Teblog

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."

Gloomy outlook from BT/Independent's SustainIT forum

Yesterday's forum run by BT and the Independent was a culmination of a 'multi-channel media campaign' called SustainIT. The forum promised to 'explore the potential of ICT solutions to help businesses reduce their environmental footprint'. And it promised to talk about 'how to empower the developing world.'

What it actually did was frighten the audience witless and provide it with some virtual hatches to batten down.

Frightener-in-chief was Tony Juniper, environmental activist, ex-director of Friends of the Earth and the Green Party's candidate for Cambridge. As you might imagine, from someone who's been beating the environmental drum for many years and who had a major hand in creating the Climate Change Act, we have no time to lose.

Among other things, he pointed out that the temperature-rise effects of our behaviour take 30 years to show up in the atmosphere, which means we're already deeply in the clag. Later in the session, Michael McCarthy, the Independent's environmental editor, reckoned our actions to date have already committed us to a 1.4 degree rise. Juniper pointed out that the most recent records show that the past three years have been even worse than the worst predictions.

He showed a chart from the Stern Review of the consequences of temperature rises on various elements of our environment. If the predictions are correct, everything starts going pear-shaped at two degrees:

The next speaker, Charles Leadbeater, is author of We-think and was introduced as "Tony Blair's favourite thinker". Not something designed to go down well with an audience whose politics were unknown. Despite this, he struck an encouraging note, suggesting that technology (including the web) could be mobilised to tackle some of the issues raised by Juniper: dematerialisation in the form of eliminating travel and using screens to collaborate/meet; and, sharing knowledge about solutions online so that the physical work can be done locally using indigenous materials.

He likes the way that the web can make lateral connections in new ways. He does, however, see that the creative solutions that will be invented to sort ourselves out will cause significant change and turmoil. He believes that we need to look both backward to pre-industrial times, at our old ways of organising and commmunicating, as well as forwards to a different kind of future.

The other speakers - Chris Tuppen, BT's Chief Sustainability Officer, and Hamish McRae, the Independent's Chief Economic Commentator, tried to focus on the positive but the backdrop of gloom was fairly palpable. They talked of efficiencies and savings that were possible but, overall, the sense was that bad things were happening and good things, in the sense of proper political leadership, weren't.

Everyone saw the upcoming Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December as a crucially important meeting. The hope is that the participants will lay the foundation for a low carbon recovery from our present financial woes. But this requires political will of a high order.

Reading between the lines, it would seem that many senior politicians still haven't realised that their previous, perhaps lifelong, concerns have been trumped by this new reality. When our own government cut VAT, it sent out a signal to 'buy more' which wasn't a remotely environmentally friendly message. This futile gesture did nothing for sales but it cost the government billions in lost revenue. Imagine if that money had been targeted at home insulation, or something else that would have cut energy use and, for the beneficiaries, their electricity bills.

Hope flickered intermittently, as speakers talked about intelligent grids, cutting consumption rather than increasing generation, electric cars and carbon capture. But, without the drive from the top, as in that shown by a Churchill or a Kennedy (and a corresponding willingness by businesses and the public to be led), then we would appear to be facing a very uncertain future.

Technology will undoubtedly play its part but what's really needed is a dramatist to write a new script. And quickly.

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.

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.

Green Grading

Getting people interested in environmental issues is tough enough but, once interested, they are faced with a blizzard of conflicting advice.

Part of the problem has been that no single organisation has been able to draw all the threads together and provide a simple labelling scheme, like that on European white goods such as washing machines and refrigerators.

We have country/continental divisions and we have an infinity of IT devices and manufacturers. Many of them are trying to 'do their bit' and, in the absence of commonly agreed standards, are going it alone.

On the one hand this is good, because it demonstrates commitment. But on the other it's bad because it's difficult to compare one scheme with another without doing a lot of homework. In theory, I suppose someone might invent a comparison web site for green products, but I'd actually be quite surprised if it were to happen.

The best bet for the industry is for everyone to pull together under the aegis of an independent body.

What sparked this line of thought off was a message from Fujitsu Siemens to the effect that it has decided to announce its own green labelling scheme. It's sent me a nice spreadsheet to show all the details and, they look pretty good to an untrained eye. Apart from the bit that talks about 'largely biodegradable'. I worry about the bit that's left after the rest has biodegraded. But this isn't really the place to go into detail.

The announcement has a curious statement in it which is worthy of reproduction:

"We reviewed and rated all existing eco-labeling systems but found that they were not far-reaching or stringent enough for our needs. Therefore, we concluded that the best way forward would be for Fujitsu Siemens Computers to create and implement our own Green IT labeling system. We are also publishing the qualification criteria, and industry partners are welcome to join our program. However, so far, we have not found a suitable partner whose criteria were as far-reaching as we were hoping for, and who could create the label in the timeframe we had set ourselves. Nonetheless, we would not hesitate in adopting a suitable industry-standard labeling system, should one be introduced in the future"

I tried calling this morning to seek clarification, but I guess they were all busy at the VISIT customer event in Germany today. The key points are clear enough though: it doesn't like existing standards, it couldn't get anyone to team up with it and it would be willing to support an industry standard.

The announcement also started off with "Green IT label is industry first". I suspect some other companies might challenge that. Hewlett Packard, for example, started a green labelling scheme in May of this year, called Eco Highlights. The two schemes differ, but the intention in each case is the same: to make clear the environmental credentials of the product so labelled.

Anyway, back to the Fujitsu Siemens statement. I am not surprised that other manufacturers didn't want to join the scheme, and I doubt that lack of time had much to do with it. And when it comes to none of the standards being good enough, this suggests that the company rejected the ECMA-370 IT Eco Declaration and EPEAT, which is based on IEEE 1680-2006.

Here's the ECMA description: "This Standard specifies environmental attributes and measurement methods for ICT and CE products according to known regulations, standards, guidelines and currently accepted practices." It gets manufacturers to complete appraisals for every product and for the company itself. Perhaps members should be pushing it to convert assessments into a grading system.

And this is the EPEAT description: "The EPEAT Registry on this web site includes products that have been declared by their manufacturers to be in conformance with the environmental performance standard for electronic products - IEEE 1680- 2006" This ranks products into Bronze, Silver and Gold categories.

While I applaud Fujitsu Siemens' dedication to sustainability, I fear that if all companies were to create their own grading schemes, we'd end up more confused than ever.

HP raises the green bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BCS to help data centre decision making

People around the world are tearing their hair out trying to get to grips with environmental issues. well, some of them are, anyway. Should they replace their car or run it into the ground? Should they commute to the office or work from home? Should they buy power-efficient servers or stick with the old stuff?

They've heard that new stuff comes with an embodied environmental footprint, but how do they know what it is? And they know that disposing of stuff can cause environmental damage, so what do they do?

These question and many more, have been around for years but information is hard to come by. It's not like a fridge or a washing machine that has a dead easy sticker on it. It almost doesn't matter what the bars mean if you go for the shortest and greenest then you're doing your bit for the environment.

When it comes to computing, you can find plenty of sources of information, but nothing as simple as a fridge sticker. Energy Star, EPEAT, RoHS and the Carbon Disclosure Project are just a few of the big names. Then you have the so called carbon calculators, device comparators and, in the data centre, computational fluid dynamics, among other things. It takes a lot of time to rummage this stuff and figure out the environmental implications of what you're buying. And, of course, it's constantly changing.

Welcome then, to the British Computer Society's initiative with the Carbon Trust to produce a way of modelling the intricacies and interrelationships of the equipment in a data centre to churn out the cost and energy implications of your choices. The catchily-named BCS Data Centre Energy and Cost Simulator started beta trials last week and is expected to go live next March, but you can get a head start and buy your way into the beta programme for £25k (half price if you're a non-profit). Assuming there are any places left in the 20-organisation trial.

The modeller looks at the following elements of the data centre: application workload, IT devices, PDUs, IPS, air flow, CRACs, outside climate, chiller, power cost energy use and carbon intensity. Variations in each of these are taken into account. For example, the climate varies by location and by time of day. The CRAC load varies by climate. The energy cost varies by thetime it is purchased. The carbon intensity varies by the source of energy.

You get the idea. The project is open source and extensible with new components and XML data. The outputs are clear - 3D wireframe graphs, bar charts and the like.

The modelling system restricts itself to the data centre but it seems to me that it would make a useful component in a broader system. One of the speakers mentioned that the CMA, now part of the BCS, is also working with the Carbon Trust on helping UK businesses make better use of ICT to significantly reduce carbon emissions, with the emphasis on the communications element, as you might expect.

If things go according to plan, you can expect more initiatives from this quarter. I'll keep you posted.

National EPEATs needed now

It doesn't matter who you ask in the 'environmental IT' world, no-one can point to a single authoritative source of hard UK or EU information on IT purchases. I've rummaged all the reports about how to go about both greening IT and on how to use IT to green the organisation, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty, answers there are none.

We have to scour the spec' sheets then make intelligent guesses, trust the vendors' claims or use another country's standards. And, frankly, the most respected one is in the USA. It's called EPEAT, which stands for Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool. It is mandated in US Federal Government purchasing and it is used as the preferred criterion by many green-aware organisations.

EPEAT offers a self-certifying process to manufacturers, which sounds dodgy, but it isn't. Transparency has become obligatory and, in any case, the EPEAT folk have a verification process. The companies' products have to comply with the IEEE 1680-2006 standard for environmental performance. And so many companies have signed up that it has become a sort of Olympic arena for them to slog it out for bronze, silver and gold environmental medals.

The problem with EPEAT for buyers outside America is that the equipment is quite often configured differently. It would be terrific if the organisation could spread its wings, but there's no sign of this happening, although I do remember reading that Computacenter has adopted and adapted EPEAT to help its own customers.

What we need is something a bit more ubiquitous. One organisation that has been involved in this space for years is UK CEED. This stands for the 'UK Centre for Economic and Environmental Development'. Part funded by government and partly by business, it covers a wide range of environmental issues, including IT. Its chief executive, Jonathan Selwyn, says, "We believe that comparable energy and other environmental data should be made available for all products to consumers.  EPEAT is a valuable first step voluntary initiative that deserves to be supported by all manufacturers and a UK-version is much needed."

Hear hear, matey, hear hear.

Now who's going to step up to the plate?