In recent times, SAP has been woo’ing me down the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) path. To its credit, the company has done a lot of good work in this area, seeking to develop industry alliances and raise awareness of the issues at stake, especially in the area of corporate citizenship. Most recently, James Farrar, who is VP corporate citizenship at SAP and Steve Rochlin, head of Accountability US managed to get a good article on the topic as it relates to Web 2.0 placed at the FT. Among other things, they say:

A decade ago if you brought together a company, an activist non-governmental organisation (NGO), and a government agency, you were guaranteed to create tension. Today, these oddly matched partners generate innovation out of positive, creative tension. Web 2.0 platforms make it easier to build such diverse communities that use different experience and perspective to create innovative solutions.

A couple of days ago, I received an SAP email newletter with the tantalizing headline:
Achieving Corporate Accountability with a Unified Approach to Governance, Risk, and Compliance Webcast. On the webcast David Kasabian, analyst with AMR reckons the market is worth $32 billion per annum. That makes it a good sized market. Holly Roland, VP marketing for GRC solutions at SAP talked extensively about managing the risks in the supply chain - something I’ve talked about elsewhere.

Imagine then my surprise when a June 2008 report from Gartner entitled Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance landed on my digital doorstep that doesn’t list SAP. The company doesn’t appear anywhere although one of its partners, Protiviti does. Marketing ahead of reality, an unfortunate omission or something else? SAP has reached some 1,700 customers with GRC solutions and seen revenues double over the last year.

[Image credit: Gartner Inc.]

PS: I expect to hear a lot more about how the BusinessObjects acquisition is feeding into SAP’s GRC efforts at the forthcoming influencer’s meeting in Boston next month.

I haven’t used a printer from more than three years. Part of that is because I’ve been conducting an experiment to see if I can ‘live in the cloud,’ part of it is because almost everything I do is digital in nature. The only time I really need to print something is when an organization insists on a faxed copy of a document and even that’s becoming quite rare. On those occasions, I drive 20 miles to the nearest place I know where there is a fax machine and make a day of it. It’s not efficient and hardly good use of increasingly scarce hydro-carbons but a good reminder that not everyone has jumped into the digital age.

Even so, I took a sharp intake of breath when I saw a post from my old chum Vinnie Mirchandani, setting out ways by which companies could mitigate their use of ink cartidges. At an alleged $8,000 a gallon, that’s a heck of a price to pay for the pleasure of holding a piece of paper. And that’s before we consider the costs asssociated with manufacturing the catridges and the toxins they produce.

I remember many years ago, Bill Gates saying that Microsoft would become paperless and yet today by all accounts, it uses more paper than ever. In my case it was a conscious decision to ‘just say no.’

Paul Murphy calls foul on the practices conducted by some Wikipedia editors, claiming that in respect of certain topic areas:

What

Last week’s launch of the iPhone seemed to get everyone excited to the point where queues formed early at many stores that quickly ran out of stock. What if you are an early adopter and already had a first generation model? Give it to a sibling? Dump it? What do you do with old cell phones anyway?

Here’s something you could think of doing, courtesy of Suw Charman: donate to your local Oxfam shop. Apart from being a socially repsonsible thing to do, it means that money raised via Oxfam goes to good causes. Another alternative suggested by an AMR analyst is to donate to local battered wives homes. All cell phones can call emergency services so this is a way where your riches can directly benefit those less fortunate.

While on the topic of good causes, my good friend Thomas Otter, ex-SAP and now with Gartner is planning to spend a week in August putting himself through what to me seems like an excruciating amount of pain in an effort to raise money for the Zimbabwe Benefit Foundation. Modern technology allows anyone to donate painlessly. This is one cause I thoroughly recommend. As I said elsewhere:

The pain he will be putting himself is as nothing compared to the pain of those he is supporting. He gets to choose. They don

Along with other edglings, I’m a huge fan of Web 2.0 technologies and especially the frequently borked Twitter. Most folk I know are addicted to Twitter so that despite its many failings, we keep hanging on in the hope that one day, the management will hire a team of engineers that actually knows what it’s doing. That won’t wash in enterprisey land where buyers expect services to be at least fit for purpose and not suffering continuous outages and glitches. This morning for instance, the only way you can reliably see @ replies is to use Summize and enter @username as a search term.

Anyhoo - some enterprising people are thinking of building an enterprise class Twitter clone - well not a clone exactly, an enhanced version that works for enterprise. What makes this project interesting is that it arose almost spontaneously as a result of this Plurk conversation that spilled into Twitter. I found out about it because a person I was searching upon in Twitter mentioned it.

It turns out that a number of the players are people I know through my involvement with SAP’s community network as an un-remunerated mentor. (Disclosure: I do some paid work for SAP’s business process expert community.)

The other day, I wrote a post about Carbon Accounting as articulated by BT for the SAP Community Network:

I am dismayed. While I appreciate the efforts being made by companies like BT to promote the notion of solving sustainability issues, imposition of what are arbitrary standards and methods is not the way to go about it. In looking at BT’s approach I note they are attempting to apply a model that can be summarized from this reporting in Computing:

Developed by BT director of sustainable development Dr Chris Tuppen, the Climate Stabilisation Intensity (CSI) model links data on a firm’s carbon emissions and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), to global emission reduction goals recommended by the UN, to work out an appropriate emission reduction target for the firm.

The nub of the problem lays in the fact that it is almost impossible to arbitrate across industries on standards of this kind without an understanding of the different inputs and outputs that constitute a particular carbon footprint. At the same time, what matters to one company may not matter to another when it comes to discussing carbon emission reduction effectiveness. For example, if the cost of adding solar power requires a payback that’s outside the company’s usual rate of investment return do you do it for the sake of going green? The answer to that is clearly ‘no.’

It might instead be more effective to lobby local politicians to pressure solar companies into finding ways to reduce their costs so that you can justify the investment.As I say plenty and often, carbon emission reduction may be a top C-level item in boardroom discussions, but it has to take place within the context of an economic environment.

I have an upcoming trip to the UK which involves going to both Bangor and Leeds. There are two of us on the trip. Trying to figure out the most cost effective way to manage the trip is hard enough but then I also need to factor in the carbon emissions element. Here’s how it goes:

• Booking with RyanAir from Granada to Liverpool comes in at

Two entirely unrelated posts caught my attention today. Tom Raftery asks whether SaaS saves greenhouse gases. Quick as a flash, Chris Yeh from PBWiki does some back of fag packet calculations and comes up with the startling conclusion:

That means PBwiki could be saving the world up to 585,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or the equivalent of driving an SUV around the world 50,000 times!

Tom is sceptical of the assertion, qualifying it to say:

Now, obviously not all 500,000 hosted PBWiki

This article about ‘green explosives‘ caught my eye. The author takes a sideways look at the issue noting that:

If you’re worried about the environment but still need to blow people up, a new class of nitrogen-based bomb materials is for you. Popular explosives like TNT and HMX react to form nitrogen oxides when detonated, the major culprits behind smog and acid rain. This is a big no-no if you’re the type of warmonger who drives a hybrid tank, obviously, so weapons experts at the University of Munich devised an alternatives that are cleaner, more stable, and even more powerful than those other explosives.

Apparently an alternative use would be as rocket fuel.

In the last 10 days I’ve been either in Boston or Orlando at events sponsored by SAP. At both events, representatives from a number of NGOs were present in part because sustainability is high on SAP’s business and product agenda. While I am aware of Web 2.0 style projects at some NGO’s those more closely aligned to business have had little exposure to these technologies. It always seems to be the way but by the time the NGO attendees reached Orlando, it seems they had been well and truly bitten by the Web 2.0 bug.

In one post on the OpenAccountability wiki (invitation required but open to those genuinely interested in sustainability in IT) developed by Redmonk and Greenmonk, Steve Rochlin, head of AccountAbility North America said:

I’m just returning from the high of a stimulating, provocative, challenging and altogether mind-expanding dialogue at SAPPHIRE Orlando.

Graham Baxter of International Business Leaders’ Forum, in comments to Steve’s breathless post added:

So we have established that there are at least two categories of application for web 2.0 in the corporate responsibility space. The first, is perhaps the easiest to understand - as a new tool to drive responsible business behaviour. The new Guardian post (thanks Derek) shows the potantial of this enabling a whole new group of people (community) to get active. It begs, again, the question of legitimacy of the community. But I understand that that isn’t really the point - its a group with a voice which is sometimes loud - so companies had better work out how to listen and respond.

For me though, as I said in the discussion the really interesting part is where web 2.0 can enable new and innovative ideas and create new opportunities for entrepreneurs to pick up and run with which in turn address the pressing and seemingly overwhelming challenges we face. Are there solid examples of this happening yet?

I can understand why NGO’s and other campaigning organizations get excited at the potential for these technologies. However, they need to understand that business needs convincing that sustainability has a bottom line value otherwise they simply won’t play. In this context, while they may think Web 2.0 technology gives them a bigger foghorn, that doesn’t necessarily translate into corporate actions. My sense from the Boston meeting is that NGOs see partnership as the way forward in helping business define those profitable measures that contribute to a more sustainable future. But again, NGOs will only get invited to the table if they can offer concrete help and don’t try throwing their campaigning weight around. It’s a delicate balance and one that’s not easy to achieve. How for example do campaigning NGOs sit down with polluters in an atmosphere of trust? Or how might NGO’s advise business in responding to the recent report from The Independent that asserts:

More than seven in 10 voters insist that they would not be willing to pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change, according to a new poll.

These and other significant challenges have to be met as part of the framework around which business is encouraged to adopt sustainable policies and actions.

It is perhaps paradoxical that the technologies we now have - especially wikis and community building solutions - can serve both sides of the sustainability debate and both together. The OpenAccountability wiki is one step in what I think is the right direction where business managers in technology companies, tasked with sustainability issues, can ‘meet’ and thrash out the issues in a safe environment. That’s a debate I hope to jump into in Berlin, where we have the second round of SAPPHIRE, SAP’s set of global customer conferences.

As an aside, Max Gladwell has an excellent post covering 10 ways to change the world through social media. While I’m not a fan of the term ’social’ in the business context, Max provides a solid rundown of tools that can be usefully applied towards developing awareness and action.