Purpose and Progress

From Lauraibm

Contents 1 Progress 2007 Week #28 2 Note from Paul to the Unit, Tuesday Week #28 3 Note from Gavin to Laura, Tuesday Week #28 4 Progress 2007 Week #27

Progress 2007 Week #28

Bill

1. The wiki is now pretty much complete in containing the text of what the vendors say about their own green aspirations and achievements.
2. Laura has also copied in as much as she can find for free from the analyst firms—Gartner, IDC etc.
3. She has now started on the stage where she needs to bring her critical faculties to bear: using the analyst papers to build a view as to what constitute best green practices.
4. Once she has 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. Ultimately we'd like 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.
6. Next week, Laura will also begin work on Caroline's request—creating Quadratics pages on the MI wiki. We will do this direct onto the MI wiki, rather than trying it out externally, for information security reasons.

Gavin

Note from Paul to the Unit, Tuesday Week #28

Bill, I mentioned giving some thought to if/how we can help the green issue (we need a better name for a range of environmental services). In brief...

Work streams within business units are pursuing green business issues quite actively. These workstreams are exploiting existing carbon/green knowledge and expertise in order to develop local services such sa GBS' Carbon Management Service. They are working cross-lob but appear to be heavily dependent on consulting-led opportunity. Key people are:

• Gill Hall—GBS Associate Partner for Carbon Management
• Steve Bowden—STG Chief Technology Officer, Green Computing
• Kate Northover—Coordinating Marketing/GBS for Green Issues
• Chris Scott—NEIOT GTS Site & Facilities Mgr
• Iain Burns—GTS Emerging Business Opportunities

I do not claim deep understanding of each of these roles.

On the one hand, it would not be welcome to slow down existing programmes just to catch up with market facts—the market is changing too fast for this. However, complementary MI activity could be:

• track existing analysis and research (tends to be IT-centric), Datamonitor, IDC, Gartner, Ovum, Forrester
• widen scope to identify and evaluate alternative non-IT sources and inform the above people

assess core competitor capability—already under way

• align output/recommendation to core business team need e.g. qualify external PR/materials

At present I'm not sure we're credible enough to influence the agenda. I suggest we do a few simple things well first. In doing this, we may win the opportunity to build more significant research programmes e.g.

• information which enables progression from early adopter customer groups and offerings to broader market segments
• identify innovative ways of investigating new facts and presenting to the marketplace (example from LogicaCMG below)
• identify high growth business opportunity
• assess new entrants / partners etc.

To take things forward, we need to identify a team with whom we can collaborate, jointly review material and take direction:

1. Who should be in this group from the businesses?
2. Who in MI should belong to the accountable team?

Example of a question different from the type we might normally ask, being asked by LogicaCMG:

Note from Gavin to Laura, Tuesday Week #28

Thanks for all you've done so far on the wiki. I've scanned through the wiki pages and suggest the following:

1. No more than one blank line between paragraphs.
   • I tend to find that when in 'Edit' mode, having more than one blank line between paragraphs or sections serves no constructive purpose. There's no need to change the sections you've already created, but we should try to eliminate redundant white space in future pages.
2. When we talk about Fujitsu, we primarily mean Fujitsu Services.
   • The key website is at http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/
   • There is also a joint-venture called Fujitsu Siemens (at http://www.fujitsu-siemens.co.uk/ ) which is of lesser importance.
   • I've changed the name of the page to show that Fujitsu Services is the object of our interest at this stage.
3. As a quick visual check on the degree of completion, I've put an α / β / γ rating on the Vendors page.
   • The rating simply says whether the sections look complete, partly complete or not yet started. It isn't a quality assessment!
   • Feel free to update the ratings yourself. (The easiest way to generate these Greek characters is to copy them from elsewhere on the page!)
   • δ and ε are spare characters for which we'll find a use at a later date.

Thanks again. It looks good.

Progress 2007 Week #27

Bill

Just a quick note to report on what we've done this week.

We've created a wiki on an external site at http://editthis.info/lauraibm/Main_Page to give Laura a safe environment to develop a wiki and her wiki skills from scratch. The site is secured so that no-one can view any pages without the username and password ( ukisa and bedfont respectively). 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.

So far Laura has been copying across the text of the environment-related Web pages of our main competitors. Next week I'll ask her to add a few Indian vendors, as it's possible that environmental concerns may be a differentiator between western and Indian vendors.

So far, the work has been done entirely on open source / freebie software and websites, which means that Laura is acquiring skills that she can use after she leaves IBM. Specifically this week, she has learnt:

• How to create a wiki-based Website from scratch, and
• Various image-processing skills—cropping, reducing and converting to JPG.

I believe that this environmental material is worth keeping in one place, and Laura could possibly develop a niche reputation as the department's 'ecologist'. (Her A-levels in geography and biology should help.) 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?