Green from the roots up, Sustainable from the top down
Do you want a job in Sustainability in your company? Are you enthused by the idea of doing the ‘right thing’ both for your company and for the planet?
Our own James Governor talked to Tony Rooke, Logica’s Head of Sustainability and Environment, about how Tony created his own position within the the company.
Lessons to be learned there…
ERP software maker SAP is, according to Wikipedia, the world’s 4th largest software co. in the world (presumably after Google, Microsoft and Oracle).
It is a big deal then when a company of SAP’s size announces the creation of the position of Chief Sustainability Officer, as SAP did earlier this month.
In the same announcement SAP also announced targets to reduce carbon emissions by 51% and to help their customers reduce their emissions.
Having talked to SAP previously, I know this is not a sudden conversion on their part but I was interested to talk to their new Sustainability chief, Peter Graf to ask him about the announcements.
We recorded three videos on the three parts of the announcement – this is the first one where Peter discusses the new role.
According to its Wikipedia definition, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
is a concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities and other stakeholders, as well as the environment. This obligation is seen to extend beyond the statutory obligation to comply with legislation and sees organizations voluntarily taking further steps to improve the quality of life for employees and their families as well as for the local community and society at large.
Companies are now starting to report on their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives in greater numbers. Drivers for this include the rise in ethical consumerism, socially responsible investing, employee recruitment and loyalty, changing laws and regulations, increased scrutiny and transparency and risk mitigation.
According to the Sustainable Investment Research Analyst’s (SIRAN) 2008 report (pdf warning):
- 86 of the S&P 100 companies now have corporate sustainability websites, compared to 58 in mid-2005, an increase of 48 percent;
- 49 of the leading U.S. companies produced a sustainability report in 2007, an increase of 26 percent from 39 in 2005
In an attempt to define standards and make these reports cross-comparable, the Global Reporting Initiative has come up with a sustainability reporting framework. According to Wikipedia:
The GRI Guidelines are the most common framework used in the world for reporting. More than 1000 organizations from 60 countries use the Guidelines to produce their sustainability reports.
A quick search of tech sites reveals:
IBM’s stellar Corporate Responsibility site – IBM’s site has a ton of good information and a downloadable CSR report (pdf) and includes the Global Reporting initiative (GRI) index. If there is a tech company with a better CSR site than this, please tell me, I haven’t found it yet!
From the Dell site you can see dell has been producing Sustainability reports back to 1998 (called Environment reports back then). The 2008 CSR report (pdf) is linked to from the company Values page and is a really good example of how to do these reports well.
SAP’s Sustainability site is pretty bare bones (and though found by Google, I couldn’t find a link to it on the corporate website! Having said that, their Sustainability report (pdf), linked to from their Sustainability site, is very good for a first effort. It includes a GRI index and while SAP admit that the report is prepared to GRI Application Level C, they give a commitment to producing a “report to GRI B+ standard externally assured and audited in second quarter 2009”.
Cisco’s CSR site includes a great 5 minute video on CSR from Cisco CEO John Chambers and some of his CSR related staff. Unfortunately the video is not embeddable and is all rights reserved or I would embed it here 🙁 Cisco’s CSR 2008 report is available in a Flash interactive version or the more traditional (and easier to consume) pdf version! Again this report has a GRI index included.
Sun’s excellent CSR site includes a podcast, lots of great links to relevant information and its superb 2008 CSR report (pdf) – again with the GRI index data.
Oracle also has a good CSR site. Oracle’s site links to its 2008 Corporate Citizenship report (pdf) but it doesn’t include a GRI index link.
HP’s Global Citizenship site looks good until you check out their CSR report – it dates to financial year 2007 (which ended October 31, 2007). In its defense, it does include a GRI index but guys, come on, 2007?
Neither Intel nor AMD have reports for 2008. But while Intel have a very comprehensive downloadable pdf report on their CSR initiatives for 2007, the AMD offering consists of a disappointing four tables of performance indicators across the last few years.
If you are looking for Microsoft’s CSR report, you will find it buried under Resource Center -> Awards and Reports -> now click on the Reports tab on their Corporate Citizenship site. The most recent report is dated 2007-08. It is a 5 page document of mostly images, there is no mention whatsoever of GRI, there is no executive involvement, and in comparison to previous years reports, it looks like Microsoft’s limited focus on CSR has waned completely.
Having said that, at least Microsoft has produced a report! Apple didn’t even do that. When As You Sow, recently tabled a shareholder resolution that would require Apple to publish a corporate social responsibility (CSR) report, The company issued a proxy filing asking shareholders to vote against this resolution, saying that the publication would be an unnecessary expense that would “produce little added value.”
Having said that, at least Apple have a section on their site dedicated to their environmental efforts, Amazon don’t even appear to do that. Their filed reports page makes no effort to include any reports about environmental stewardship or corporate citizenship although given the story which came out before Christmas about Amazon’s shocking employment practices, that can hardly be any surprise.
Ironically Google’s CSR efforts are supremely difficult to find! They do have a corporate website dedicated to their Green Initiatives but like Apple, they too don’t have any CSR report (that I could find!).
Who’d I miss? Who is better? Who is worse?
Doug Neal is a Research Fellow at the Leading Edge Forum – Executive Programme and is responsible for research into Innovating through Technology.
While working with Yale Professor Dan Esty, author of Green to Gold, to develop a holistic view of the challenges and opportunities of this new Corporate Social Responsibility frontier, Doug and the LEF team realized that even if we could wave a magic wand and reduce computer power use to zero, we would have successfully dealt with only 2% of the CO2 problem.
In this presentation at the 2008 it@cork Green IT conference, Doug talked about how to use IT to help address the other 98%, suggested how firms should proceed in dealing with this global issue, and socialising carbon data.
Photo credit photobunny
[audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/JamesFarrarSAPonSustainability.mp3]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)
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?
Google.org is the not-for-profit arm of Internet search company Google.
After hearing about some of their initiatives, I was curious to learn more about Google.org. I contacted my friend Vint Cerf, Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist and asked him if he’d come on the show to talk about Google.org and Google’s sustainability projects.
Vint very graciously agreed to and so we have this video. Thanks Vint.
I see from my good friend Salim Ismail, that his good friend Sonal Shah has been appointed to President-Elect Barack Obama’s Advisory Board.
According to her Wikipedia bio Sonal has:
temporarily taken leave from her current position as the head of Global Development Initiatives[1]for Google.org to help transition in President Elect Obama’s new government.
While the Changemakers.net tells us:
Shah has said she will be “getting the things ready for the team that will take over in the government and giving them the option and handing them what they can go do, so that they can do it . . . We talk about a 21st century government, but how do we create it?”
I have to say, it is really heartening to see someone with so much talent and with such a strong global sustainability background being added to the Obama team.
Photo Credit runway27r
I was at a BT analyst briefing during the week and at this meeting I was delighted to hear Donna Young, BT’s Head of Climate Change say that amongst other things, BT are going to start requiring suppliers to follow the BT ethos on carbon footprinting. They will be auditing suppliers on a scale of 0-3 where 0 means the supplier hasn’t started working on their carbon footprint yet and 3 indicates that they have auditable results. Further, BT will be using this scale to rule companies into or out of tender processes. Excellent.
Then this evening via April and via Bo in Nortel I came across the release from Verizon where they announced that from January 1st 2009 their target is for new gear from their suppliers to be 20% more energy efficient.
Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president-corporate network and technology said:
The Verizon network requires power costing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to provide the most advanced services available anywhere in the world. The energy dollars are well spent, as the network supports consumers and businesses in dynamic new ways. For example, our customers engage in energy-efficient activities like videoconferencing and e-commerce every day over our network.
Aside from the potential cost reductions involved, as a responsible corporate citizen, we want to be part of the drive toward greater energy efficiency. Part of our plan to accomplish this is to request our suppliers’ help in meeting our conservation goals.
Verizon are ahead of the curve in this respect. In fact, as I noted previously, there are no agreed standards against which to measure equipment so Verizon went ahead and wrote ther own:
Verizon established a series of Telecommunications Equipment Energy Efficiency Ratings based on formulas that test the consumption of equipment in various operating conditions and settings. Test data are entered into formulas developed for each type of equipment, which will indicate whether or not they achieve the target rating…. The concepts and measurement methods have been submitted for consideration by appropriate standards bodies, such as ATIS’ Network Interface, Power and Protection Committee (NIPP).
There is still a dearth of agreed standards around carbon accounting and energy efficiency. It is interesting to see, in the absence of such standards, companies coming up with their own and starting to use these measures as part of their purchasing process. Increasingly your company’s carbon footprint will not alone affect your energy costs but will also start to affect your sales.
More reasons for agreed standards and lower carbon footprints!
I spent today in Bristol at HP Labs, learning about the company’s relaunch of its R&D organisation. I came away impressed with the crispness of the new vision. In the past HP Labs came across like an academic organisation, removed from commercial concerns. I am happy to report though that the new approach and tone seems much more focused and business like.
From a Greenmonk perspective the real meat came this afternoon when Chandrakant Patel, Director, HP Sustainable IT lab (and dab hand with a sketch pad, which made for lovely slides.) joined the session via web conference.
The conference worked a charm; I found myself nodding along and giving out non-verbal queues to a face filling a six foot screen. The contrast couldn’t have been starker with BT’s CSR event this week: the telco’s Boston-based head of videoconferencing didn’t fly back to the UK to avoid the air miles footprint (good), but instead of live conferencing he prerecorded a video (bad). Note to BT-showing can be a lot more effective than telling, especially when you have a room full of influencers ready to be impressed.
But what of HP Lab’s strategy for sustainability? Chandrakant’s first slide carried the same basic message at my own Green stump speech: that is, IT only accounts for 2% of global energy consumption (and so carbon emissions), wheras the great majority of the problem is found in areas such as buildings and heating, supply chain logistics and transport – the 98%.
IT is a small percent, but it has a unique opportunity to attack the 98% problem.
HP has more skin in the game here than you might think – because of its printing business. While HP didn’t use the term Bit Miles it did talk a lot about “Long Tail Printing”. That is, digital printing at the point of use, avoiding the need to pulp a bunch of copies of some book or magazine noone ever read. Bear in mind that print technology is now moving into three dimensions, so you can potentially print objects not just characters on paper. The potential for print and micro-fabrication to reduce transportation cost is vast. Chandrakant talked about the need to create an “IT ecosystem” for the printing industry, to ensure it is carbon positive rather than negative. The HP Labs’ approach he said was to replace conventional supply chains with sustainable IT ecosystems.
Of course not everything in the vision is new. On the contrary:
“We need to leverage the past to create the future.”
One of the key problems with the 98% is the complexity of the metrics involved. How do we really know, asked Chandrakant, that the carbon used to create the Halo video conference wasn’t greater than the flight he chose not to take? There is a need for irrefutable metrics. And we don’t have 15 years. HP Labs is now working on prototypes to model and predict the impact of different re-engineering strategies, then measure and monitor the results. “These tools”, said Chandrakant’s UK equivalent Chris Preist, will analyse consumption of available energy and greenhouse gases across the lifecycle.
HP’s vision here is nothing less than to give businesses the tools they need to simulate the greenhouse impacts of potential new products and services. What if I used IBM tools here, or a BT network? What if I chose Apple hardware over Windows laptops? And so on.
This could be an entirely new frontier in product design and lifecycle management.
In order to create these kind of footprint models we’re going to need manufacturing companies to share information about their production and logistics processes. Needless to say I suggested after the briefing that Preist talk to Gavin Starks of AMEE as soon as possible.
When it came to Q&A my question was why such initiatives are in the Lab, rather than in the field. At least one industry- air travel – is no longer viable with oil prices above $80 a barrel. Other industries won’t be immune to the rise of transportation costs.
Chandrakant responded by contrasting HP’s current approach, going public early, with earlier efforts to persuade data centers to invest in smart cooling technology.
“Unlike in 1998, we need to act fast. This time we’re going out and talking about it immediately.”
Preist added: Why is HP being open and transparent? in order to solve the challenges we have around sustainability we have to scale. Talking of opening up, HP also plans a “Sustainability Hub… “, that is, an online place to share and pool information.
HP does of course have a plan for low carbon data centers, which involves using beams of light rather than wires in data center equipment. This idea is not so far fetched- we’re all used to idea of TV traveling along optical fibre now, so why not bits along a beam? Atoms are cheaper to move than atoms, and photons are cheaper to move than electrons.
Using this photonics approach HP estimates it can make a 75% reduction in carbon footprint for data centers. Not bad for starters! I like HP’s narrative of dematerialisation, whether we’re talking about printed pages or processors. Don’t make things manifest unless you actually need to. That’s a key to sustainability.
“The ultimate goal is photonics, but we need intermediate steps. We have teams beginning to transfer technology but we’re looking for partners, that can co-create in this area… that’s critical.
I came away generally impressed with HP and its progress in sustainability thinking. It has some super bright people thinking far beyond the 2% and ready to work with customers in a range of industries in becoming more sustainable. But even more importantly its increasingly clear the IT industry is not only fully aware of the need to become more sustainable but also is quickly reaching a consensus on how to tackle some of the problems. I see a lot of hope for standards, information sharing, and IP cross-licensing. The public sector may not get it. Manufacturing may not get it. The general public may not get it. But IT – IT gets it. It doesn’t matter whether I am talking to Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, or Sun the agenda is pretty well shared now. The green data center is important but completely overhauled supply chains and ways of living even more so.
disclosure: HP is not a client, but paid my train fare to Bristol. Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and Sun are clients.