Purpose and Progress
From Lauraibm
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.
- Do different types of vendors put different levels of effort into environmental issues? (e.g. hardware vs. services vendors)
- Do the Indian vendors do comparatively little?
- 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?)
- What do the analyst firms say?
- What do customers and the markets want?
- Threats: is it possible that the IT industry may come under the same level of attack as the aviation industry has experienced? How should we prepare for this?
