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Note to SAP: Finding A Cheaper Travel Option isn’t Innovation

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SAP is doing some interesting work around environmental sustainability, working on issues such as carbon accounting and environmental monitoring and compliance. For now SAP is working with partners such as OSIsoft and Technidata to help flesh out its offerings.

But in keynote land environmental sustainability doesn’t seem to have become a top bullet point item (which is a bit surprising given SAP is a European company). My ears had pricked up when SAP co-CEO Henning Kagermann started talking about rising travel costs in his pitch yesterday. So what business process innovation did SAP suggest, based on integration of its Business Objects and ERP software? To establish a new business process to find and pre-qualify new transport suppliers… That’s what SAP came up with for risk management in an environment where we ‘re entering the era of the $200 over a barrel innovation challenge?

So much for energy demand management. I think we’ll tag that “could do better”. I appreciate this was just a simple demo in a keynote, but if SAP wants to be seen as innovative, and enabling business process breakthroughs, it would have been nice to see the company provide an approach that would help customers reduce their travel bill by reducing their travel, rather than just trying to get the cheapest supplier. Maybe I am just being grumpy, like Eddy, who yesterday asked whether from an environmental perspective we should be going to conferences at all.

In this morning’s keynote SAP’s other co-CEO Leo Apotheker also talked to rising energy prices, but kept banging the Flat Earth drum. In my opinion the Earth was Flat for about five minutes, until Friedman was proved wrong by rising energy prices. Kind of like the End of History seemed right for about a year or so…

Ending on a positive note I am going to try and join a session here at Sapphire 2008 later about Reducing Carbon Emissions using wind power, on which more later. In the meantime check out this cool job, working as an SAP admin at a windfarm. Want to feel good about your employer? How about this for environmental impacts (or lack of them):

• No Air Pollution
• No Water Pollution
• No Global Warming Pollution
• No Waste
• No Fuel usage verse mining or drilling
• No Water use

SAP is a client. They paid my travel and expenses. I flew to Berlin. I wish firms would more events in Brussels or Paris so we could travel from London by train.

Photo courtesy of SAP press office.

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Sustainability/Energy Agenda Accelerates

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People ask about greenwashing and vendor hypocrisy. I don’t see it like that. If resources are being applied to managing electricity demand, or addressing broader sustainability issues, that is all to the good. The space is heating up almost as fast as the planet.

Today IBM announced a swathe of services and tools, and is clearly beginning to tie together its various IT energy management strands. Thus for example, it touts data center efficiency:

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager (AEM) tracks energy consumption in data centers and helps customers monitor power usage and make adjustments to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The new software allows IT managers to control — even set caps on — their energy use for servers, storage, and networking as well as the air conditioning and power management systems that keep the data center running.

IBM is also pushing into certification. I think the firm needs to think bigger though and to take on bigger challenges (not often I say that). Data center energy optimisation is interesting, but IBM should be looking at driving power improvements in supply chains, manufacturing plants, building central heating and so on. IT currently accounts for around 3% of world energy consumption. Lets get to work on the other 97%.

Nortel is going after Cisco “ruthlessly” based on better power performance of its gear. This is the most agressive use of a energy benchmarking I have seen so far in the industry. Great – bring on competition on the basis of power consumption.

I am liking SAS pitching its BI tools for the triple bottom line. with Global Reporting Initiative indicators and KPIs based relating to environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Excellent! I need to go chat to SAS – a very interesting privately held firm with a real culture of innovation and a high R&D budget to match. I wonder if they talked about this today at the

Boston is going green, which I am sure Stephen will appreciate.

With the triple bottom line in mind The FT reported yesterday that “The German government plans to make the country’s first trademark for good business behaviour, as a complement to “Made in Germany” as a respected global brand.”

Today my old mucker Dennis Howlett has been in Boston with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and a number of software companies discussing sustainability rights, responsibilities and opportunities. Next week at Sapphire 2008 in Orlando, SAP is hosting AccountAbility,  (BSR), and the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) in launching a dialogue on sustainability. I have been involved in planning, web 2.0 support, and will join the dialogue in Berlin. I’d like to see SAP in future set up industry vertical sustainability groups based on its successful Industry Value Network program, for best practice sharing. James?

GreenMonk appreciates change needs to be top down, as well as bottom up. All this of activity is goodness. We need to move on, and watching CSR evolve from a PR initiative to one driving corporate strategy is pleasing.

Climate Change
Creative Commons License photo credit: openDemocracy

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McAfee goes Green in Vegas!

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So it appears you can go green in Vegas, beyond all my cynicism and that of others. I just came across some really interesting news from McAfee about its approach to greener conferences in that benighted location.

“Greening Kickoff,” an innovative project to minimize, rigorously measure and offset the environmental impact of a large corporate event in Las Vegas. The project, which focused on McAfee’s annual Sales Kickoff meeting as a pilot effort, reduced non-air travel carbon emissions by 16% while offsetting the remaining 1,865 metric tons of carbon emissions through support of reforestation projects.

I am not a big fan of offsetting, but I am a fan of reforestation. What I particularly like about McAfee’s approach here is that its not about warm and fuzzies, but real measurement and monitoring. It brought in a third party, ICF International, to audit its activities. The results? McAfee claims to reduced the event’s carbon footprint by 16% of its total non-air travel emissions. What else?

  • 25 metric tons saved by facilitating the sharing of rooms by participants
  • 3.2 metric tons and 56,357 gallons of water saved through participation in the hotel’s towel and sheet reuse program
  • 0.5 metric tons saved by providing a shuttle for airport and event transfers rather than travel by individual taxicabs
  • 0.5 metric tons saved by eliminating bottled water and providing tap water only
  • The carbon footprint of the overall event was approximately 1,856 metric tons of CO2, or 1.03 metric tons of CO2 per event attendee
  • 90% of the event’s carbon footprint resulted from air travel to and from the event
  • Excluding air travel, of the remaining 10% of the event’s carbon footprint, the breakdown was as follows: food (35%), hotel rooms (33%), amenities (19%), facility use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) (5%), solid waste (4%) and the event’s conference center (3%)

Well done McAfee- but I have to say I am really disappointed I didn’t come across this earlier. It would have been amazing to have someone come to talk to our free EnergyCamp unconference on Monday about the apppoach – particularly given the Vegas angle.

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Xerox sustainability calculator

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Xerox has long been known for innovation and recently they released a Sustainability Calculator which helps companies realise the savings they will achieve by reductions in the number of printers they have.

The calculator is an online Flash application into which companies can enter information about the printers they have and see the savings they will achieve by reducing their number.

In the example below I entered different numbers of non energy star enabled mono and colour printers. I then entered the same number of printers and copies into the optimised scenario section but this time marking the printers as energy star enabled to see the difference an energy star rating would have on the results.

Xerox Sustainability Calculator

You can get results for Energy, Solid Waste or Greenhouse Gas. The results below are for Greenhouse Gas and predictably the only difference between the two columns is in Operating Energy Greenhouse Gas emissions.

Xerox Sustainability Calculator results

As printers are typically used only between 1 and 2 percent of the time, there is plenty of room for reducing their number in an organisation and still facilitating printing when required.

It may sound counterintuitive that Xerox are enabling companies to see the benefits of fewer printers but since Anne Mulcahy has taken over as CEO of Xerox, it has been heading towards 50% revenues from services and consulting business around document management. Telling companies how to save money and be more green is a growing business.

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Standing Around The Water Kula, Hanging Out

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One of the cool things about the twitter messaging platform is that the application programming interface (API) is really easy to use. The truly outstanding thing about twitter though is the amazing range of communities and cool people it has fostered. Greenmonk has a core belief that web technology is allowing a hitherto unprecedented lowering of barriers. We can all participate.

A good example popped up this week. Dan Light is a fellow East Londoner I had never heard of before a couple of weeks ago, when Hugh Macleod twittered about some great blog everyone should read. The blog, a review of a SXSWi, a hipster conference for people with Ruby skills and lazer-etched Apple laptops, is indeed excellent, a deeply personal manifesto for change.

But that’s just the back story. What’s the water kula thing about? Well- it seems that Dan had an idea last Friday. By Monday the WaterKula application was up and running. Its basically a social platform built on twitter that notifies you about cool stuff (a great great grandchild of boingboing). We had a similar experience building a social application over a weekend when we introduced the chinposin avatar capture service. I don’t buy the need to be reminded to drink more liquids, and like any cool new web service the revenue model is murky. But then the goal is clean fresh water for people that really need it.

Our goal is to use WaterKula to raise money for WaterAid, possibly through some form of sponsorship. This will only become possible if we can attract enough followers, so please tweet the word far and wide, and help us make water cooler.

Dan should really hook up with the people at Akvo, an ambitious clean water initiative, which regular readers will know recently achieved second round funding, and might be interested in a potentially revenue-raising game. It has never been easier to be a social entrepreneur.  If you want to make a difference you can. Dan does. Mark does. The barriers to entry are dropping. You don’t need anyone’s permission to make a difference. Why not try and make water cleaner by hanging out at the virtual water cooler?

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Shai Agassi To Forge Israeli Electric Car Network

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So ex-SAP executive Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place has managed to pull it off. Former product chief Shai catapulted coolly into DLD in Munich yesterday straight from Jerusalem, where he had launched one of the most curious deals the auto industry has ever seen. He drove out that afternoon. To Davos.

Alongside Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Renault / Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn, Agassi announced, a spectacular and audacious agreement on Monday to deploy a new kind of electric power network and set of cars to run on them that will get Israel’s car drivers off oil as quickly as possible. It’s consistent delivery on his October deal, when he raised $200 million from Israeli Corp and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Shai and I spent thirty minutes talking yesterday in Munich and what I heard proved to be true. On stage, Agassi is a brilliant presenter, dashing, focused, witty and strident. He’s up there with Al Gore in getting you by the throat and implying “talking about this isn’t enough!” and stood shoulders above the impressive line up the crushed and seat-deprived attendees of Burda Media’s DLD event had seen.

Project Better Place will integrate and deploy a new product, sales and support channel (read ‘charging’ stations) that will allow Israeli consumers to drive their own pure electric (not hybrid) car that has a 200km or so range. It will feature a new design of battery that can be swapped in and out in about the time it takes right now to fill up a car with gasoline. People will be able to do so at a country-wide network of swapping stations, or charge cars via power points. The cars will be designed and built by Renault / Nissan. Agassi says it will reduce oil use in Israel drastically – we’re talking figures like 50 per cent here.

The capital to get this going has come from a group of investors that includes Israeli Corporation (which right now supplies Israel with oil – proving, as with Abu Dhabi’s latest moves – that oil money can sometimes turn green) and also features VantagePoint Venture Partners, blessed right now with this shining star to distract everyone from the mess at Tesla. Agassi claims the system will launch within four years.

One of the big features of the system is that electric power will be sold as packages akin to the way that mobile phones are sold today – there will be multiple plans you can buy, including one that says if you buy about six years of power, they’ll throw in the car for free.

Shai Agassi

Photo credit jdlasica

But can he really pull it off? Agassi has got to this situation incredibly quickly. When I ask how in a year he has managed to leave his old job and do one of the most audacious deals imaginable he says “Nine months! It’s been nine months!”

In truth, for any entrepreneurs out there who may suddenly feel deeply inadequate, Agassi has had this process in train for three years. The journey started when he listened to a challenge by a speaker at Davos to do something to make the world a better place. Agassi admits that during those first few years “I walked every single wrong path first. I was sure for months hydrogen, then I was sure it would be ethanol.”

This characteristic of Agassi’s seems crucial to understand. You feel he’s churned the options over in his head constantly and worked out the answer. Now he’s settled on it, his purpose is to set that vision out to the world, do the necessary business deals to make it happen and then…”. Actually, “and then?” is a fairly good question and there isn’t right now a lot of substance to see, beyond the deal itself. Be in no doubt that Project Better Place now needs to ‘execute’, as IT guys would say. They’ll need some very talented people, they’ll need to ensure that Renault / Nissan and other partners such as battery provider NEC deliver technologies, and integrate those technologies together, on time. They will also need to work out the details of the service model and sales and marketing, factors that could make or break the project. And of course if oil prices fall dramatically (admittedly unlikely) the economics become a problem.

So is the man up for it? The company website is today a lonely place, with a link to ‘leadership’ that leads to… just Agassi. There are two people photos. Him and, curiously, his young son, who is part of the Davos pitch. Yet while Agassi himself quipped on stage to the (German) DLD audience that he “used to be the next CEO of SAP”, he never was SAP’s CEO and opinions gathered from my Twittering IT analyst friends vary on just how successful his time at that firm was.

First, here’s Dennis Howlett, veteran technology and financial software analyst:

“Shai created a roadmap and at one stage was delivering a ton of product [at SAP]. “But it became indigestible for many SAPpers.”

Then over to Greenmonk’s own James Governor:

“The Agassi legacy at SAP?…. a job unfinished. He built an architecture, but it was not as widely adopted as he, or the board, wanted.” James’s other comment is curious. “Shai evidently doesn’t have a great deal of patience and is inclined to hector communities (for example, customers) that don’t do what he wants.”

What next? Well Project Better Place has a hell of a lot to do and, once Davos is over, Agassi better get together a brilliant team and start executing. Right now, you hear nothing except him. While the project talks about partnership and being open, it would seem that the big deal has for now taken priority over engaging the talent base required. The firm will need a lot of great people, and those partnerships will take a lot of managing.

What’s sure is that the world is a better place for this development. Amongst the visionaries and future talk underway at DLD, Agassi stood out as a doer.

But don’t for a minute think this is the only future for cars. Agassi’s vision has unlocked anything up to a billion dollars but there is surely more to come and many things are happening right now. Agassi is a visionary but his vision is pretty narrow.

Shai’s in Davos now, wooing the great and mighty with that vision and his audacity. For the next three years he’ll definitely be judged on that ability to ‘execute’. We wish him well.

Read on at Re*Move, where we ask Is Project Better Place the big answer?
Mark Charmer is a contributor to Greenmonk Associates. He is CEO of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Photo credits: Project Better Place.

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On Small Changes, Small Cars, Tax and Pollution

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It’s fair to say that encouraging people to change their behaviour in small ways can have a big impact – cumulatively – on reducing carbon footprints and environmental impact in the long-term.

But how Governments and authorities manage and cajole the public to change personal behaviour can be a problematic process – and something that’s difficult to get right. One obvious avenue available is to incentivise change by introducing tax-breaks on ‘environmentally friendly’ products and services, and hiking tax on high-polluters. That seems to be the idea behind planned changes to the Congestion charge policy in London, which – rightly or wrongly – from next year, is being turned into an environmental charge based on carbon dioxide emissions from cars.

You can read more about it in detail here, but in short, the plan is that whereas currently nearly everyone pays £8 per day, by 2009, cars which emit more than 225 g/km of CO2 will be charged £25 ($50) a day to drive into central London. Ouch. But the flip side – the ‘tax-break’ – is that if you drive a car that emits less than 120g/km of CO2, then access is free. The idea is to move people from gas-guzzlers to eco-friendly fuel-sippers, and thus see CO2 levels in the city fall. Nothing wrong with that you might think, but there’s a potential flaw…

Sales of these small, ‘sub-120g/km’ cars are soaring across the south-east of England. A new report by CEBR (report not available openly) suggests that this ‘environmentally-driven’ policy could actually end up causing CO2 levels to rise. That’s because it’s predicted the changed system will have a net result of up to 10,000 extra cars a day entering central London. And that can only lead to an increase in congestion, and a slow down in traffic speeds. As anyone who understands the internal combustion process will tell you, the problem with (even highly efficient, and small) engines, is that they’re at their least efficient when the car is sat stationary or moving at low speeds. So despite the fact that most of these additional cars will be classified as ‘environmentally friendly’ and driving around congestion charge-free, the extra traffic and congestion they create could mean CO2 levels actually rise.

Kit like this will unsurprisingly fall into the £25-a-day bracket come next year

You will, doubtless, be surprised to hear that kit like this will cost £25-a-day to drive in central London come next year…

Whether the report’s predictions prove true, only time will tell. One potential caveat to consider is that it was commissioned by Land Rover – who aren’t exactly known for their small cars (in fact, every vehicle they currently sell falls into the £25-a-day category). In the auto-industry, nothing is ever quite as black and white as it first seems… but there’s plenty of support for it’s predictions in the form of academics for instance, who have no reason for bias.

The big questions it begs, is how governments, authorities and legislators drive a process of adoption for new, more environmentally friendly products and technologies, without having the entire process back-fire on them at ground level? The message they’re putting out to people here is ‘do this, and because you’re helping save the planet, we’ll reward you’ – but in fact, that ‘reward’ might end up having quite the opposite effect on the planet’s health. Don’t ‘reward’ people’s for changing their behaviour, and they’ve no reason to change. So the carrot-stick approach is difficult. I suspect this policy might go down in history as being one of those top-down processes, that on paper looked great – but which back-fired terribly on the ground by having precisely the opposite impact to what was originally intended. Another case which will show the need for grass-roots level innovation and adoption, rather than top-down? I think so.

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Why the Poisoned Apple? Lets learn from the Shakers

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Given its commitment to incredible industrial design, its a real shame that Apple doesn’t appear to be showing any leadership on green issues in product development. According to Techworld, a Computerworld publication:

Greenpeace has slammed Apple’s iPhone, saying it includes toxic chemicals that other mobile phone makers have already stopped using.

An analysis of a disassembled iPhone by an independent lab in the UK found toxic brominated compounds and hazardous PVC (polyvinyl chloride) in multiple components of the handsets. Bromine, a chemical used in fire-retardant compounds, was present in more than half the 18 samples taken, Greenpeace claimed, while toxic phthalates made up 1.5 percent of the ear bud cables’ PVC coating.

While the iPhone doesn’t violate EU chemicals legislation Apple is evidently well behind more established players such as Nokia, Motorola and Sony-Ericcson, which are all now PVC free. So let me get this straight- Apple came dead last in a recent Greenpeace study on PC manufacture, and now it is lagging in mobile phones too. Is this a Greenpeace vendetta or does Apple have systemic problems to address? Given that California-based Center for Environmental Health is now taking legal action against the company it’s somewhat harder for Apple to shrug the accusations off.

I have a two year old son, ergo no more Apple products until the company gets its act together. I know the firm’s product’s are gorgeous and very easy to use but its surely time for the company to make its beauty more than skin deep.

“Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.”

The Shakers, a Protestant sect, had the most incredible design culture. Folks like Frank Lloyd Wright took design cues from the group. One thing that defined its furniture was that the joinery was just as attractive inside as out. As Shakers see it God sees the inside, not just the outside, of the furniture, which has obvious implications for quality and craftsmanship. According to Wikipedia:

Shakers designed their furniture with care, believing that making something well was in itself, “an act of prayer.” They never fashioned items with elaborate details or extra decorations, but only made things for their intended uses.

Am I saying Apple needs to discover Shaker religion? Obviously not. But a commitment to sustainability and clean manufacture and disposal would benefit us all. As fake Steve Jobs would say: “Namaste”. But not before calling Greenpeace a bunch of “fscktards”…

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The UK Gets A Green IT Conference: w00t!

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Exciting. Green IT 08 is a new UK conference for “IT leadership in Environmental Age.” Its really good to see this conference in London – its surely one of the first in the world, let alone the UK.  They are looking for green pioneers, sponsors and all sorts.

One of the thing I think is cool is that they are starting small, evidently trying to start a snowball to roll downhill, rather than pus a rock uphill. Its at the business design center, a small but perfectly formed venue in Islington.

The fact they put a web site online, without feeling the need to have every tab complete, is goodness. The community will drive the content, which is a good grassroots approach. All I can say is- I know what I am doing 9th and 10th April next year.

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Working water twice

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I’ve spent the past few weeks emerged in the water sector and the opportunities that exist to tackle the problem that 1.1 billion people lack safe drinking water and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.

There are some fascinating people out there working to overturn assumptions and find new models of collaboration. There are also some great design ideas. Check out this system, or should I say cistern, which initially looks bizarre but is actually an astonishingly simple way of improving the efficiency of flush toilets. If we make toilets more efficient, they require less infrastructure.

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Bill McDonough points out that to develop a strategy of change requires genuine humility. He follows on with one of my favourite quotes to use with naysayers:

“If anyone has any trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.”

Stuff like this shows how much we can redesign even the most familiar things. Thanks to Juergen Kikuyumoja Eichholz for the link.