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Go Green Nippon Style: Turn Your Server Off at Night

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I recently met with Fujitsu Siemens Computer about green data initiatives, based on what the joint venture calls IT with a sense of responsibility. The underlying hook to the narrative is Japanese/German engineering excellence (not a bad peg, I am sure you’d agree).

Bernhard Brandwitte, director of product marketing for FSC and perhaps more importantly in the context of behavioural change an excellent story-teller, told me something that really rocked me on my heels: in Japan its common to turn production servers off at night. Yup- apparently the Japanese insurance industry tries to avoid fires in plants at night by offering much cheaper cover for companies that power down after dark.

What does that mean in practice? A much more coherent backup and recovery strategy for one. A commitment to not 24/7, not follow the Sun, not have uptime for its own sake.

I have been thinking about this issue for a while, but it was a tweet from Chris Dalby this morning that pulled the trigger:

yellowpark is going green. I’m turning my server off each night 🙂

Chris is someone I deeply respect. Another cool thing is that he won’t shop at supermarkets- all his shopping is packaging free, from a local farm shop. When he tweets a delicious lunch menu you know the vegetables were never wrapped in plastic. That is a pretty good metaphor for Chris: He is very real, very passionate, and focuses on local issues. He is all about change from the grassroots.

Chris’ commitment to server-off computing is cool because he is an expert in technologies such as Windows Small Business Server, which he sells into small and medium-sized businesses. I wonder if he could set up a service helping SMBs become more green, given his bona fides?

All I know is that much as we should all turn off our appliances at night, and our cellphone chargers, so we should ask – do we really need that server on all night?

 

picture credit: Chris’s dog, from his moo cards, saying… “Turn that bloody server off, I’ll be your watchdog…”

disclosure: Chris is a friend.

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Why Don’t You Just Turn Off The Television And Do Something Less Boring Instead?

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From 21st Century Citizen come suggestions for small things that could make a difference in the fight against global warming. One of the suggestions is turn off the TV and do anything. Join the Anything But TV club. Seems fair. We need to engage with challenges, not just watch them flickering past.

My own favorite small thing to make a difference is turning off the plugs at the wall when I leave the office, and when we turn off the TV in the evening at home. There is no need to power all of those appliances-or more pertinently their power supplies-overnight. Its good to turn off the plugs rather than just devices because otherwise you forget about phone chargers and so on…

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On Africa: The Bush Administration Does the Right Thing

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And that’s something you don’t hear from me too often. According to the New York Times the US will now be able to buy local cereal crops when administering aid, rather than shipping US surpluses abroad. Grain dumping overseas is a bad thing- it punishes local farmers by wrecking market prices, and uses up unnecessary food miles. This article explains the problem in some depth.

Small changes can lead to large effects, while unintended consequences are a problem for any policy area. So its very good to see the US administration making it easy to buy local crops at times of extreme need. Buying local helps the economy in ways dropping in grain never could – and we use less oil. This is aid through the grassroots.

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Towards Sustainability: We Are The Watchdogs

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SAP’s Amit Chatterjee points out that corporations are spending real money on this new-fangled sustainability thing. Dollars spent is always an interesting metric. You don’t pay McKinsey money to help you write a corporate social responsibility report. You bring them in to redesign parts of your business. This is a new kind of business process re-engineering (BPR), with a new focus, and new concepts of efficiency. Why is Greenmonk interested? Because the focus is on behavioural change.

“During the presentation, it was clear that there was a significant need for changing behavior.  I was trying to determine how long it would take to make this trend a reality vs. short-term FAD status.  Then I was hit with the most interesting stat of the whole presentation.  Another director of the Firm announced that McKinsey was currently serving 20 of the Fortune 100 around establishing or building out their corporate sustainability program.

Ladies and gentlemen, CSM has arrived.  Basically, when a large corporation is willing to hire McKinsey brainpower (which does not come cheap) to establish a strategy, it is no longer a fad, but a true initiative for change within an organization.  Thus marks the arrival of CSM into our lexicon as a legitimate method for competitive advantage or lever for shareholder value.  This is truly exciting news.”

I wrote about Amit and SAP’s Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategy a while ago over at Monkchips. I called GRC the new ERP. Well folks, what did ERP support? First wave BPR. What are we now facing? Sustainable BPR… Another wave of change.

Although this discussion may seem to be top down, and therefore not “green from the roots up”, and therefore outside Greenmonk’s remit, any successful organisational behaviour change is going to need bottom up commitments and ideas. BT, for example, uses blogging and local team leads to encourage bottom up eco-innovation. Social software is going to play a crucial role in any successful sustainability strategy.

Thomas also picked up the theme (he has been dragging me into the corporate social responsibility space, helping me to understand its more than platitudes):

“I don’t want auditors crawling all over sustainability, but I do want to know that the stuff in the annual report and elsewhere is relevant and material. I want to know who is serious and who is bs’ing me. I worry about greenwash.”

Anyone that cares worries about greenwash, which is why we all need to engage with this stuff. The more engaged we are the harder it is for big companies to fool us. As investors, citizens, employees, customers we have to be the watchdogs. We can’t assume someone else will do that job for us. The responsibility is ours. That’s green from the roots up.

picture courtesy of Frankie Roberto.

disclosure: SAP is a client of RedMonk, the industry analyst company I co-founded.