and you're far away from help, anything is better than nothing at all.

Ferguson was not afraid to mention the dangers of turfing up at hospital. He'd rather sit on a telepresence or videoconference consultation than face God-knows-what in person. And patients eliminate the risk of catching hospital-borne infections if they don't have to go near the place.

The benefits are piling up.

The downside, of course, is that this stuff has to be paid for and the bandwidth has to be there. On payment, Cisco has a cash mountain so this, presumably, is why it's happy to consider spreading payments over time, essentially turning the customer's capital expenditure into operating expenditure. It can still recognise its own revenue at point-of-sale. Although it's a different issue, we're also seeing gradual acceptance this pay-as-you-go approach in the various kinds of cloud-based services.

The harder part of the equation is the communications infrastructure. Covering highlands, islands and oil-rigs with high quality broadband connections is a political and economic challenge, given the relatively sparse populations. Oil rigs have, apparently, been trialling a satellite-based facility called OPTESS. And some of the ground-based services have been using ISDN but, of course, the higher the bandwidth and the further the reach, the more services can be provided remotely.

Ferguson pointed out that medicine is now so good at patching us up when we get a major illness, we keep on living only to get more and more illnesses, until we end up with some chronic condition. All of this puts increasing demands on an already overstretched health service much of which, in theory at least, could be alleviated with some kind of home monitoring and self-treatment service, escalating to the professionals as and when needed.

But that's to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, the SCT has run trials inside hospitals running telehealth 'kiosks' in parallel with conventional assessments, in order to compare the quality of results. (It has a clever way of eliminating bias.) It is extending this facility to multiple hospitals and has started home monitoring trials. All of which are testing the principles of telehealth and capturing feedback from users on the experience.

As with so many things in the computer world, the big question is whether it will be able to scale. And that depends largely on either an appropriate infrastructure or a system which can adapt successfully to lower bandwidth connections.

An unjustified poke at social media

When I was a kid, we used to sneer at the children who scuttled indoors as soon as the evening tv programmes started. (Yes, it was that long ago.) The rest of us had a grand old time playing in the streets, the fields, the woods or going for a bike ride or a swim. Even now, I regard most television output as a waste of time.
But then most people who look at me 'playing' with the computer probably regard that as a waste of time. Little do they realise that the computer is actually a doorway into a world of personally-chosen information and relationships, not to mention local tools for manipulating words, numbers and images. One thing I never do is play computer games. As an ex-programmer, I find the idea of pitching my wits against another programmer a bit of a pointless exercise.
Just lately, Twitter and other social sites have come in for increasing amounts of stick, a lot of it from journalists who assume that the public can't tell the difference between responsible and irresponsible blogging. Or, just this week, the journalists who have reported that Twitter can make us 'immoral'. This is tosh at two levels. First of all, it's a misinterpretation (by the Daily Mail in one particular case) of what was actually said by the researchers into the subject. Second of all, it's loading Twitter with problems that started with television at least, and possibly radio before that.
Mind you, the researchers'publicists have themselves to blame. The story announcement, from the University of Southern California, had a sub-title that read, 'Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass.' The fundamental idea is that when information and images are coming at us thick and fast, our poor brains don't get enough time to reflect on what we're seeing. Apparently we need between six and eight seconds for emotions relating to our moral senses to awaken in our minds. By that time, especially with quick-fire media, the moment has passed and the appropriate emotions fail to surface as the next story grabs our attention.
The study raises questions about, "the emotional cost - particularly for the developing brain - of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter." You can't help feeling that last item was chucked in as a news hook. After all, you're unlikely to encounter a lot of emotion-laden content in a 140-character Twitter tweet.
Of the list, television news is probably the biggest culprit. And who sits in front of that all their waking hours? Most of us spend the majority of our time engaged in other activities which give us time for reflection, if we need it. And we spend a fair bit of time, especially if we're in the vulnerable mind-developing group, playing with our chums or hanging out with the family and learning about life and compassion in these inherently slower activities.
It strikes me that the anti-Twitter venom which was generated by this story would have been better aimed at television producers and shoot-em-up games writers.
The study, if you're interested, comes out next week at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences http://www.pnas.org/content/early/recent. It will be called, "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion."

Green IT for Dummies: HP/Freeform Dynamics special edition

If you were one of the early readers of this post and you had trouble downloading, please try again. HP has improved the download process. You can just answer section 1 then skip to 3.

Eleven months ago, to the day, Freeform Dynamics and Wiley put the wheels in motion for a green IT for Dummies mini book. Somewhere along the line, Hewlett Packard offered to sponsor it and we're delighted to say that it's now officially available as an online download.

Or, to quote from HP's forthcoming announcement, "Copies of the book were already handed to out to people at the European Sustainable Energy Week and due to the positive success and feedback HP is making a limited number of pocket books available online to download."

Physical copies of the book will continue to be given out at appropriate conferences and exhibitions and, indeed, Freeform Dynamics has its own small stock. But, given that this is a book on environmental sustainability, the idea of downloading it and reading it online has a certain resonance.

The pocket book's very readable, 'Dummies-style', 28 pages look at how IT can reduce its own environmental impact and that of the organisations it serves. Apart from the main story, it also contains case studies, checklists and helpful links.

The chapter headings are: Gearing Up to Go Green; Cleaning Up IT; Greening Your Organisation; Changing Staff Attitudes and Taking Action; and, Ten Greenspirational Links.

If you're wondering whether it's for you, perhaps these assumptions about the readers will help:

You hold a senior position in an organisation (whether large, medium or small) and are wondering how to maintain or even improve performance while following a more sustainable environmental agenda.

You hold a senior position in the IT department and are wondering how to reduce your energy consumption, your general environmental impact and help the organisation meet its environmental goals.

You’re a concerned employee who feels that your organisation could do more for the environment.

The book was written by three analysts (me, Martin Atherton and Tony Lock) from Freeform Dynamics to ensure a comprehensive and pragmatic coverage of the subject. HP was very supportive but the book was independently written.

We hope, if your own profile matches one of those above, that you will find this guide a useful starting point for your own journey towards environmental sustainability.

Cisco and NASA to save the planet?

You can't beat a good slogan for grabbing attention. And, to prove it, here I am writing about Cisco's and NASA's 'Planetary Skin', a global monitoring system to look at environmental conditions around the world, with a particular focus on carbon and climate change.
The idea is to grab real-time environmental information from every form of sensor, space-, air- and surface-based, and digest and deliver it in a way that will help companies, governments, decision-makers at the international level make better-informed decisions about climate change and about the development of a decarbonized economy.
The project rang loud and horrible bells in my head. Didn't I write about something similar some 20 years ago? Yes, it was a column in PC Dealer about the United Nations Environment Programme which was establishing a Global Resource Information Database (GRID) to 'gather and analyse information from space and ground stations about changes in climate and renewable natural resources.' On this occasion, IBM was whacking in millions of dollars' worth of equipment and software.
Sound familiar? So what's different? Well, it appears that the 'Planetary Skin' is primarily focused on carbon. It aims to look at both carbon emissions and carbon sinks across the globe. Simon Willis is Cisco's VP for public sector practice in the internet business solutions group which is leading the project. In a podcast, he pointed out that rain forests are being cut down at a rate equivalent to an area the size of England each year, a rate that is speeding up. He suggests that this is "probably the second-largest contributor to global greenhouse gases." He adds, "probably the most urgent task facing us globally at the moment, when looking at how to tackle climate change, is to reverse the incredible decline in rainforests."
This is the not unreasonable justification for starting the project there. It also happens to be technically easier than tackling urban or semi-urban environments, which are lower down the agenda.
What bothers me, more than a little, is that Cisco and NASA are bolstering their own businesses to give us a finer-grained view of what we know already. And have known for many years. Otherwise, Planetary Skin wouldn't have known where to start. Isn't the issue the horribly practical one of getting people on the ground to change their ways? This requires political and financial manoeuvring of a very high order.
We can cloak the earth in all these marvellous technologies, and inform people to the nth degre. But isn't it a bit like an obese hospital patient being told exactly what's going on in their body and being told how they should change their lifestyle yet, on leaving hospital, they head straight back to the kebab shop?
We actually know in our hearts that living a sustainable life is in the best interests of humankind. We have more than 20-years'-worth of evidence about what's going on, environmentally speaking. My fear is that this project will end up as a re-run of the Strategic Defence Initiative (Reagan's son of Star Wars). A fantastic idea, plugs into the fears of the day, gets masses of funding, but fizzles out as reality bites.
Can someone tell me I'm wrong?

The organisational social software paradox

Last week I reported on the shape of the enterprise social networking space with the help of Andrew McAfee's Berkmann Centre lunchtime presentation on the subject. This week I'll get a little closer to home and present you with a paradox you're going to have to resolve if you're thinking of introducing social networking into your organisation.

A few months ago, Freeform Dynamics and MWD joined forces to carry out research among 201 companies on the subject of collaborative computing. The respondents were roughly equally split between France, Germany and the UK. All organisations were at least 1000 employees and half of them were over 5000. Sixty percent of the respondents were IT-centric and forty percent business-centric. All had some responsibility for workforce communication and collaboration.

The research contained all manner of interesting stuff but, as promised last week, I'm going to take a couple of charts out which relate to risk. One of our questions centred around the unofficial use of collaboration software within the organisation. As you can see from the chart below, social software of the kind we were discussing last week has crept into most of these organisations to some degree. Over fifty percent of respondents report wide adoption while almost every organisation has at least some.

In the officially sanctioned figures (not shown), social media is in third place at a little under 25% but instant messaging remains bottom of the heap.

Now, I don't know if I'm being dim here, but if something is unsanctioned, it seems that people would need to get it in by stealth. This is easy enough to do with solo desktop software (if organisational desktop control is lax enough) but social media, by its very nature, needs more than one participant and a shared location in which participants can 'meet', either synchronously or asynchronously.

This being the case, it seems highly likely that at least a percentage of those interviewed must be using public services in order to achieve their social networking objectives. Some, of course, will have an in-house 'skunk works' server - rather as Euan Semple did when he was at the BBC - but this requires some degree of computer skill and, of course the authorisation of the IT department at least.

So, let's take a look at the second chart. This relates to the concerns of the respondents towards the use of public services for this sort of thing. Don't forget it includes the conferencing, communication and screen sharing applications mentioned in the first chart.

Security, compliance, user distraction and support overhead all rank reasonably highly when you aggregate 'major concern' and 'some concern'.

We clearly have a discrepancy between what people are doing and what their organisations would like them to be doing. No doubt the employees have their reasons for behaving in this contradictory way. I'd hazard a guess that they've found the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived risks. Within most organisations, I'd have thought it unlikely that people would adopt social software just so they can chat to their personal friends. (By the way, if you'd like to alarm yourself with a detailed run down of risks, take a look at this new report on Web 2.0 security from the European Network and Information Security Agency.)

I'll confess to a degree of bafflement and, if you are in one of these contradictory situations, I'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you can tell me whether things are as laissez faire as they appear or whether guidelines and controls have been put in place to minimise, or at least balance, risk. And, maybe, tell us how hard it is for your organisation to take social networking seriously and what efforts you're making to articulate the commercial benefits to the powers that be.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Greening the data centre

In the process of digging around the 'greening' of data centres (no, don't laugh), I ran into the boss of Migration Solutions, one Alex Rabbetts. By a weird coincidence, his Surrey office is more or less exactly on the spot where my computer department was in the early seventies, when I first started taking 'sustainability' seriously.

In those days, I was inspired by E F Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" book. I was further motivated by the country's oil supply shortages, not to mention the fact that my company made stuff from hydrocarbons. And then, to put the tin hat on it, Ted Heath forced us into a three-day working week.

It made me dream of a better world in which we consumed less and thought more about our environmental impact. I embarked on a journey which, due to a number of side-tracks, took 29 years to bring me to a meaningful destination, environment-wise: involvement in a huge sustainability project, primarily with the Science Museum.

During the past fifteen months, I've been applying this experience to the IT world through my work with analyst firm, Freeform Dynamics. We knew from the start that IT was both a contributor to environmental damage and an enabler of savings elsewhere. We also knew from our research that companies are not turned on by doing green things for their own sake. They are primarily interested in money, appearances and regulation.

Alex Rabbetts not only came to the same conclusions himself, but he added an environmental assessment service to his data centre building, consultancy and operations company. If you have a data centre of less than ten thousand square feet, his firm will conduct a fixed price assessment for £2,500, an amount he would "normally" expect a client to recover in three or four weeks. The assessment looks at 120 different factors which have an environmental impact.

He knows that no data centre can be green, but most of them can be greener.

Unlike hardware vendors, whose natural instinct is to get you to replace kit, Migration Solutions is independent of vested interests (apart from its own) and can usually find plenty of improvements without touching the hardware. The company looks at the whole environment, including things like noise, light and waste, as well as power. It triages its findings into things which can be done for nothing, things which require a bit of expenditure and things which can wait until the next refurb'.

He takes into account regulations, both current and upcoming and warns that companies with over, say, 50 racks* could be pushed into the arms of the government's upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment legislation. Initially, this will apply to any company on half-hour metering that uses more than 6,000MWh of electricity per annum.

DEFRA's website currently claims that companies spending more than £1M on electricity could find themselves subject to this regulation. Both Rabetts and I remember the figure being £500,000 just a few weeks ago. And a quick Google of '500,000 crc site:www.defra.gov.uk' brings up bunch of pages with the old number on it.

It very much looks as if the government has taken the pétard of fluctuating energy prices and hoisted itself with it. Either that or it realised that, at £500,000, its catchment would overwhelm the regulatory system.

But, whether you're liable or not, it might be worth taking a look at Migration Solutions' service. It is pragmatically focused on environmental principles with the by-products of potentially saving money, looking good and being prepared for regulations when they head your way.

*My calculations went something like this:

Assume a rack is 5KWh
Double it to 10KWh for cooling and other infrastructure energy costs
Now multiply by 24 then by 365 to give an annual 87.6MWh
Approximately 68.5 racks would put you in reach of the CRC regulations

I said 50 because your organisation is bound to have non-IT energy bills too.