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IBM Eco Jam kicks off later today with an impressive line-up

Jam

Photo credit justmakeit

The IBM Global Eco Efficiency Jam kicks off this afternoon (January 27th) at 9am EST (14:00 GMT, 15:00 here in CEST) and continues right on through until Friday afternoon.

According to the IBM site the Jam is

a web-based event which will provide an unrivalled opportunity for thousands of public and private sector sustainability leaders, from medium to large organizations around the world, to pool their knowledge and experiences through a series of focused discussions and exchanges of best practices with each other, with practitioners and influencers and with acknowledged subject matter experts.

The objective of this jam is to enable senior representatives from organizations of all sizes to cooperatively determine the best actions that can be taken to meet our goals for a sustainable future for our organizations, our customers, our suppliers, our stakeholders and society at large

There are almost 1000 companies from 45 countries around the world (ranging from Argentia to Brazil to Finland to Hungary to India to Malaysia to Peru to Slovakia to UK to USA to Vietnam) signed up to participate. Typically in IBM Jams several reps from each company participate. The types of roles who have signed up for this Jam include: CIO, Chief Sustainability Officer, COO, Facilities Manager, CFO, Manufacturing Operations, Environmental Affairs, Fleet Manager, Real estate and site operations, IT manager, data center manager, and city planner.

More than 250 subject matter experts from IBM, Green Sigma Coalition partners, industry analysts, energy & environment experts, and leading edge companies are taking part. Some of the non-IBM experts who have signed up to share their expertise are:

  • Dian M. Grueneich, Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission
  • Joel Makower, Chairman/Executive Editor, Greener World Media, Inc.; Senior Strategist, GreenOrder; and Co-founder and Principal, Clean Edge, Inc.
  • Dan Esty, author of Green to Gold
  • James Watson, Managing Editor, Industry and Management Research, Economist Intelligence Unit
  • Clay Nesler, Vice President, Global Energy and Sustainability, Johnson Controls
  • Andreas Schiernbeck, President & CEO, Building Automation, Siemens AG
  • Patricia Calkins, Vice President, Environment, Health and Safety, Xerox Corporation
  • Amit Chatterjee, CEO, Hara
  • Chris Lloyd, Executive Director, Public Policy and Strategic Alliances, Verizon
  • Jim Sinopoli, Managing Principle, Smart Buildings
  • Kamal Meattle, ?Fresh Air? activist and CEO, Paharpur Business Centre & Software Technology Incubator Park, New Delhi, India
  • Dr. Terry Yosie, President & CEO, World Environment Center
  • Carl Gaurdino, President and CEO, Silicon Valley Leadership Group
  • Carol Baroudi, Green & Sustainability Research Director, Aberdeen Group, and author of Green IT for Dummies
  • Andrew Winston, founder of Winston Eco-Strategies and co-author of Green to Gold
  • Tom Raftery, analyst and blogger, GreenMonk/RedMonk
  • Chris Mines, Senior Vice President, Research Director, Forrester
  • Simon Mingay, Research VP, Gartner
  • Vernon Turner, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Computing Research, IDC

To learn more about the Eco Jam check out the Eco Jam page on the IBM website or request an invite by sending an email to: [email protected].

I wonder how this will affect the number of people tuning into Apple’s big announcement later on today, not to mention President Obama’s State of the Union 2.0 address!

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IBM’s Ken Bisconti discusses Paper Reduction strategies and the new Smart Archive initiative

I had a chat recently with IBM’s Vice President, Product and Strategy for the Enterprise Content Management, Ken Bisconti. We had a great discussion around enterprise paper reduction strategies and IBM’s recently announced Smart Archive initiative.

Here is a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery:

Hi everyone, and welcome to GreenMonk TV. My guest in the show today is Ken Bisconti. Ken is with IBM, and Ken is the Vice President, Product and Strategy for the Enterprise Content Management Division.

Ken, Enterprise Content Management, that’s basically all the kind of — the papery stuff, all the content that companies create over their lifetime, is that correct?


Ken Bisconti:

Yeah, Enterprise Content Management refers to the management of unstructured content, which comprises about 80% of the world’s business information today. It’s everything from email, and scanned documents, to Compound Document Management, and now archiving content analytics, records management, even case management, business processes; the wide variety of technology with origins back to days of imaging and paper capture.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Now, I remember back in the 80s people were talking about the onset of the paperless office, and yet, here we are 20 some years later and still there seems to be as much paper as ever. What’s going on? Why aren’t we getting rid of paper?

Ken Bisconti:

Well, about 90% of the world’s content is created digitally. We still find that about half of business information is still sitting in paper today. Much of that is due to the fact that there are business transactions and business to business communication that happens in paper, and from consumers to banks, and from agents to claimants and others, there is a lot of paper traffic that still exists in the world, especially when you think about transactions and the legal requirements around signatures across many different countries or jurisdictions, etcetera.

Tom Raftery:

There is a definite move now away from paper that we are starting to see. Why is that? What are the advantages of digital over paper; I mean paper has worked fine for years?

Ken Bisconti:

It’s a great question. I think that we are now at a point where due to the decreased cost of digital storage and improvements in technology, we are at a point where just the simple storage and retrieval and discovery processes around paper-based business content is not — it is much more cost effective now to take advantage of digital capture.

We at IBM have an effort we call No Paper Weight, which is very focused on helping customers understand the cost of ownership improvement by digitizing their paper records management. Digitizing and automating paper-based business processes. And also using those technologies for not only records management and retention, but also eDiscovery and legal review as well.

Tom Raftery:

Are there other advantages, I mean I can think of environmental advantages for instance, what other kinds of advantages might there be?

Ken Bisconti:

Sure. There is certainly environmental advantages. We have got — I can think of a recent example in one of the county governments in Southern California, where just one simple business process saved them about 1,200 pounds of paper everyday by digitizing that business process. So certainly there are environmental benefits and green benefits to the digitization of paper-based business processes and paper records.

But in addition to that, there are very hard cost savings that customers are able to take advantage of. Often it’s pretty obvious nd our customers, they simply need some assistance in making the cost justification and also understanding how and the best practices to implement some of these policies.

With the digitization of paper you have the advantages of using security technologies, like encryption and access control, to secure who is retrieving and interacting with content that is being stored and managed and part of the business process. And naturally with any digitization and digital storage of information, you have the ability to take advantage of disaster recovery and availability technologies, such as clustering and offline storage. So there are tremendous advantages in security and reliability and availability, not just the cost savings and storage.

Tom Raftery:

You guys made an announcement in October about your Smart Archive initiative. What was that about?

Ken Bisconti:

We did. In October we announced across IBM initiative we call Small Archive. It is focussed on a very holistic view of information life cycle management and information life cycle governance. The basic concept is that we want to provide our customers a consistent way to collect and archive both structured and unstructured content. This ranges from structured information like application archives or application datasets from ERP systems, like SAP and Oracle, using some of our opt-in technology as an example.

It includes email and paper capture and collaborative content from Lotus and SharePoint, chat transcripts, faxes, etcetera. One consistent way that we can collect and archive that content.

We also provide the ability to classify that content based on rules or manual classification, or even an advanced automatic classification technology which uses natural language, linguistic analysis to help identify business content versus non-business content.

We also combine that optionally with records management software and eDiscovery collection and review technology. This is possible using our ECM software.

And one of the components of the Smart Archive strategy is the introduction of new delivery methods. We are introducing a new appliance-based delivery method we call the IBM Information Archive. That will be delivered in the first half of 2010. And through our Global Technology Services Team we are also going to provide these same capabilities in a Smart Cloud offering, an Information Archive Cloud service, which also will be available in the first half of 2010.

I know one recent large retail bank we had in California, 10,000 plus employees, bank with 300 plus branches, they had a single investment in this space that had over 260% returns, and I think their payback was in less that nine months on the overall early investment. They invested maybe three to three-and-a-half million dollars and had returns over a few years of over 30 plus million.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. With any of these new technologies Ken, you are always going to see some verticals going gung-ho and others being a bit more reticent. Are you see seeing that in this as well?

Ken Bisconti:

In this context we tend to find our traditional interest has been in financial services related industries: retail banking, insurance. We have also found that there has been tremendous interest in public sector environments, local and state governments, federal and country level governments.

We have also seen energy in utilities, telecommunications, even retail and manufacturing, but I think that it would be fair to say that traditionally a lot of the interest has existed around financial services, government, and energy utility firms.

Tom Raftery:

So if a company is looking at this and maybe interested in trying to see, is it for them, would they save money? Do you have any kind of a way; someone can model to see if they can save money doing this?

Ken Bisconti:

We do. As I said earlier, we have a program we call No Paper Weight, I’ll provide you with the URL. And you could always search for IBM ECM anywhere on the Internet and you will be directed to our content, which can also guide you to the No Paper Weight initiative, where you will find ROI calculators and white papers, even including case studies of other organizations that have done this before; how they have justified it and some of the fantastic returns that they have gotten from these investments.

Tom Raftery:

Super! Ken, that’s been fantastic. Thanks a million for coming on the show.

Ken Bisconti:

My pleasure Tom. Thank you.

[Disclaimer – IBM sponsored the production of this video]

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IBM’s John Soyring talks about IBM’s Smart Planet initiatives around water

I posted my video interview with IBM’s John Soyring previously as part of a round-up of my impressions of the IBM Connect09 event. I have since had the interview transcribed so I thought I’d post it once more as a stand-alone post, with the transcription – the content is that good.

Transcription:
Tom Raftery:

Hi, everyone and welcome to GreenMonkTV. My guest in the show today is John Soyring from IBM. John you are a part of the IBM Software Group and we are at the Connect 09 Conference today and we are talking a lot about the Smarter Planet initiative from IBM. So IBM has traditionally been known as Big Blue. Are you guys now going to rebrand as Big Green?

John Soyring:

Well, certainly someone referred to that, but blue is important too because of the color that water appears to many peoples as well and water is part of our projects.

Tom Raftery:

The Blue Marble.

John Soyring:

It is.

Tom Raftery:

So tell us about some of the stuff you are doing around water, for instance, since you brought that out.

John Soyring:

Yeah, I would be happy to. So we have selected water because we know that there is already a shortage, globally, of the amount of potable water available to people and the lack of potable water is a major cause of health problems in parts of the world and has adverse impacts on economy; so right now is a problem already, a pretty severe problem.

Secondly as you look at supply and demand the amount of fresh water on the face of the earth or drinkable water or water that’s easily purified to be drinkable is finite in nature, it hasn’t changed over centuries really and the total amount – it is a very significant amount.

Yet, the demand with population growth and with the growth of certain economies around the world where more and more people are demanding water not only for their own personal use, but also for commercial use – there is an increased stress on the system. So we look at it from a macroeconomic standpoint and say there’s has got to be something we could do to help here.

So this team got together and said how could we apply technology to help all of the world of water, whether it’s managing water resources or helping people to better distribute the water or very importantly how to make more intelligent decisions on how to consume water.

So if I use one example as representative and I won’t give out their specific numbers because they share them on confidence with me of what they are doing, but as an example the country of Malta we were very fortunate to work with them, because of the work they were already doing and recognizing that water is extremely important to the people, the citizens of Malta and the visitors, but very importantly as they continue to grow their economy an increased availability of water is going to be critical to that.

What they told me, 100% of the water comes from rain catchments that’s about 55-60% of the total supply and about 40% or 50%, it varies, I believe, during the year is seawater from the Mediterranean Sea that’s desalinated, purified, and then distributed. Now, as I had the benefit of coming and visiting some of their desalination centers and purification centers, and they were already using state-of-the-art technology.

Now in the future will there be a better technology with nanotechnology and other on filtration systems? Very likely; so it’s great to be able to work with some people who already on the leading edge of pushing the technology to it’s boundaries.

The second is how you would distribute that water, because today water in almost all cities and regions of the world or countries in the world is heavily subsidized by tax payers. Consumers don’t really realize the true cost of water because the price…

Tom Raftery:

Water is free. You just turn the tap and there it is.

John Soyring:

It is so inexpensive the monthly bill that people perceive it to be free, but in reality the cost is much higher that what they are being charged. With governments – city, regional, federal governments around the world being stressed because there’s a gap between the taxes they collect and the amount that they are spending is not a sustainable economic model.

So eventually water will have more and more market prices and for decades, now I have been projecting personally. This is my own personal opinion that the price of a barrel of water will far exceed the price of a barrel of oil. And what’s important is we can live without a barrel of oil, we’ve got alternatives to oil. It’s going to take a while to develop those, but we don’t know really have alternatives to water that we have to drink and survive whether it’s animals or human beings in that category.

Tom Raftery:

Because I saw in a statistic recently that it takes 16,000 liters of water to produce one kilo a beef.

John Soyring:

It is expensive and the other thing I found recently and it takes quite a few liters of water to produce a one liter of beer.

Tom Raftery:

I’ll give up the beef, I won’t give up with the beer.

John Soyring:

I happen to be a real big fan of one of your Irish beverages.

Tom Raftery:

Guinness?

John Soyring:

Yes, the Guinness is just absolutely wonderful, but think about this and Malta is pretty representative of many other countries. We create this purified drinkable water very expensively on a per liter basis, we distribute it, our water systems are very old, many times measured in centuries not just decades.

There’s leaks in the system, so there’s loss of water in the distribution system, loss of water when they get in to the buildings – the residential homes or commercial buildings, loss in the building is pretty bad also from a health standpoint because it creates mould which has adverse affect on the living beings that are in that home or that commercial building; but, very importantly when you think about we designed our plumbing systems that assume as you pointed out water is free.

So we use it for all sorts and I was shocked as I talked to the CEOs of different water utility companies around the world that’s a very higher percentage of water that’s just flushed down the toilet; a very significant part and that when you look at the majority of it that’s actually going for irrigation for the grasses and lawns, or for the flowerbeds, for vegetable gardens, for trees, for irrigation, for farms, it’s a very high percentage. None of it really needs the quality of potable water that we have.

Tom Raftery:

So there’s a disconnect there between the amount that’s flushed down the toilet and what could be used for irrigation purposes?

John Soyring:

And the interesting thing, as I was in Malta meeting with some of the government leaders and the business leaders in Malta and on my flight back to the United States the airline had copies of the Financial Times and I was reading through a section and it was a Middle East country, I believe it was Qatar back in about April had a paid section that they put in and talked about the different parts the government one of which is water management.

I taught that it was just absolutely visionary what they are doing because the leaders in Qatar were setting goals for the future, they wanted to able to — every time they created a liter of a drinkable water, they want to able to use that liter seven times before they dispose of that.

Tom Raftery:

Wow!

John Soyring:

Now, so that’s a great vision. Now the question is from our system today that use the water once in 95% plus of the cases, how can we get to a case where we are satisfy a vision like Qatar has of using it seven times?

Certainly a new plumping system would do, but another thing is if we have the intelligent sensors of where the water is being used, then we can people aware of their consumption habits are we’ve certainly seen that in hybrid vehicles that when they no what their patrol consumption is they try to optimize that and change behavior.

Now if we can make that information available to the consuming public and also if they know what the real cost of water is and the benefits, we think we can precipitate some of that change.

So that’s what we are doing and for the smart water grid in Malta, we’ve signed several other deals and just issued press release earlier this week, one for the lower Colorado River Authority, which is a watershed in Texas supplying water to central Texas.

One is in Japan with a water utility, one is in Australia, and then there’s a variety of other projects anywhere from working on the Hudson River in New York, which has in its 1960s and 1970s, unfortunately, became very polluted.

Tom Raftery:

Sure.

John Soyring:

To be able to place sensors through the river to identify when various chemicals – whether it’s agricultural runoff, industrial chemicals, personal use chemicals, because people are using medications, but they eventually flow out of you body, usually get flushed down the toilet, but they end up not being separated during the water purification process for sewage, and when they do the sewage processes it mixes in the river.

So if we put sensors in the river, we can identify the source and start to mitigate the pollution problem by hitting it at the source as soon as possible.

Tom Raftery:

You did a project in Galway Bay in Ireland as well.

John Soyring:

Yeah, absolutely, and as you know being Irish the Bay in Galway is probably the major source of economic growth for the city of Galway and the surrounding region, whether it’s the fisheries which depend on the quality of the water, they have better catches if the water quality is better; to Galway is one of the major import and export centers, the ports in Ireland so the commerce of the country of Ireland is very dependent upon the success of it.

Vacationers, people like to bathe in Galway Bay, so by putting sensors throughout on buoys throughout the Bay we are able to capture information and help Ireland be the first country to start satisfying a European regulation where this data has to be captured and made available to the public immediately, so they can make decisions. One of the things that we measure is E. coli high concentrations.

Tom Raftery:

Right.

John Soyring:

If the concentration level is below what the Health Department determines is acceptable or the EPA in Ireland they say bathers feel free to go in. Now people can make that decision rather than waiting for a notice and perhaps missing it in the newspaper, going swimming, and then ending up with some health problems.

Tom Raftery:

John, that’s been great. Thanks, for taking the time to come on the show.

John Soyring:

Oh! It’s a pleasure. Thank you for coming here to this event.

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IBM’s Software Analyst Connect event, Smarter Planet and sustainability

I attended IBM’s eighth annual Software Analyst Connect (#Connect09) last week in Connecticut. The theme of the event was “IBM Software for a Smarter Planet”.

You have to admire IBM for coming up with the Smart Planet branding strategy. Now anything Smart (Smart Cities, Smart Water even Smart Work) is automatically, subconsciously associated with IBM.

The Connect 09 event itself was superb. The delegates were all analysts and I was humbled to be in the company of so many really bright people.

It was a two day affair broken up into a healthy mix of keynotes, breakout sessions, round tables, an appliance showcase and chats with experts. The content level was very high and the networking opportunities were off the charts (I had face time with Steve Mills, Al Zollar, Sandy Carter and John Soyring (in the video above) to name-drop but a few).

The breakout sessions had titles like:

  • IBM’s Industry Frameworks and Solutions for a Smarter Planet
  • Driving Smarter Business Outcomes with Analytics and Information and
  • Smart Work and Dynamically Adaptive Collaboration

So while the content was quite in-depth and at times extremely technical, unfortunately there wasn’t a strong emphasis on sustainability. This is no big surprise as this was never billed as a sustainability-related event.

Having said that IBM’s larger Smarter Planet strategy talks very much to the Internet of Things vision where everything is instrumented with RFID tags or sensors and inter-connected which has massive potential implications for making the world more sustainable.

Then the talks from Steve Mills referenced IBM’s work with utilities in the Smart Grid arena and the development of the SAFE Framework while John Soyring talked up IBM’s work around the world on Smart Water initiatives.

The one use of the Smart X lingo which IBM use and I do object to is Smart Oilfields. The thinking goes that Smart Oilfields are ones that extract oil more efficiently from the ground. I’m sorry, but CO2 is a pollutant which is endangering all life on this planet. Anything which helps put more CO2 into the atmosphere, cannot be very smart.

It was spectacular to get a chance to record my chat with John Soyring about IBM’s work on water globally. Take 10 minutes to watch the video above. You’ll be glad you did.

Full disclosure, IBM is a client and paid my airfare (economy) to attend the event, accommodation and all delegates received a gift of a solar phone charger.

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November chat with IBM’s Rich Lechner

Rich Lechner is IBM’s VP of Energy and Environment.

He is a regular interviewee here where we discuss various matters related to energy and environment. This interview was recorded while I was at the SAP TechEd 2009 event in Vienna in a crowded interview room so I apologise in advance for the poorer than normal audio and video quality.

In this show we discussed IBM’s recently released Solution Architecture For Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE) and we had a quick chat about the recently published Green IT for Dummies book.

[Disclosure] The Green IT for Dummies book was written with input from IBM and I served as technical editor for the book. Having said that, I hadn’t seen the completed book until Rich held it up during the video and the link to the book on Amazon above is not an affiliate link – I get no monies from its sales.

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Guido Bartels of GridWise and IBM discusses Smart Grids with GreenMonk

High Voltage power line

Photo credit Ian Muttoo

Guido Bartels is General Manager of IBM’s Global Energy and Utilities Industry. Guido leads IBM’s corporate initiative around building an ‘Intelligent Utility Network,’ IBM’s portfolio of offerings and capabilities for the Smart Grid.

Guido is also a member of the Electricity Advisory Committee at Department of Energy, an organization whose mission is to

provide advice to the U.S. Department of Energy in implementing the Energy Policy Act of 2005, executing the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, and modernizing the nation’s electricity delivery infrastructure

And Guido holds the position of Chairman at GridWise Alliance, the US Smart Grid industry association.

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/GuidoBartels.mp3]

I invited Guido onto the show to discuss the current state of Smart Grid roll-outs globally and I asked him, amongst others, the following questions:

Define what is a smart grid (there are a lot of definitions out there!)

Why do we need them? What are the benefits of smart grid?

What is your vision of what the ideal Smart Grid rollout would be?

and what would be necessary to achieve it.

What differences are there in global geographies?

Are regulationss affecting rollout?

Can you point to any good smart grid rollouts?

Download the entire interview here
(12.7mb mp3)

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IBM’s Jim Spohrer on the Smarter Planet University Jam

IBM held their inaugural Smarter Planet University Jam earlier this year. The Jam was a crowdsourcing process held by IBM earlier this year where nearly 2,000 students from more than 200 universities from 40 countries around the world took part with the aim of building a Smarter Planet through technology.

Some of the findings from the Jam were:

  • Eight of 10 students want universities to revamp traditional learning environment
  • Over 90% want to join or start a Green Advocacy group at their campus
  • 64% of students believe that the world has a chance to reverse carbon emissions by 2025 and
  • 60% believe that education and efficient transportation offer the best hope for sustainability of our cities

I had the chance to talk to Jim Spohrer, the Director of IBM’s Global University Programs (GUP) recently about the Jam. We discussed the thinking behind it, the outcomes what were its take-aways.

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IBM’s Drew Clark on electricity, water and trends in sustainability

I had the good fortune to have a chat with IBM Director of Strategy Drew Clark recently. We had a great talk covering how to get noticed by the IBM Venture Capital group, water and energy projects and trends in sustainability globally.

We even speculated on the likelihood of demand response systems being rolled out for water management.

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IBM has signed a new services agreement …

IBM has signed a new services agreement with Germany’s Federal Employment Agency, Bundesagentur fur Arbeit (BA) to help the agency file, distribute, process and manage documents electronically.

Given how much energy and water goes into paper production and transportation, this move to e-government has got to be a big win for the planet!

See http://bit.ly/168oFS for more