Goals

From Lauraibm

Revision as of 17:22, 3 April 2008

This wiki should contain:

1. the text of what the vendors say about their own green aspirations and achievements.
2. materials from the analyst firms—Gartner, IDC, Ovum, Datamonitor, Forrester etc.
3. use the analyst papers to build a view as to what constitute best green practices.
4. Once we have developed a set of Best Practice criteria, we can start to assess the vendors against them. (This may also yield one or two innovations that the vendors are doing but the analysts hadn't thought of yet.)
5. identify and evaluate alternative non-IT sources.
6. a summary scoreboard in the form of a table—criteria down the side, vendors across the top—with some form of rating system, yet to be decided.

Possible Goals of UKISA MI's green coverage

1. Align output and recommendations to the needs of the core business team e.g. qualify external PR/materials.
2. information which enables progression from early adopter customer groups and offerings to broader market segments
3. identify high growth business opportunity
4. assess new entrants / partners etc.
5. innovative ways of investigating new facts and presenting to the marketplace (example from LogicaCMG below)
   

   

   Example of a question different from the type we might normally ask
6. Within IT:
   • the total energy consumption by Business IT in UK (split by datacentre and outside)
   • Anything to do with split by sector
   • Growth rates of IT server spend by sector
   • Rate of consolidations
   •  % doing new datacentre builds
   • What other factors are key indicators?
7. Outside IT
   • Where does business think IT can enable lower emissions? Transport optimisation? Supply Chain? other areas?
   • Attitudes of CIO to energy issue and business execs in general to using IT to help enterprises be greener
8. Top CEO priorities for carbon management and reduction (carbon footprinting? going carbon-neutral? energy use? impact on customers? on supply chain? etc)
9. Who are the players in the carbon management market at the moment?
10. What is the size of demand for services in the market?
11. Gartner assessment of how the market for 'green' services will evolve over the next 2 - 5 years.
12. Top CEO priorities for carbon management & reduction (carbon footprinting? going carbon neutral? energy use? impact on customers? on supply chain? etc. etc.)
13. Who are the players in the carbon management market at the moment?
14. What is the size of demand for services in the market?
15. Review of the Green strategy of IBM and its competitors, with a SWOT-type analysis (Victoria Leach).

Executive Comments

From Andy McFarlane:

I like what you are doing here... some thoughts though...

• The tone associated with the titling "Green Stuff" might lead us down a route of IBMers just talking generally about this hot issue... but we need to encourage IBMers to realise that our prefered corporate position on this topic is one of "helping clients to reduce their own carbon footprint".
• We do this from a base of having a strong carbon emissions reduction story ourselves, but we are not carbon neutral... nor are we likely to be in the near future... unless we "offset" but that is a questionable approach, as your paper states
• So, I'm not sure how you do this... but if your leadership here can help others to focus their time and efforts on:
  • what clients are doing to reduce their carbon footprints,
  • how our competitors are doing this in a limited way, and
  • how IBM can use our breadth of capability to deliver this transformation in the most compelling way possible for our clients

then you would be helping achieve the desired clarity on this important topic.

About this Wiki

• Once we're confident that the organisation of the wiki is fairly stable, we'll bring it in-house and probably abandon the external site.
• This environmental material is worth keeping in one place.
• Laura could possibly develop a niche reputation as the department's 'ecologist'.
• There could be a useful paper to be written on the topic, e.g.
  1. Do different types of vendors put different levels of effort into environmental issues? (e.g. hardware vs. services vendors)
  2. Do the Indian vendors do comparatively little?
  3. What does each vendor do in the UK? (i.e. are some trying to claim that what they do in say, Texas, gives them environmental credit which somehow benefits the UK?)
  4. What do the analyst firms say?
  5. What do customers and the markets want?
  6. Threats: is it possible that the green credentials of the IT industry may come under the same level of attack in the media as the aviation industry has experienced? How should we prepare for this?