Teblog

Will sustainability turn BT Global Services' fortunes?

The IT or, to give it it's full name, the ICT industry has led a pretty charmed life. After being a participant for over forty three years, it amazes me that it still manages to buck trends; from ever more power at ever lower prices to the potential ability to steer the planet and its occupants from environmental disaster.

At least, that's the hope and the intention of the green IT industry. Manufacturers are gleefully chomping out and selling more and more ICT equipment, while claiming that the environmental savings accruing from its use will mightily offset the environmental harm caused by its manufacture, operation and the disposal of whatever it's replacing.

Of course, IT isn't the only game in town. Cleantech industries are working hard on coming up with new things (with their embedded environmental harm) to reduce our overall environmental impact. It's paradoxical and uncomfortable, but it seems we have to do some more harm in order to do even more good.

One company that has an interesting environmental programme is BT Global Services. It also wants to be seen as "the IT provider of choice". It plans to do this by raising the level at which it consults with businesses by using sustainability as a lens. It has the IT in the form of data centres, software and services. And it has the C, because its core business is communications.

Global Services has posted some ghastly results recently and is in the middle of a restructuring. Perhaps it sees 'sustainability' as an opportunity to improve matters for itself and for the environment.

Anyway, if pretty charts are anything to go by, its Sustainability Practice has a comprehensive approach to helping its customers build sustainable organisations. Like many large companies (IBM, Cisco, CA and HP are just four examples), it has drawn heavily on its own experience to formulate its guidance for customers. For example, an early step in the process is a carbon assessment. This focuses on people, power and procurement.

People commute and travel on business and they use laptops, personal printers and mobile devices, for example. Power is used in office devices and data centre equipment, as well as heating, lighting and cooling. Procurement includes third party services, hosted equipment, print services, transport and so on. These three elements are analysed according to the three 'Scopes' of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. (Scope I is the direct burning of fossil fuels. Scope II is electricity and the carbon created in using it. Scope III is indirect activity such as staff commuting.)

When you look at it this way, it seems obvious, but that's the deceptive thing about a simple framework.

Of course BT has a range of service offerings to match sustainability needs. And, as you might expect, substituting travel with communications looms large. And 'Homeshoring' is offered as a solution for UK contact centres. (With dog-cancelling microphones, perhaps?) The data centre hosting story is the usual one of greater carbon efficiency than a DIY approach.

The individual elements of the BT story aren't particularly original, but its telephony and networking pedigree hint at good service and security levels. It has many years of implementing sustainability initiatives with resulting business benefits. The savings it boasts sound huge, but these have to be considered in the context of BT's size (£21.4bn turnover last year). It saves £37m per year in travel costs and it saved £238m in one year through conferencing. It also reports a 20 percent productivity improvement from flexible working arrangements.

BT has spent years trying to muscle in on IT's turf. Now the industry really is ICT, perhaps this is the best chance it has. And, with the inevitable build up to December's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, now seems to be a very good time for BTGS to set out its sustainability stall.

Align green and business strategy, or fail

Call me an idiot if you like, but I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book this morning. A few weeks ago, a colleague forwarded what looked like an interesting invitation from Infor to watch some webinars. My response was to wonder to my colleague why Infor hadn't written to me directly since it knew me. But all this was forgotten as I finally got round to doing something about it.

Here are the opening few lines of the invite:

We invite you to learn more about Green Initiatives

Two thought provoking webinars, sponsored by CFO Europe and Infor, available to view now

CFO Europe and Infor recently sponsored two webinars addressing green issues: "Green Strategy and the CFO: At the Crossroads between Profitability and Sustainability" and "Environmental Performance Management: How CFOs Contribute to the Green Strategy".

I'd taken a briefing from one of the speakers in January and thought this was a chance to catch up. All was going swimmingly until I noticed a spelling mistake on one of the slides, the very mistake I'd pointed out in the January meeting. Then it dawned on me, the 'recent' webinar was no such thing. It was recorded last November.

Oh well. In for a penny, as they say...

If you're interested in nailing the business drivers for green initiatives and you're fairly new to the subject, you'll get some value out of watching the webinars. There's a little bit of subtle selling but, in the main, the speakers play with a straight bat. (I didn't watch the second, but I assume the quality is similar to the first.)

A key learning is that organisations which treat their green, or sustainability, strategy as somehow separate to their business strategy are probably setting themselves up to fail on both counts. The two need to be integrated for the best overall results. In fact, we're really talking about integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) which should incorporate green strategies.

The CFO was chosen as the focus because they are the custodians of corporate information. They own the budget, they have influence in all departments, and so on. They are well placed to provide or withhold funding according to the likely impact on the balance sheet of any investments, green or otherwise.

When the audience (at the original webinar) was asked what practical impact green awareness had on their organisations, most identified 'process improvement' as the major impact. This suggests that existing processes were improved rather than 'rip and replace' major investments made. Very few - around three percent - identified 'cost cutting' as a benefit, a fact that astonished the speakers. They couldn't see how reducing energy use could fail to cut costs. One of the speakers suggested that the 'either/or' polling mechanism might have been the cause of the surprise.

When it comes to implementing an environmental strategy, the key is to link it to organisational objectives - financial returns or benefit to stakeholders, for example. Gross margin could link to energy use or market share to customer perception.

Failure is usually either the result of lack of funding or lack of communication. If the funding is tied to specific actions which result in future success then it will be, itself, sustainable. Effective communication to employees and stakeholders needs no expansion here.

The audience was asked to vote on barriers to success. Way out ahead of all others (at 63 percent) was 'other competing priorities', which simply reinforces the need for linking investments to organisational goals. One of the speakers warned about starting too many key initiatives. Twenty to thirty would be plenty. Definitely not hundreds - this is the sort of thing that results from attempting to implement every 'good idea', rather than filtering out all but the most impactful.

Legislation is coming, it's still a bit muddly, but this will change the business case because, although voluntary in the early stages, it will eventually impact the bottom line, for better or for worse. This is expected to bite within four years.

The one thing that always bothers me about these presentations is that the supply chain is largely ignored when it comes to the question of equipment replacement. One of the speakers mentioned first year write downs of certain conforming equipment purchases: a fine incentive to invest in green equipment. But no-one ever seems to address the embedded environmental footprint of the new equipment and that of disposal of the old. It seems to me that, by using the business as the boundary of environmental calculations, totally wrong decisions can be made in the context of the planet as a whole.

Or am I missing something?

Salesforce/Twitter: genuine help or fake sincerity?

Interesting that Marc Benioff (boss of Salesforce.com) should choose to announce the addition of Twitter to its Service Cloud on Monday. Why? Because it won't be available until the summer. Part of me suspects that the reason was simply because Twitter is a very hot topic today and it might be tepid by June. The official reason, I think, is that the deal with Twitter had just been inked.

The news might have passed me by had we (Freeform Dynamics) not received an official announcement from the company. The covering letter said, "...enabling companies to search, monitor and join conversations taking place on Twitter..." Without being a Salesforce.com expert, I was worried that a whole bunch of sales types or, worse, machines would start trying to insert themselves into Twitter conversations.

In fact, the pitch is somewhat more genuine than that. It suggests that organisations can monitor Twitter (a free addition to the $995/month 'Service Cloud' which already provides access to a number of online services such as Google Search and FaceBook) for mentions and, when they relate to problems, do something about them. That something will end up as either a comment to the Tweeter with a link to a solution to their problem or, if lots of people have the same problem, a general announcement-type Tweet. (Or maybe a bunch of direct messages - I don't know if the Service Cloud can do that. Nothing, apart from the tedium, to stop the help desk people doing it though.)

All sounds pretty reasonable, right? Back there in Salesforce.com land, the client organisation will have a whacking great database of customers, prospects, queries and answers. Each can be clothed instantly with relevant Tweet threads. I quite often appeal for help online. If someone were to help me, and I said "hooray, it worked!" or similar, then this thread would be collected for future reference by support staff. A bit cheeky perhaps, but quite understandable. It expands the company's own knowledge base at little extra cost.

Getting a bit more sinister, it would be possible for a sales person with access to the Service Cloud to hoover up personal information about a prospect before making a call. ("Sorry to hear about your recent illness. How are you feeling now?") These things aren't impossible today, but because it's built right into the Salesforce system, it is actually quite powerful. A tremendous aid to fake sincerity.

And this is the point, isn't it? If the service is used for the genuine benefit of the customer, then people will welcome it. If, however, it's used to exploit the Tweeting public, then the backlash will be swift and unstoppable.

But who will the backlash be aimed at? Twitter for allowing access? The Salesforce customer for abusing the system? Or Salesforce itself for providing the Service Cloud?"

Any thoughts on that, Twitter?

Speaking in tongues

Saturday evening: To me, my son's new mother-in-law said, "Will you give a speech in Norway next week?"

Sunday: Wrote speech and wondered whether to give it in Norwegian language. Threw it into Translation Experts' Intertran language translator via Free Online Translators. Knew the output fell short of fluent.

Monday morning: IMs to anyone in my Skype contact list likely to know a native Norwegian. While doing this, got to the letter S in my contact list and realised that one of my contacts, Sigurd Rinde, is Norwegian. He was offline. I still pinged him. Also left message in a Facebook group for Norwegian language enthusiasts.

Almost immediately, David Terrar - one of my Skype pals - suggested Sig. I told him I was on the case.

Monday afternoon: Sig offered to look at the translation. I sent the English original too.

Seventeen minutes later, I had a Norwegian version in my hands.

Then Anne Christine Parborg from the Facebook group offered to help. I showed her Sig's version. She suggested two changes.

Meanwhile Sig's wife, Tittin, had come home and added a woman's touch, which made it even better.

Then I started trying to figure out how to pronounce it. After an hour of using an online pronunciation guide, I had figured out one and a half sentences. And, I suspect, they wouldn't have sounded anything like proper Norwegian.

So, once more, I threw myself on Sig's mercy and asked him to read it into a sound file. A few minutes later, the file arrived.

From first contact to listening to Sig's pronunciation fewer than four hours had elapsed, of which Sig or his wife must have been actively helping for around eighty minutes, on and off. How fortunate that they were in a position to do this. (On the quiet, I suspect they enjoyed it.)

Imagine how long this would have taken without social computing. Find someone. Hurl documents back and forth. Chat on phone and messaging. Make recording. It would have been days probably.

I must have listened to that recording at least forty times. All the time trying to write what he was saying as if it were English. A kind of bastardised phonetic language. It was imperfect, so I made side notes whenever only mimicking Sig would do.

The evening of the speech arrived and the Norwegians were all presenting theirs in English. Which was a very kind gesture towards my family and the one or two other English people there. When I announced I'd deliver mine in Norwegian, there was much laughter because they thought I was joking.

Thanks to Sig, his wife and Anne Christine, I got away with it.

Thank you so much guys and girls. You know I will repay you in whatever way I can, especially if you find yourselves in England. A lunch at the very least.

The curious thing about all this is that, the very next day, David Terrar was looking for help with a speech. I'd done one that overlapped his theme, and had taken a rather unusual approach to the slides. I was able to send him the original PowerPoint, including my speaker notes.

That took minutes and, hopefully, saved him hours.

So the wheel turns...

That's just one of the nice things about social computing.

Social Media Analysis

Nathan Gilliatt has written a 75-page guide to the companies who  monitor, measure and analyse social media for business worldwide. He claims it's the most complete guide available. If it's any good (and I suspect it is), it could save you a ton of leg-work. The pdf download covers 31 providers in nine countries.

Nathan is a member of the Social Media Today blogging group (I used to be a member until I realised it was defining me too narrowly) which is why I'm prepared to pass this information on.

If you don't like it, you can always ask for a refund on the $500 price.

PowerPointless

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on a fearsomely complicated subject. Words and bullet points wouldn't do justice to the topic, so I decided on a sequence of captioned images.

Apart from the presentation, the slides were required for publication. I sent them off and warned the organiser that he might be somewhat shocked by my approach. He decided it would not be appropriate for the proceedings, not least because it would diminish the shock factor, when I delivered the presentation.

This made me wonder whether PowerPoint presentations have two conflicting purposes. One for posterity and the other for the gig itself. These are in conflict. If you try and combine them, you doom your audience to the well-known 'death by PowerPoint'.

Blow me down if a story didn't appear in some of today's newspapers which explains the phenomenon. The Daily Mail and The Telegraph (at least) carry quotes from University of New South Wales' Emeritus Professor John Sweller. This is the man who developed the Cognitive Load Theory in the 1980's. Crudeley stated, he advises us that the brain cannot process textual and verbal inputs concurrently.

So now you know.

(By the way, you might be interested to know that this story started its journey to the mainstream media on 23rd March, but I bet you the mainstream media picked it up secondhand from blogs or from Guy Kewney's piece in The Register.)

Was Wired WaggEd?

Once upon a time a PR firm accidentally sent a British journalist the profile it held on him. It started "This guy's a lush." Oh dear.

Well it's happened again, more or less. This time it's Wired contributing editor Fred Vogelstein who has been accidentally (or maybe not!) sent briefing notes from Waggener Edstrom prior to interviews with Microsoft executives.

Although it contains a short briefing on the journalist, it is mostly a backgrounder and 'game plan' for the Microsoft executives for a feature on its "video blogging initiative, Channel 9, and its overall campaign to embrace corporate transparency". From this perspective, it's an excellent insight to how thoroughly Microsoft is briefed for interviews with influential publications.

If you've ever wondered about how to brief and steer your executives, it's worth a read. Scale your approach to the importance of the publication otherwise you'll end up paying PRs a fortune in bloated briefings.

I can't help wondering whether Waggener Edstrom deliberately copied the information to the journalist. He and the PR know the game. Both know that preparation on both sides is key. So why not be transparent and pretend to reveal all? Then, with the journalist suitably off guard, send a second, confidential briefing to the executives that takes them deeper into the journalist's psyche and the interview strategy.

The journalist would have a great resource to get him up to speed in the areas that Microsoft wants to talk about. Result: a fast start and an implied boundary to the conversation.

But, regardless of whether the leak was deliberate or accidental, any self-respecting journalist would still find ways to throws interviewees on the back foot and not let it change their approach in the slightest.

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A PDF of the memo

Waggener Edstrom president Frank Shaw comments on the fuss.

Fred Vogelstein blogs his perspective.

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How long should a blog post be?

Not a new subject in the blogosphere, but it was triggered by two posts today: one was almost 3,000 words and the other 4,000. Each ended with 'to be continued' or similar. Did I read every word? No. After the first few hundred words, my interest in the topic turned into curiosity about why the posts were that long.

Neither was broken up with alleviating cross-heads, bullets, quotes or illustrations. Solid slabs of text - one paragraph alone was three hundred words - are very hard on the reader. This is even more true when being read in an aggregator where other items are clamouring for attention.

I wondered if anyone had produced any statistics which revealed a relationship between blog length and attention span. Clearly, one's interest in a topic would play a part, but there ought to be some general relationship. So off I went in search of some answers. Apart from the odd mention of average attention spans (meaningless really), all I could find was stuff on blog lengths. This is what I learned:

Problogger suggests 250 to 1000 words

Big Blue Wave sugggests 10 to 250, but not more than 500 words

BLOGGING::BUSINESS suggests 300-400 words usually, with the odd short or long one thrown in

ChristianBlog.com insists on a 150-word minimum and 20,000 characters maximum (that's nearly 4,000 words)

A number of bloggers say they "write until it's finished", which suggests a stream of consciousness approach. This also suggests a lack of respect for the reader's time.

Some say either post long and infrequently or short and frequently. (Maybe break long ones into short ones, thus increasing both frequency and readability?)

Others say, "you can always stop reading a long post" which is a bit sad for the author - being uplifted by the hits but not realising that no-one gets to the punchline.

May I be so bold as to suggest to those who insist on long posts that they review the structure and stick in some bold cross-heads which would act as sign-posting, break the monotony and give people encouragement to keep reading?

Antony Brewerton: On branding the library

Found myself speaking at Re-imagining the Library the other day, sponsored by CILIP and Talis. The audience was a mix of public, corporate and academic librarians and the speakers were charged with sparking off some fresh thinking. None did this better than Antony Brewerton, head of academic support at the University of Warwick. Previously, he was at Oxford Brookes University and before that at the University of Reading.

Anyway, his presentation was excellent. The others I saw (I had to nip out, unexpectedly, for a couple of hours to take a briefing for some urgent writing work) were very good but if there was a prize for best presentation he'd have won it. He was intelligent, articulate and amusing on the tough subject, for librarians, of branding.

To give a flavour of the man, he decided to take the theme of 'inspiration'. He looked at pennies dropping, Rodin's Thinker, a light bulb (incandescent, naughty boy), but while good, he felt there was something better. Then he thought of Newton and the famous apple.

Well, and this shows the calibre of the man, Antony couldn't have any old apple, it had to be special.

He spent hours in greengrocery shops studying the goods. Eventually, he found the perfect apple. Then he needed the right light for the photography. He found it outside on a bright day. But then the pesky apple, while it had all the right colours, didn't reflect the light properly. So he took it indoors and gave it the Johnson's Wax treatment. Back outside, he placed it on a large sheet of white card and finally got his shot.

Sadly, I can only find a monochrome picture but, as soon as I find a colour one, I'll put it here.

You can already see what a fine apple it is and how magnificently it's been polished.

And the caption was:

Brilliant. So simple. Addresses the undergraduates' second most important issue (after beer). Or do I mean third?

He cited Theodore Levitt who said, "Purchasing agents don't buy 1/4 inch drills; they buy 1/4 inch holes."

So true. And so easy to forget.

Thanks Antony.

Don't be shy, promote yourself

I have a friend who is darned smart and darned modest. He wonders why people don't realise how good he is and rush to engage him. After all, he writes the odd blog and fires off the odd email to people who he finds interesting and who, therefore, should be interested in his work.

And they are. They see him as bright, and are happy to take his feedback, probably thinking they're dealing with an enthusiastic amateur. Or, God forbid, a tech groupie. The result is that his goodwill is frequently abused. People take a lot from him but give little in return. Yet he has valuable skills to offer and certainly plenty of enthusiasm.

I tell him he should push himself a bit more. When people ask him about himself, forget the self-effacing modesty and articulate clearly and simply what parts of his world are likely to be of interest to the listener.

He finds this incredibly difficult. It's probably a culture thing as much as anything. Over this side of the pond, we're not taught to be assertive, even in a pleasant way. We get hot under the collar and tongue-tied and, in the case of many techies, embarrassingly modest. "I do a bit of blogging and software testing" might mean, "I'm an A-list blogger and I am a freelance software evaluator for major research organisations." You'd never know it.

We give no glimpse of why someone should be interested.

After my friend told me of another lost opportunity, I suggested he sit down quietly and work out what value he can offer other people, then try and articulate that into a workable sentence. It doesn't need to be a life story, just enough to catch the interest of the other person.

Then, when he meets people in future, he can ask them about themselves. (This is always a good conversation starter, even if they kick off by asking about you. I've found you can ignore that, and they go spouting off about themselves. Eventually they remember their manners and say, "but you didn't answer my question.") By then he has gained the knowledge he needs to adjust his own opener to suit the listener.

He's not comfortable with any of the above. Ideally, he wants to be retained for his skills but doesn't want to take this next step. In frustration, I cobbled together a picture and said, "if you were at a party, which person would you prefer to speak to? You're like the one on the left."

Here's an adaptation of the picture but, as you will realise, I've changed the sex to protect the innocent:

At a party, say, which one would you prefer to talk to?

It seemed to ram home the point. My friend is going to take stock. Hooray.