Goals

From Lauraibm

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 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. 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.

• The wiki 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.
• 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?

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: