post

Technology for Good – episode thirty seven with Mike Maney

by

Welcome to episode thirty seven of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s show our guest is independent spin doctor Mike Maney. Mike is a regular attendee, and supporter of our annual Monktoberfest conference, and an all-round good guy!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included a look into the latest developments in mobile payments, Microsoft making Office free on all mobile platforms, and Facebook launched it’s own Tor site.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

Climate

Energy

Hardware

ePayments

Apps

Security

Wearables

3d Printing

Transport

Sustainability

post

Technology for Good – episode thirty four with Salesforce’s John Tascheck

by

Welcome to episode thirty four of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode our guest was SalesForce SVP of Strategy, John Taschek. John and I are both longtime members of the Enterprise Irregulars, but this was the first time John and I had had a conversation outside of email!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included a very successful Kickstarter campaign for a small router which can completely anonymise your internet activity, Lockheed Martin announcing that they’ve made a breakthrough on nuclear fusion technology, and Satya Nadella’s response to his gaffe last week about women seeking a raise.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

 

Climate

Energy

Hardware

Internet of Things

Wearables

Mobility

Comms

Privacy

Open Source

Sustainability

post

Technology for Good – episode thirty three with Jon Collins

by

Welcome to episode thirty three of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode our guest was Jon Collins. I’ve known Jon for quite some time online and met him for the first time at out ThingMonk conference last year. In honour of that, I wore my ThingMonk t-shirt for the show!

Some of the more fascinating stories we looked at on the show, included Glasgow University becoming the first university in Europe to divest from fossil fuels, Code.org partnering with Google, and Microsoft to help 100M students learn computer science, and Susan Scrupski’s new venture, Big Mountain Data using Big Data to tackle the problem of domestic violence.

Here is the full list of stories that we covered in this week’s show:

 

Climate

Energy

Lighting

Transportation

Smart Cities

Comms

Compute

Mobile

Sustainability

Education

Women in Tech

post

Technology for Good – episode twenty three with Theo Priestley

by

Welcome to episode twenty three of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had  Software AG‘s Chief Technology Evangelist Theo Priestley as our guest on the show. Theo is one of those guys who I have come across online, but this was the first time we had ever talked, so I wasn’t sure how the hangout would go. As it was, I needn’t have been concerned, it went really well. Last week was July 4th, Independence Day in the US, so there was less Tech news to discuss, but despite that, we had plenty to talk about, especially in the Wearables and Comms categories.

Here are the stories that we discussed in this week’s show:

Climate

Internet of Things

Apps

Comms

Wearables

Transport

Sustainability

Misc

post

Sustainability and SAP?

by

SAP former CEO Dr Peter Graf

Dr Peter Graf, SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer announced that he’s leaving SAP yesterday.

There has been a significant purge of executives re-organisation at SAP in the last few weeks since CTO Vishal Sikka resigned suddenly, and Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe stepped back from his Co-CEO role leaving Bill McDermott as sole CEO.

Taken in isolation, the departure of Graf from SAP wouldn’t be too concerning, but SAP’s sustainability team has lost four of its most senior executives in the last few months. Jeremiah Stone was VP for SAP’s Sustainability Solutions. Scott Bolick was VP Sustainability. James Farrar was also VP of Sustainability for SAP, and Peter Graf was the Chief Sustainability Officer.

The loss of four such senior figures in such a short time leads to obvious questions about SAP’s ongoing commitment to sustainability.

Coincidentally I’m at SAP’s customer and partner conference SapphireNow this week, so I look forward hearing SAP’s take on this.

post

Technology for Good – episode eighteen with Chris Adams

by

Welcome to episode eighteen of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had Loco2 product and UX manager Chris Adams as a guest on the show. Chris is an old friend, and semi-regular co-host, so we had a lot of fun discussing this week’s crop of stories. Though I tried to whittle them down to a manageable number we still had quite a things to talk about, particularly in the energy, transport, and health spaces.

Here are the stories that we discussed in this week’s show:

Climate

Transport

Energy

Wearables

Apps

Sustainability

Health

Misc

post

Technology for Good – episode seventeen with Chris Kernaghan

by

Welcome to episode seventeen of the Technology for Good hangout. In this week’s episode we had SAP Cloud Architect Chris Kernaghan as a guest on the show. Chris is an old friend, and a fellow Irishman, so we had a great craic (a great time) discussing the stories, which were quite diverse this week, but primarily from the Internet of Things, and Connectivity spaces.

Here are the stories that we discussed in this week’s show:

Climate

Renewables

Sustainability

Connectivity

Internet of Things

Cloud

Transportation

Mobile

Wearables

Misc

post

SAP running six week online course on Sustainability and Business Innovation

by

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC’s as they are also known, are training courses delivered online, allowing for large numbers of students to enroll in the courses. When I signed up for an introductory data science course with Coursera last year I had over 50,000 ‘classmates’ taking the course with me. The network effect of haveing thousands of students taking the same course at the same time meant that the forums were actually useful places to interact and get questions answered.

I was interested then to hear from DJ Adams that SAP is running a MOOC on Sustainability and Business Innovation. The course is being given by SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Dr. Peter Graf.

It is a six week course, commencing on April 29th (2014), with 4-6 hours of instruction per week, with a final exam on June 10-17th (2014).

The course content (below) looks to be quite comprehensive:

Week 1: The Business Case for Sustainability
The week contains the following units: Welcome; Root Causes; Sustainable Value Creation; Engaging Top Management; Organizational Setup for Sustainability & The Role of IT

Week 2: Sustainable Strategies
The week contains the following units: Crafting a Sustainable Strategy; Stakeholders and Materiality; Analysis and Target Setting; Examples of Environmentally Driven Initiatives; Examples of Socially Driven Initiatives & Examples of Transformational Innovation

Week 3: Sustainable Business Processes (Part 1)
The week contains the following units: Embedding Sustainability Into Business Processes; Sustainable Design; Sustainable Sourcing and Procurement; Sustainable Production & Sustainable Logistics

Week 4: Sustainable Business Processes (Part 2)
The week contains the following units: Sustainable Consumption; Sustainable End-of-Life Processes; Environmental and Social Capital Accounting; Sustainability in Finance and Administration; Sustainability in HR & Sustainability in IT, aka Green IT

Week 5: Stakeholder Engagement
The week contains the following units: Engaging Line of Business Leaders; Engaging Employees; Engaging Society – Corporate Social Responsibility; Engaging Business Partners, Authorities and Opinion Leaders & Engaging Investors

Week 6: Sustainability Reporting
The week contains the following units: Purpose, Audiences and Standards; Data Quality and Assurance; Integrated Reporting; Report Delivery; Rankings and Recognition & Recap of Key Course Learnings

Week 7: Final Exam

I’m particularly happy to see the data quality and assurance being covered. With the move towards an increasingly quantified and transparent world the importance of knowing how to measure and interpret data cannot be underestimated.

If you are interested in signing up, or simply knowing more about the course, head on over to the course site, preferably before the class commences this coming April 29th. Over 9,200 people have already registered, so it looks like it will be a lively few weeks for all involved.

post

SAP Startup Focus in newly industrialised countries

by

Vishal Sikka, SAP CTO

As we have said before here, sustainability job number one is putting bread on the table. To that end, it was great to see SAP’s Startup Focus program take off so well, gaining over 1,000 companies signed up in less than two years.

We profiled the Startup Focus program here on GreenMonk earlier this year, talking to three of the participant companies about it. They were very enthusiastic about how it had helped them break into the enterprise software market, and said they wished they’d joined the program sooner.

More recently, we spotted news from TechEd Bangalore that SAP CTO Vishal Sikka announced there that of the over 1,000 companies who have joined the Startup Focus program, 158 of the come from India. I’d love to know what percentage of the Startup Focus companies overall come from newly industrialised countries, and what level of employment they are helping create.

post

Dell launches its 2020 Legacy of Good Plan

by

Dell water bottle

Yesterday (Oct 15th 2013) Dell published their 2020 Legacy of Good Plan. In this plan they commit to

leaving a positive, measurable, and lasting contribution to out planet and our society.

Lofty goals indeed, but what about some of the more concrete specifics? Well Dell has published 21 concrete goals with an end-date of 2020 by which they have to achieve them.

The goals cover three distinct categories, Environment, People and Communities.

The Environmental goals include:

  • Reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our facilities and logistics operations by 50%
  • Reduce the energy intensity of our product portfolio by 80% and
  • Ensure 100 percent of Dell packaging is either recyclable or compostable

The People goals include:

  • Increase university hiring to a rate of 25 percent of all external hiring
  • Engage 40 percent of our global Dell team in employee resource groups by 2020 and
  • Achieve 75 percent favorable responses (or higher) in team member satisfaction globally as measured through the annual employee satisfaction survey

While the two Community goals are:

  • Engage 75 percent of team members in community service by 2020 and provide 5 million cumulative hours of service to the communities in which we live and work and
  • Apply our expertise and technology in underserved communities to help 3 million youth directly and support 10 million people indirectly to grow and thrive

The goals are all extremely laudable and measurable, and Dell has committed to transparency in the process. It will be interesting to watch Dell’s progress with the plan, especially as we come closer to the end-date 2020.

Dell claims to have worked closely with its customers in formulating this plan, but according to this Twitter conversation, not all Dell’s customers are on-board, as yet

An obvious goal missing from the People section would be to increase the number of female executives in the organisation, though Dell is already one of the top US companies for executive women. No harm to have written goals for this too though.

Finally while discussing this initiative with David Lear, Dell’s Executive Director of sustainability programs, I asked him what was going to happen to this program given Dell’s move from being a publicly traded to a privately owned company. He responded that because the plan was generated in consultation with Dell’s customer base, those customer’s were unlikely to change significantly after the privatisation, and Dell’s commitment to them wouldn’t change either.