Teblog

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.

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.

Safe corporate social computing?

Look around at social and collaborative computing and what do you see? A complete hotch potch of different systems, some of which run safely behind the firewall, others which sit out there on someone else's servers. You hop from Flickr to Outlook to Skype to Facebook to discussion groups, or whatever. Each has its own approach and, often, integration is only possible through hyperlinks or copy/paste.

Add to this the fact that you're working on different devices, laptop, desktop, internet café terminal, mobile phone, Blackberry and so on and what have you got? A lot of time wasting, a lack of security and data distributed all over the show.

It can't last. To move forward we need to get to a point where all we're concerned about is doing stuff with our information and other people while the systems themselves move towards invisibility.

Of course we're going to have to get from where we are now to where we'd like to be then. One issue is integration. Another is multiplatform. And a third is security. I'm sure there are others, but they'll do for now.

We need common interfaces, the ability to surface our information to whatever device we happen to be using and to do it in a way that doesn't  expose us or our organisation to risk.

Enter stage left an organisation called Outblaze*. I had some minor contact with its CEO, Yat Siu, in 2005 and I'm ashamed to say I totally forgot about his company name. His tale about internet connection speeds in the Far East is what stunned me at the time. He was talking about 100 megs being common, with up to a gig being possible, if you were prepared to pay $215/month at the time. He now has a 1 gig connection to his home.

This means that using the internet is a totally different experience over there. And the software and user interfaces that have evolved are highly visual and engaging - you feel more as if you're in a virtual cartoon world than working a computer.

Outblaze sits quietly in the background providing 'white label' messaging and social computing services to a wide range of clients. Try MSN, AOL and Yahoo! for size. It's big. It has 76 million users tied to 480,000 web domains. Its clients offer Outblaze services as if they were their own. Outblaze picks up a monthly fee per user based on which particular services are picked from the company's long menu. At a broad level, it provides messaging, security, collaboration, community/social networking, digital identity, compliance and gaming facilities. Each heading contains, on average, half a dozen or so sub categories.

If you took the community/social networking stack, for example, it contains: social networking platform, online video editing and sharing, photo sharing, bookmarks sharing, blogs, wiki, chat, forums/message boards and dating/friend matching. It supports devices from mobile phones to desktop PCs and anything that can use the web.

The company is already hugely successful around the world and it is now extending its reach into the enterprise and, at the same time, it wants to increase its European presence, where it (vaguely) claims to have between five and ten million users. It thinks that Europe is more ready for its approach than the USA.

Richard Bye is the company's vp of sales and corporate development for EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa), so he's the guy in the hot seat for this initiative. He believes, and he's probably right, that enterprises want their own social networks but they can't do it in-house and they don't really trust the public services. Nor do they want the capital expenditure or the disruption associated with such an initiative.

It's obvious where this is heading. With a solid base of experience of running enterprise-class hosted and integrated systems, Outblaze's system appears to check all the boxes. No doubt it will try and get its leverage from working through the third parties that already serve these prospects. Potentially, it's a straightforward value-add for them and huge leverage for Outblaze.

It will come into conflict with some presently outsourced services. Messagelabs springs to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

And, who knows, perhaps we can learn to relax a bit and allow a little of the Far Eastern culture to penetrate our rather stolid computer interfaces. All we need is a bit more bandwidth.

PS The above blog was written just before I left for Lotusphere on 20th Jan. On 21st January, IBM/Lotus announced  the beta of its own social/collaboration hosted service called bluehouse. If IBM can get its rollout and provisioning strategy right, it could put the company centre stage.

*Outblaze's new website should be online by the end of January. Having looked at the old one on Wayback Machine, I can't blame the company for hiding it.

Dealing with social media addiction

The internet is silting up with ego-driven dross. It's little wonder that the anti-network-neutrality brigade would like to turn it into freeways and side streets, depending on willingness to pay. And, equally, it's no wonder that the network neutrality supporters want everything to stay the same and for the pipes to be fattened ad infinitum.

With limitless capacity and fixed price access, anyone who can afford a few dollars a month is able to promulgate whatever they want out to an unsuspecting world. They could do it with blogs, podcasts, videocasts, social networking sites, Second Life or Twitter.

It doesn't matter that most of the utterances are ignored by most of the world. For most people the joy lies, I suspect, in the uttering. It's like vanity publishing. Everyone has a story and this is a way to get it out.

Most people like making connections and 'friendships'. By participating in a social site like Twitter, they can delude themselves about their connectedness. Enough of the digital glitterati hang out there to make it worth dropping by and picking up what these A-listers are up to. Even if it is as boring as 'stuck in traffic on 101', or whatever.

If we were able to really restrict our appetite for social media consumption to our genuine friends and work colleagues, for example, then we'd probably derive a lot of value from it. I wouldn't mind knowing what my four analyst colleagues at Freeform Dynamics were up to at any time although I really wouldn't welcome a continous stream of the stuff.

And this is the issue really. If you get involved in any big way with blogs, podcasts, videocasts and social sites, it can be like a drug. But this drug doesn't so much mess with your head as mess with your time. "I'll just see what [name your own guru] is up to at the moment" and that's another chunk of your life thrown away, never to be recovered. It's even worse with videos, which are becoming all the rage in Twitterati circles. A bit of puff and a tiny URL and, if you're not careful, you end up watching some nonentity on an ego trip.

I think we ought to start accounting for our time in the same way that lawyers do. And then measure the value extracted from each social media engagement. Did it entertain? Did it educate? Did it inform? Choose your own criteria and monitor your online activity. If you're dissatisfied with the outcome, ask yourself what else you would have spent that time doing. If the answer to that is 'something better' then you have a problem. Only by recognising the consequences of the addiction can you form your strategy for beating it.

PS For social accounting purposes, that probably took you 135 seconds to read.

To Twit, to who?

Okay, I confess. I've been Twittering over the holiday period. As part of my social computing beat for Freeform Dynamics, it's up to me to try and understand what the heck's going on, even if it isn't (yet?) mainstream.

Like blogging, Second Life, instant messaging, Facebook and all the other social computing activities before it, at first glance Twitter looks a bit mad and potentially very disruptive. It is, essentially, mini-blogging. 140 characters to say what you like when you like. Your posts appear on your followers' screens or on their phones.

You can be certain that companies like IBM and Microsoft are watching with interest. And, no doubt, many of their staff will be participating enthusiastically. As with all the previous social activities, they'll mine value out of it, if there's any value to be mined. Then they'll try to either replicate it within their own collaboration suites or, if they have to, make sure that this stuff can be surfaced within their own offerings.

The early adopters of social media tools are a fickle bunch. They swarm. Because they are so connected, ideas spread rapidly and they find themselves flitting to the next new thing. And, presumably because there are only so many hours in the day, marginalise whatever social computing activity they previously indulged in.

Facebook was de rigeur among these people and now they're Twittering. I have no doubt that they will be on to the next good thing very soon. But they leave a trail. I was going to say like animal spoor, but that sounds rather negative. First of all the creators of these tools have probably worked for nothing and shared their tools freely. If they end up with a 'hit' on their hands, then they have masses of beta testers, also working for 'nothing'. (In actual fact, they disclose a lot about themselves.) They will have identified value in the offering, even if they subsequently move on.  For the Microsofts and IBMs of this world, this amounts to free research.

When blogging first caught on, it seemed to comprise mainly of people wittering on about nothing in particular to an audience that largely couldn't give a toss. Some bloggers, though, actually made sense and started to attract followers. Just like journalism, some educated, some informed and some entertained. It didn't really matter. By writing authoritatively about their interests, they started to attract those who were interested in similar things. Communities started to form, through adding comments and including links from their own blogs. This often led to other more conventional forms of contact. Beside this undeniably valuable human aggregation, a massive pool of permanently stored information is there for anyone to explore in the future.

So what about Twitter? Time-wasting nonsense was my predominant reaction to it for several months. I made the same mistake that I did with blogging, predominantly that I thought I had to keep up with everything. It's not possible. I thought the posts were largely pointless. Many of them are. Just like blogging, some are silly, some are irritating while some deliver direct value. Some Twitterers do all three, depending on their mood. The best ones are of the 'hey look at this' variety. If someone you respect enough to follow says this, then you're probably going to welcome such a tip-off.

But then you get the "I am in a sushi bar in Times Square, yum yum". Most of us couldn't care less, unless we happen to be in New York, in which case it's an opportunity to make contact. If you're thinking of calling someone and they're on Twitter, you could look at their stream and see what they're up to. Frankly, I think there are dangers in giving too much away. If I wanted to burgle someone, all I'd need to do was follow their Twitter stream to find out when they're away. Okay - a bit silly maybe, but it is a reminder of how much we give away, wittingly or not.

But, behind this, values emerge. Sign up and find some people or entities (Twitterers are all people, but some go by their company name or their interest - 'predictions08' or 'FTtechnews' for example) that you know and see who they follow. This is a useful way of finding who's out there who might be of interest to you. Watch out for the current courtesy of reciprocating 'follows'. If you look at the list of people I follow, don't assume I have the faintest idea who many of them are. I've just added them because they added me. (Unlike Facebook where I'm very fussy who I accept as a 'friend'. 'Follower' is a much more sensible term.)

Conversations emerge on Twitter, but it's not a good way to converse, any more than blogging would be. Do you track comments on your comments on someone's blog post? So Twitter provides messaging as well. You can't assume that anyone's aware of anything you've posted. Twitter is just a stream of jumbled stuff into which you can dip to 'catch the mood' perhaps or pick up tips, links and like-minded (or not) souls. And, of course, it's always a good idea to reciprocate with links to good stuff that you've stumbled across.

The very worst thing you can do is to try and catch up on everything that's been said since the last time you were on. Accept that you'll miss stuff. Or, if there are people whose every utterance you must follow, get them sent to your mobile or log in to their page when you have a moment.

I can't predict whether Twitter will prove to be a fad or whether it will go mainstream. What I do know is that the entrails are being studied and if there's anything of value there, it will surface in some form in the offerings of major software companies.

On social computing signal:noise ratio

Earlier this week Dale Vile - boss of Freeform Dynamics - posted about his frustrations following a deep dive into social computing. He's been blogging and reading blogs for a couple of years but wondered if he might be missing out on something. By and large, he concluded he wasn't.

I responded by email rather than comment. But Dale thought I should base a post around my response. Having read it through, I think I may as well share it in its entirety. Responses, private or as comments, are more than welcome.

Dear Dale

Read your 'Signal to noise' piece yesterday.

Reread it this morning.

Sounds like you've gone round the loop I went round a few years ago, except I did allow myself to become overwhelmed for a while.

Eventually, it was the realisation that you can't keep up with everything, no matter how relevant/important, that stopped me. Along with the inability to keep up was a strong and growing sense of inadequacy which was fairly crippling.

Eventually I twigged that all this stuff is a river - continuously flowing, into which it's possible to dip and sense the mood and perhaps go after the occasional fish or interesting piece of driftwood. There's always Google blog search if you want to track down what's been said recently on any particular subject. And, as you point out, tags. Although I'm less trusting of them because they're not universally used.

When Netvibes came along, it allowed me to Watch the river without necessarily going for a swim. This is where the value of a good descriptive headline comes in. Netvibes just lists the feeds in little boxes - you can choose how items many you want to display in each, but the next/previous links mean you don't have to miss stuff.

If you want to see the full degree to which I (don't) track, see the attached picture. The bold numbers are how many unselected/unread items are outstanding in each category.

Am I bothered? Not any more. Like you, I go where I want when I need to. You'll notice the 'ego' tab has no unreads. When I go to a tab with unread entries, it takes seconds to scan each one.

I agree about Twitter - lots of lost souls clinging together for comfort and reassurance. Facebook is heading the same way and they're making some strategic mistakes at the moment. I hope it will pass because groups have good potential for business use as does the general theory of 'find someone who knows'.

The water cooler/bonding aspect of these social media is important IMHO, providing it doesn't descend into pointless natter (the social media gurus will argue that nothing's pointless, it might come in handy some time). Sometimes our own Skype IM group is good, sometimes it's noise. But there's bonding going on there. These things can be good for distributed teams or collaborators.

Part of whether social computing has value lies in the size of the participating group. And this applies to wikis as well. Too few active participants in a community means that nothing happens and value isn't extracted. Large organisations like IBM, BT or BBC get value out. Signal/noise can be improved with simple ground rules. And, of course, by the fact that people's online activities are visible to all in the community.

Finally, there's the question of why people do stuff online. Blogging in particular, but it could apply to Twitter, Facebook et al. Conventional wisdom is 'post often'. I think the reason for this is that you then go up the various rankings. And, if you get visible, you go up further because people think you must be good. I've always thought this was barmy, and still do. The scheduled or frequent posting is not for the benefit of the reader, it's for the benefit of the publisher or the individual doing the post.

You talk in your piece about how few blogs have something original to say. And I agree. It's just noise. And, I suspect a lot of this is because people feel obliged to post at a particular frequency, regardless of if there's any reason to post.

It's all jolly complicated. I know there are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when I think "oh shit, it's blog post day". Although, mostly, something has happened in the previous week to justify some kind of post. Then there's the time it takes up.... But that's another story.

David

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) on successful wikis

Yesterday, Jimmy Wales blew into town to address a huge audience of information professionals at the Online Information conference. Wales, in case you don't know, co-founded Wikipedia which is intended to become "the sum of all human knowledge". Written for the people by the people. And hugely popular, to boot.
As ever with these kind of events, the question and answer session at the end was just as interesting as the prepared presentation. It was a chance for some baffled people to get to grips with some key issues. While these were Wikipedia-focused they do resonate with other wiki activity, including that in your own organisation perhaps.
Freeform Dynamics recently ran a survey asking people how they connect at work or education, as opposed to in their personal life. The 1500 or so responses came from IT professionals and, that subset that liked responding to a survey on this subject. Interestingly, in the work context, wikis were read by more than 55 percent of respondents and contributed to by about 25 percent. This suggests that wikis are certainly on the business communication radar. Wales' thoughts could well help avoid some false starts.
On participation, he talked of applying the 'neutrality principle' to writing style. I think he means avoid opinion and stick to facts. Or, to don the behavioural psychologist's hat, to keep contributions adult rather than parental or childish. A debate is more constructive and likely to lead to a better outcome than a fight.
In a similar vein, Wales urges courtesy and respect for the community. He gives the example of journalists who think its clever to edit a contribution to see how long it takes for anyone to notice. The important takeaway here is that people cannot be expected to just start contributing to Wikipedia without understanding and agreeing to some basic ground rules.
He doesn't regard Wikipedia as the place to publish original research. For a start, no-one would be able to check it. Second of all, it gets away from the principle of the "sum of all human knowledge", in the sense of a summary, understandable to the layman but with sources cited for those who want to drill deeper. In Wikipedia's case, he politely suggests that researchers get their material published elsewhere first and then cite this as a source. The 'summary' idea is a good one. The difficulty in a company wiki is that it's sometimes quicker to write or cut and paste a long discourse than a thought-out summary. But, if no-one reads it, it seems rather counter-productive.
On credibility, it's somewhat easier for humans to assess this than for it to be calculated automatically. Wales would be interested in seeing a background colour wash in Wikipedia according to the credibility of the writer. But, as he points out, a mathematical formula might regard his frequent contributions to the policy part of Wikipedia as 'argumentative' and downgrade him accordingly.
Humans take into account their knowledge of a person, whether their changes and challenges have improved the content, their engagement style generally, their biases, etc. Try working out a reliable algorithm to deal with that lot. Perhaps Wales is right to be experimenting with it but with no firm plans for its introduction.
Another thing to bear in mind is that a wiki isn't like paper. It's theoretically limitless. Wales noted that the English language write up of Pokémon provides details of all the various regions but the German version has not allowed this. People don't have to read this stuff, so does it matter whether it's there or not? Since wikis are largely textual, they demand little in storage resources.
Finally, there's the question of motivation. In Wikipedia's case, Wales believes it boils down to humanitarianisn or fun, where the fun is being part of an enthusiastic and engaged community of common interest. He points out that "doing wikis alone doesn't work". He suggests five or six people - friends, enemies, it doesn't matter - engaging day in and day out is the way to go.
In our coporate wikis, we can probably discard the humanitarian aspects but fun and community building sound like good motivations.

Upheaval or opportunity?

The trouble with this business is that, almost every day, you meet honest and well-intentioned people who have a convincing story to tell. Then you get back to the real world and realise that however decent these people are, many are fundamentally deluding themselves.

I'm not going to name names, but take a company that has a technically superb product but it was designed by programmers and information scientists with the result that it can only be used by an elite with a similar background. Or, and perhaps this is deliberate, by spending a ton of dough on training - either from the vendor or by setting up their own internal programmes.

A bit of 'user first' wouldn't go amiss and it would save customers a fortune. It would also make selling easier. One suspects that it might also result in a lower price, because it would then be seen as less esoteric and easier to use.

Another organisation might think it has come up with the most cracking environment within which to work. Top to bottom integration from applications, through operating systems, down to database and hardware platform. Enterprise rollouts are the dream with shedloads of revenue pouring in each year. Such systems pay lip service to the outside world of social networking but try to trap everything within their own walled gardens. The mantra could be, "You're safe with us."

A variation on this theme is a multi-platform version which is slightly less obsessed with the operating system lock-in bit.

Either way, the sell is seductive -  a single backside to kick. The downside is that, once trapped and committed to a particular way of working and set of standards, it's hard to escape. You depend on the supplier to keep up and quickly incorporate the more desirable elements from the outside world.

This sort of all-encompassing approach comes at the same time as a general drift toward consolidation and centralisation and away from the distributed computer operations that we've become familiar with. This is driven largely by cost savings but, for public consumption, they're frequently camouflaged with greenwash.

Counterbalancing this centralising, regaining control, kind of world of individual major vendors, you have a decentralising world of hosted services, social computing and open systems. They look like a rag bag army from a distance but get close and you find some jolly effective regiments and platoons. The challenge is to wire them together as a cost-effective whole.

SalesForce.com is the poster child for enterprise SaaS. It took one aspect of a business which could be peeled off and delivered as a service, more or less bypassing IT.

Then you have the great mass of social software where people can link up with others of common interest, both inside and outside business. Many of these are platform plays which allow others to add functionality for the glory of so-doing, rather than in the expectation of making money. Some pretty major companies have given the nod to Facebook use among employees, not least because they haven't had to expand their computer operations to accommodate the functionality.

It's easy for IT and business people who are used to the first world above to sneer at people from the second world. But they know that every day, in their own lives and in those of their users, that the second world is an increasing slice of their lives. Connections between people are the life blood of knowledge work and knowledge work is an ever-increasing part of our lives.

The centralisers want to embed and control the somewhat freeform nature of informal and ad hoc communications. Apart from anything else, they'd like audit trails for possible regulatory actions. (Never mind that they can't do it with normal human interactions - in the café, down the pub, in the restaurant and on the phone.)

On the other hand, the open folk put their offerings out there and wait and see what happens. Sure, they evangelise like fury, by talking at conferences, blogging and pushing hard from their websites. But they don't have armies of sales people. They rely on the conversational networks to spread the word. They provide free downloads and let people get on with it.

Some of them and this unnerves many, rely on unpaid developers to fix bugs and add features. They argue that real-time fixes and improvements are infinitely preferable to waiting for, and forking out for, the periodic 'big releases' of traditional vendors.

At some point, if 'client' companies get serious, they come to the provider and ask for support, hosting, education or whatever. At this point, the vendor starts to make money more or less directly proportionate to the effort they are expending. But the amount of money coming in doesn't have to pay for a top-heavy, revenue-draining, sales force and channel. The vendor's primary investment is in creating a robust and responsive computing and communications system which can scale to match demand.

In so many ways it seems we are at another transition point in computing history. Huge forces are demanding that we review how we run our computer operations. The open movement is challenging conventional publishing models. Broadband and mobile communications are transforming where and how many of us work. And interpersonal communications, on which so much of (western?) business depends, is moving centre-stage.

Who knows what the outcome will be? The important thing is to keep an open mind and, even if you're presently locked in to a particular supplier, don't stop looking at what's going on elsewhere. And, although their demands might seem unreasonable at times, listen to your users. They are, after all, the ones doing the real work.

Time for a WEEE change?

Whoever dreamt up the name of the WEEE directive clearly did not check with how it would go down in Britain. But it's been a long time coming and the sounds of our sniggers have long since died away. In some quarters, they've been replaced with the sounds of gnashing of teeth.

First of all, let's be clear: any attempt to encourage responsible recycling of waste electronic products is to be applauded. This, after all, is the intention of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. The idea is that end of life products are separated into their constituent parts and usefully recycled.

But, as often happens with matters European, things aren't that simple. The rules, such as they are, are implemented differently country by country. Belgium wants 39 different classes of IT waste accounted for whereas the UK settles for just two. WEEE is not a standard, it's just an umbrella term under which countries can make their own decisions. IT companies which work across national boundaries (and that's all of the big ones) waste man-years just to ensure their compliance with these sometimes pettifogging local regulations.

But who cares? These companies are rich enough to cope. Maybe. But what do they and their customers get out of WEEE? The answer seems to be, "not a lot". They have the cosy feeling that they're doing the right thing by recycling. But they have no idea what happens next. There is a disconnect between the WEEE world and the manufacturers who are, increasingly, designing their products with easy recycling in mind. I think I've mentioned that Sun uses a lot of metal cases these days, and Hewlett Packard has cut its printer plastics from over a hundred to just five types. Both measures are intended to improve the reuse value of the materials.

Sadly, the chances are very high that when the plastics and metals are chopped up into tiny pieces, ready for re-use, they'll all get mixed together thus destroying their inherent value. So, in the example of plastic, they get shoved into some low grade object like a park bench. Where's the environmental gain in that? A wooden park bench, by contrast, is functional, good-looking and it contains sequestrated carbon.

Someone, somewhere, needs to find a way to separate plastics and metals more sensibly and make it easier (and more rewarding) for IT manufacturers to participate in WEEE recovery loop.

HP optimises data centre power use

The data centre with its huge potential to gobble power and generate heat has long been the focus for green computing initiatives. And quite rightly so. The alternative is arrange rooms so that cold air is delivered to where it's needed most, usually by careful room and rack planning. This still leaves the possibility that power is being wasted because each area has to be designed for the worst possible environmental conditions.

Just under a year ago, HP Labs started talking about Dynamic Smart Cooling. The idea was to place a network of temperature sensors on the racks, providing information back to a control centre which, in turn, controlled the cooling fans in real-time. Such an approach was designed to minimise the energy requirements and, therefore, the costs. And as a by-product, of course, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere.

All very well, but competitors complained that this was merely an announcement of future intent. A touch of greenwash, perhaps? Except that Hewlett Packard could demonstrate the system working in the labs. Now, though, the company has its first internal data centre implementation running and and has announced its general public availability.

The first site outside the laboratory is in the company's newly-consolidated data centre in Bangalore. This 70,000 square foot centre is already operational, although it has yet to bring up all of the planned 2,500 racks. The company's six new US data centres are scheduled to be ready in early 2008.

All of these data centres are the result of consolidation and this is, "when the power bill hits you in the face," according to John Sontag director of virtualization and datacenter architecture for HP Labs. In Bangalore, the issue is complicated by the fact that the centre has its own diesel-powered generators and a requirement for diesel oil storage. This is because public power supplies cannot yet be relied on in this part of the world.

With diesel oil in India providing a kilowatt-hour for around 25 cents, Sontag estimates an ROI of six months for the Dynamic Smart Cooling system. Where power costs are lower, the payback time will obviously be higher. Perhaps twice as much in California, say. The company estimates power bill savings of up to 40 percent over conventionally cooled datacentres. Once fully optimised, the Bangalore operation (a consolidation of fourteen centres), is expected to save Hewlett Packard 7,500 megawatt-hours annually and reduce carbon emissions by approximately 7,500 tons. (Based on the figures given, that suggests the DSC cost was just under a million dollars. Anyone from HP care to comment?)

The DSC can be retrofitted to existing data centre racks and legacy equipment. It just requires that the fan drives be variable-speed and have industry standard controls. The controller (accessible remotely as a web service) is the smart bit, able to calculate what fans need to run at what speeds to deliver cooling to the right places at all times. Sontag  explains that if a modern high density (30kW) rack loses its cooling, it could overheat in 90 seconds. By the time a human has received and reacted to a warning, it would already be too late.

It's certainly a seductive argument. Hewlett Packard believes it's first with such an intelligent adaptive system. Others will, no doubt, follow. Systems that respond to changing needs will remove a lot of risk from data centre planning while at the same time cutting both energy bills and carbon emissions.

I wonder if anyone's working on tying virtualisation and intelligent cooling systems together?

Just a thought.