Tag Archive for 'sustainability'

James Farrar on SAP and Sustainability

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on January 7, 2009
in Podcast and sustainability
. 0 Comments

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Photo credit photobunny

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My guests on this podcast are James Farrar and James Governor. James Farrar is Vice President of Corporate Citizenship at SAP while James Governor is the co-founder of RedMonk.

SAP recently published their Sustainability Report and both James Governor and I were keen to chat to SAP to learn more about how SAP views Sustainability.

We invited James onto the show and despite/because of some ribbing and rigorous questions what resulted was, I think a great conversation.

Listen in and let me know what you think…

Download the entire interview here
(25.7mb mp3)

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What is your company’s Sustainability Communications Program like?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on December 10, 2008
in sustainability
. 7 Comments

Sustainability

Photo credit _ A l v a r o _

I guess the first question should be does your company have a Sustainability Communications Program? If not, why not?

As I mentioned in my last post, it is now time for everyone to

band together not only at national levels, but at company and community levels to do everything we can to work to reduce our impact on the planet. Don’t rely on your politicians to do it for you. Get together with friends, neighbours, co-workers and make a change.

So, what is your company doing about sustainability? Some companies invest heavily in this space. Others roll it under the marketing umbrella and still more, don’t even have a sustainability policy.

How do you improve your company’s sustainability policies? I don’t know! But more than likely, you or others in your organisation have great ideas about ways your company can be more environmentally responsible. Why not poll them?

Roll out a bottom-up Sustainability Suggestions Wiki in your organisation today. Most people have excellent ideas on how to improve things in their company but assume they will not be listened to. A wiki allows people to make suggestions in a transparent, meritocratic manner.

Incent people to do so. Give prizes for best suggestions every month. Prizes could be anything from something small like a CFL light bulb, or a Current Cost meter, all the way up to sponsorship of an MBA in Sustainable Business, or any number of things in between.

Go further, video and podcast interviews with winners - make them heroes in the company. The rewards for the company will often be cost savings through efficiencies but also a more highly motivated workforce, who see the company as being responsible and caring of what they (the employees) think.

Enabling bottom-up suggestions in this manner (and subsequently acting on them) promotes a “We are all in this together” spirit and empowers people to make a real difference in the fight against climate change, a difference which they may be unable to make as individuals.

Why wouldn’t you do this?

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GreenMonk talks Sustainability with IBM’s Stan Litow

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on December 2, 2008
in Podcast
. 0 Comments

IBM

Photo Credit ChicagoEye

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My guest on this podcast is Stan Litow. Stan is IBM’s VP for Corporate Affairs and Corporate Citizenship.

IBM recently issued their 2008 Corporate Responsibility Report. It is an extremely interesting, very comprehensive overview of IBM’s work in this space. You can download the entire report here (PDF warning!).

Having gone through the report, I was interested to discuss it with Stan and he graciously agreed to come on the show and gave a fascinating look at some of the thinking behind IBM’s initiatives in this space.

Download the entire interview here
(20.3mb mp3)

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GreenMonk talks to Siemen’s (SIS) Peter Arbitter

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on December 2, 2008
in Podcast and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Peter Arbitter

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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My guest on this podcast is Peter Arbitter. Peter is Siemens SIS Senior Vice President, Portfolio and Technology Management. I caught up with Peter at the Siemens Technology Day in Salzburg. The theme of this year’s Technology day was IT for Sustainability.

We had a wide-ranging discussion around Siemens energy and sustainability initiatives both internally and externally for their customers.

Download the entire interview here
(34.4mb mp3)

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Living In De-material World: On Microsoft and Bit Miles

Published
by
monkchips
on September 26, 2008
in energy efficiency, environment and footprint
. 1 Comment

I have written a fair bit here about Bit Miles (the moral imperative to digitise) and business process dematerialisation, so I was particularly interested in a recent trip to Microsoft’s gaming and world simulation division.

What was so relevant?

One area that I believe holds out great promise for this kind of simulation technology is in sustainable and sustainability modeling. Take the pilot training example above; while the highest cost may be for maintenance engineers, but how much fuel is being needlessly burned? Training in the real world is expensive. Moving Atoms has a cost. I have recently started talking about Bit Miles as a Greenmonk narrative, defined as is the carbon cost associated with moving a good or creating a service that could instead have been delivered digitally. Bit Miles offer us a moral imperative to digitize: a simulation of the world is a beautiful opportunity to rethink and potentially dematerialize business processes.

Why not Supply Chain Simulator ™, which would pull together all of your plant information (pulled in from OSI, say), where your people are located (Peoplesoft), and how you move goods and services (SAP) around the world? An organisation could begin to run really deep “What If” scenarios about the energy costs of their businesses with simulations like these. But what would really make these models sing is the fact they’d be visual and immersive. Telling is rarely as effective as Showing. What would a low energy manufacturing business look like? With virtual technology we could maybe work it out. At this point it might seem that I have gone off the deep end, but the ESP team inspires that in you. I didn’t see a single Powerpoint slide during my visit. Rather Shawn likes to open up people’s imaginations.

I would love to know your thoughts- there is a good discussion going on over at my monkchips blog.

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Thirst!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on September 9, 2008
in water
. 0 Comments

Ireland is one of the least densely populated countries in Europe and it has some of the highest amounts of rainfall.

After seeing the following presentation about the world’s dwindling water resources the water shortage in Dublin, which I posted about yesterday, appears all the more scandalous.

THIRST
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

Thanks to Shel for linking to this presentation on Twitter.

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