Teblog

How ICT can help broad environmental initiatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Microsoft and EEA's environmental early warning system

Confession time: I get a horrible sinking feeling when I hear terms like 'EU', 'human rights' or 'observatory'. When they come at me all at once, my usual temptation is to run away. But, this time I didn't. Perhaps it was curiosity about Microsoft's involvement, perhaps it was the hint of democracy, but I stuck with it. The 'it' being a recent announcement by the European Environmental Agency (EEA from now on) that it had entered into a five-year alliance with Microsoft to create an environmental observatory.

The observatory's purpose, as the name implies, is to gather information about local environmental conditions and share this with any interested party, including members of the public. The data will come from a multitude of sources including data satellites, NGOs, ornithological and wildlife organisations and the hoi polloi. Much of it will be real-time and it will be aggregated, analysed and presented back to enquirers in an appropriate form. That can include data tables for further processing or geo-spatial images in Microsoft's Virtual Earth. The hope is that such information will lead to rapid local action such as when a factory is spotted polluting the air or soil.

Microsoft will be playing its part in each of these elements: collecting, storing, analysing and sharing the results. It has been working with the EEA since the summer of 2007 and has gone public on the five-year agreement which it believes is entirely complementary to the company's own commitment to environmental sustainability.

Suspecting the worst, I investigated Microsoft's environmental credentials. After all, in cahoots with Intel, it did spend a lot of years more or less enticing people into equipment upgrades. My conclusion is that the company is sincere in its intentions and has already made great strides in dealing with its own environmental footprint, especially with regard to cutting travel and single occupant vehicle usage. It even runs a huge bus fleet for its staff which aims to reduce car traffic in the Redmond area by more than 250,000 miles per week. Not to mention saving the Microsoft campus land area needed for parking and garaging facilities. This is one of the sad aspects of environmental actions, they often save the company money so bragging runs the risk of appearing somewhat two-faced.

But, returning to the EEA project, Professor Jacqueline McGlade, its executive director, suggested that, "To sustain the improvements in the environment made over the past few decades, everyone needs to be involved and understand the consequences and impact of their actions." She added, "The only way to do this is by reaching out to the widest audience. This collaboration with Microsoft is a groundbreaking approach to bring environmental information to as many people as possible." This rather assumes they have a) access to a suitably equipped computer and b) the will to look. I would have thought that traditional media will be the best way to reach these people. The other issue with this statement, taken as a whole, is that she refers to improvements made over the past few decades. This suggests that the actions required are already understood and merely need communicating.

It seems to me that although this project is being billed as a citizen information system, it is actually much more of a citizen spying system. Most people would be more interested in snitching on local sources of pollution than in logging in periodically to check local environmental conditions. However, you can be sure that certain powers-that-be will be very keen on this sort of real-time information. It's a chance for them to swiftly crack down on miscreants, for which we should all be grateful, assuming that things don't get too petty.

In the end, I remain puzzled by the publicity exercise around this. I suspect that Microsoft considers the EEA to be a good notch to have in its corporate social responsibility stick. And maybe the EEA wanted a bit of profile and Microsoft provided an ideal delivery vehicle.

But I'd like to think I'm wrong. Perhaps you see it differently...

Lovelock and Lawson: read 'em both

Well, Earth Day was not the smartest day to jump on a plane to California to, among other things, meet some folk to talk about environmental sustainability. Still, I made up for it a bit by reading a couple of environmental books. Except, of course, they were made from mashed up trees. Oh dear.

One of the books was James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia - a couple of years old now, but worth a read. The other was Nigel Lawson's book, hot off the press, called An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. An interesting juxtaposition of reading materials, to say the least.

Let's just say that the two men aren't even close to agreement when it comes to global warming, or global heating, as Cameron calls it. Lawson can't see what the problem is, even when he takes scientists at their most pessimistic. Lovelock, on the other hand, is convinced we're on the cusp of dramatic and devastating warming, with all of its attendant consequences for humankind.

Although they have different perspectives on the degree danger we face, both agree that something's going on and both think that some action makes sense. Broadly speaking, Lovelock wants all hands to the pumps while Lawson believes that we should behave in a more measured fashion.

But, having said that, I was quite astonished at how much they agree with each other. Not least when it comes to nuclear power. Both regard it as the most sensible way to deliver the power we need while minimising the damage to the environment. This seems to be an emerging theme whichever way I turn these days.

Lovelock tends to be quite respectful of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) while Lawson considers it far too biased for a supposedly objective organisation. He has fun with its estimates for global warming and wonders whether the massive amounts of money and inconvenience to today's population can possibly be justified by the anticipated benefits.

In one example, he uses the scientists' own best and worst case scenarios to show that, in one hundred years, the developing world will either be 8.5 or 9.5 times better off than it is now. Given that both outcomes are billed as equally likely, he wonders what level of sacrifice today would make the higher outcome worth pursuing.

Lawson's book has been diligently researched but he focuses on the narrow issue of global warming. Lovelock takes a more holistic view, essentially urging us to look after the planet, so that it will look after us. Lawson doesn't think that his book will 'shake the faith of the true believers', but it certainly contributes some reason to the debate. As, indeed, does Lovelock's.

Either book may jar with your present way of looking at things but, if we don't think about this stuff from multiple viewpoints, we'll never arrive at an informed opinion. We'll simply be believers of one position or another.

Don't put lipstick on the pig

Today's issue of PR influences covers 'greenwashing' - "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service."

It's good to see professional PR folk in action. Part of their job is to make sure that companies don't get carried away with their rhetoric and make fools of themselves. Of course, there will always be poor PR folk who see their job as "putting lipstick on the pig". We have to take a certain amount of personal responsibility for filtering good PR from bad.

Once upon a time, it was easy to pull the wool over most people's eyes, by writing good press releases, advertisements and brochures. The public didn't have much of a voice - the letters page of the newspapers, the complaints desk of a company or the local advertising standards authority. In other words, except in newsworthy cases, not a lot would happen.

Now, with bloggers galore, some will always be expert enough to see through the greenwash and blow the whistle. And we all know how fast bad news travels through the blogosphere. And how mainstream media organisations quickly pick up juicy stories.

We hear about companies that claim to be carbon neutral which is wonderful, if true. But, if close examination were to reveal that one of the directors drives a gas guzzler or that the heat from the data centre is being vented to the atmosphere, then the carbon neutral claim falls apart and the company risks ridicule.

The best option is transparency. To show what steps are being taken to run a sustainable (financially and socially, as well as environmentally) business and not make any pretence that things are better than they are. Some IT companies - IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Fujitsu Siemens spring to mind immediately - seem to be very forthright in their claims and their explanations.

They still fly people around when necessary, but they'll talk about how much travel has been cut. They still have to run high-powered data centres - even more so for those who offer hosted software services, but they'll talk about how much they've slashed their energy bills through consolidation, virtualisation and other measures.

Of course, they would all like to sell more equipment, software and services and they will dangle the cost and environmental savings that are possible. But they are also well aware that new equipment brings its own environmental costs, including the disposal of old equipment. Honest discussion around these issues will win vendors more customer loyalty than misleading claims based on dodgy premises.

Indeed, they may well find that their revenues rise for hosted services, consulting and software, even if an increasing awareness of sustainability among customers were to lead to a slowdown in hardware sales.

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.

Link: How green is your vendor?

Date: 2 Nov 2007

Audience: IT Professionals

Link: How are your suppliers' green credentials?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Computing

Date: 2 Nov 2007

Audience: IT Professionals

Link: How are your suppliers' green credentials?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Computing

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Date: 12 Oct 2007

Audience: Information professionals

Link: Touchgraph Link Visualisation

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Information World Review

Scrolling testimonials

Thanks to a bit of JavaScript from Mike Hudson (Where are you Mike? The web address I have for you no longer works.) and a lot of jiggery pokery by yours truly, Press Here now boasts a scrolling testimonials box. On the surface it looks quite cool, but this merely masks the clunkiness of my coding.

The hardest bit was getting the scroll box aligned and floating with the navbar. Took me a day. Would have taken an expert half an hour probably.

Now ('cos I'm still living out of boxes), I need to find the appraisal stash. That might take considerably longer.

Blogs before blogs

Before there were blogs there were columns. Comments were through the laborious process of 'letters to the editor' and hoping you'd get published.

The columnists were hired for their ability to interpret, inform and amuse. Two of them (me and Martin Banks) watched the PC industry as it flowered in the UK. We've also lived through the networking, web and social computing waves and, no doubt there will be more. Before the PC, Martin specialised in electronics writing and I lived through the visible record and minicomputer waves as a participant, with mainframes as a noisy backdrop, before becoming editor of Personal Computer World.

Martin and I grabbed a slice of history, as we saw it, by scanning and uploading 363 of our columns. (In the original blog post, I miscounted - I said 365.)

However, we relied on Google for the search and it wasn't comprehensive. Result: you type in something you're interested in (Sinclair, Curry, Hauser, Jobs, Gates or whatever and there's a good chance nothing will show.) Shame.

So we've now switched to FreeFind's sponsored engine. At the expense of a few text ads at the top, you can now properly search the archive. It runs from 1979 to 1991 although it probably follows a bell curve. The search is at the bottom of the left sidebar on any Press Here page. (That's where Martin and I hang out 'cos we're the press and we're here.)

If you know anyone who's interested in this kind of thing, you might want to tip them off.

One of the issues of the fast-moving pre-web world is that a lot of computing history got lost. This is our small attempt to redress the balance with the observations of two insiders.