Eddy de Clercq is my kinda guy. A software engineer who works at a Belgian university, Eddy is widely known among his community for his sharp wit and incisive points of view. He makes the kind of connections many miss and tries really hard to live the sustainable life. This from a recent post about bottled water:

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Courtesy of my old mucker James Governor, I see McAfee is leading the charge in greening up its events. Reporting about a recent conference held in Las Vegas, McAfee made sure it was as close to being carbon neutral as possible. By the numbers:

In support of its environmental commitments, McAfee took steps to “green” the event in advance. According to ICF International’s measurement, through a series of event planning decisions and participant education efforts, McAfee reduced the event’s carbon footprint by 16% of its total non-air travel emissions. Specific CO2 emissions savings included:

• 25 metric tons saved by facilitating the sharing of rooms by participants
• 3.2 metric tons and 56,357 gallons of water saved through participation in the hotel’s towel and sheet reuse program
• 0.5 metric tons saved by providing a shuttle for airport and event transfers rather than travel by individual taxicabs
• 0.5 metric tons saved by eliminating bottled water and providing tap water only

“Companies who are committed to sustainability and minimizing their environmental footprint must first understand where their material impact can be made,” said Craig Ebert of ICF International. “For companies in the knowledge economy, often that material impact is in their electricity use, business travel and corporate events. We applaud McAfee for its industry leadership in corporate sustainability by conducting this in-depth measurement project, taking steps to reduce and offset the environmental impact and being transparent in sharing the results with others for the common good.”

Among the overall findings of the formal measurement project of the remaining environmental impact:

• The carbon footprint of the overall event was approximately 1,856 metric tons of CO2, or 1.03 metric tons of CO2 per event attendee
• 90% of the event’s carbon footprint resulted from air travel to and from the event
• Excluding air travel, of the remaining 10% of the event’s carbon footprint, the breakdown was as follows: food (35%), hotel rooms (33%), amenities (19%), facility use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) (5%), solid waste (4%) and the event’s conference center (3%)

MacAfee used carbon offsets to compensate for the travel element, contributing to a reforestation project in Louisiana.

Ironically, James Governor’s Greenmonk is holding an Energy Camp unconference next week - in Las Vegas.

Business travel among software companies is a major contributor to CO2 emissions. One of the ways to overcome this is to organize virtual events. Like the one I recently ‘attended’ along with more than 2,000 SAP employees. Savings amounted to 724,000 km in travel alone for the three day event.

Next week I will be attending a meeting of Business for Social Responsibility in Boston. The meeting will be interesting as it is seeking to develop a framework that looks at the materiality concept as it applies to issues of importance to stakeholders.

One of the more interesting problems comes in finding the balance between what matters to stakeholders and what matters to business. What struck me from the graphic below is that in some cases, there is almost an inverse relationship between stakeholder importance of issues that get plenty of attention such as climate change risk and what influences business. Clearly there is an education process to be undertaken though the question I want answering is whether it is possible to develop software that adequately addresses both dimensions. For instance, data centre usage is high in the agenda but how might software be developed that uses less energy cycles than existing systems?

Immediately afterwards, I go to Orlando to attend SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual customer shindig. I will be taking part in a round table discussion on issues around sustainability, a topic that is taking on increasing importance for companies like Intel, HSBC and others. Alongside this, a wiki has been opened that has the support of SAP, AccountAbility, and RedMonk in association with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), and the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF).

It’s first post refers to the use of Web 2.0 tools in the context of developing policies and actions that not only address issues of importance but do so in a way that allows business to prosper.

Web 2.0 revolutionizes how we regulate business, how we govern business, how we design and implement future business models, and how we innovate. But, there

I was saddened to read Miya Knights report that significant number of UK IT managers are confused or in the dark about the greening of IT. What’s worse is that:

The Datamonitor survey of 245 CIOs and IT managers found over 75 per cent considered eco-friendly computing as an important element in their IT strategy while a further 15 per cent rated it as their top IT priority.

Why should this be worse? If something is top of agenda then you’d have thought that people would know what they’re talking about. In any event, I’d argue that the baseline argument is not about ‘greening’ but sustainability. There is a huge difference. Earlier, Miya reported that:

But most of those with an existing policy (85 per cent) were more likely to outsource IT functionality. Although only 27 per cent insisted on checking the green credentials of a supplier, a further 21 per cent admitted to having no knowledge if such checks were even in place.

“Faced with these findings one has to question the current ethics of outsourcing green IT,” said Antony Young, director of Bell Micro’s services, security and networking divisions.

With respect to Mr Young, it’s not a question of ethics, unless of course he is implying that by outsourcing, UK IT managers would effectively be moving the problem from one place to another. That seems to be the implied assumption in what followed:

“It is also worth remembering that if green IT does become subject to legislation it is highly unlikely that such unregulated outsourcing would be acceptable,” he added. “UK businesses clearly must introduce more vigorous vetting procedures when outsourcing to third party organisations. What is apparent from these findings is that IT departments require a quantifiable green education and structured response.”

Legislation is NOT the answer. I am currently engaged in a project where the notion of sustainability is being baked into ideas around business process software. Business is not going to adopt sustainable measures unless it sees a tangible business benefit. Simply mandating that companies do X or Y is not the answer. You only have to look at the extractive industries to realize that the number one agenda item has not been sustainability but about the extent to which companies can push the boundaries without getting caught.

My group is proposing (among other things) that developing assurance measures that become part of provisioning processes, you encourage the business to measure and assess its sustainability credentials in a constructive and structured manner. Moving forward, we believe that assurance will provide a pathway to external assessment and audit that can usefully adopt techniques designed to assess materiality in the same way that auditors use the term when testing financial statements. Our view is that by looking at sustainability from an end to end process perspective, companies will have a far clearer picture of the impact they have, both directly and indirectly on the resources they consume. We believe this approach will work well in a horizontal fashion across a variety of business processes. However, the real challenge will be in assessing the materiality elements for any particular business. So while it is convenient to pick on IT, it may not be the primary focus in industries where consumption of water (as an example) is a significant ecological drain. Unless your name is Google.

Much has been made of the tie up between Google and Salesforce.com. At first blush the deal has much merit, especially given that Salesforce.com has done a credible job of providing solid integration with Google Apps, and specifically with Gmail, GTalk, GoogleDocs and Spreadsheets. I wonder about the compliance angle.

During yesterday’s dog and pony show in San Francisco, executives from Google were keen to talk up the work Postini has done as providing a solid, secure, data solution for large scale business. Salesforce.com is already seen as a trusted provider for business applications running in the cloud. Where’s the problem?

My analyst colleague Josh Greenbaum has questioned the extent to which Google owns your content, noting that the Terms of Service (ToS) say:

A recent report entitled The State of Green Business, 2008 is packed with facts and figures that make heartening reading for anyone concerned with governance.

I was particularly struck by the laggardly growth in CSR reporting, that despite:

Customers, investors, and stakeholders are demanding increasingly greater accountability and transparency from companies on environmental and social issues. They want to know what companies are, and aren