sustainability Archives - Page 8 of 8

SAP’s Peter Graf discusses his role – Chief Sustainability Officer

March 18, 2009 by Tom Raftery

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.

SAP hones sustainability push (news.cnet.com)

James Farrar on SAP and Sustainability

January 7, 2009 by Tom Raftery

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)

What is your company’s Sustainability Communications Program like?

December 10, 2008 by Tom Raftery

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?

GreenMonk talks to Siemen’s (SIS) Peter Arbitter

December 2, 2008 by Tom Raftery

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/SiemensSIS-PeterArbitter.mp3]

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)

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

September 26, 2008 by James Governor

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.

Thirst!

September 9, 2008 by Tom Raftery

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.

Nortel’s Green takes 1st place in London Olympics bid

July 31, 2008 by Tom Raftery

Photo Credit shutterhack

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/podleaders/NortelOlympics.mp3]

Episode 1 of the GreenMonk Podcasts – 08 mins 28 secs

We have been thinking of starting a podcast here on GreenMonk for some time so when I read that Nortel is going to be the official Network Infrastructure Provider for the London 2012 Olympics I decided that would be a great story to start with.

My guest on this podcast is Nortel’s Dave Johnson. Dave is the General Manager, Olympic Programs for Nortel and I figured if anyone could tell us what went on behind the scenes in this process, it’d be Dave.

Dave graciously agreed to come on the show and he explained how Nortel’s Green credentials were paramount to their winning the bid. According to Dave “sustainability was one of the key focuses for LOCOG (the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games) and when they say sustainability, Green is one of the key pillars of that sustainability”.

We are seeing more and more Green credentials being a factor in purchasing processes and this is just one of the more public examples.

If your company isn’t considering going Green for reducing your costs, you may well want to consider doing so to maintain your sales!!!

Download the entire interview here
(7.7mb mp3)

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