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.’  With more applications going online into the SaaS world, I don’t see the justification for keeping paper copies of everything we do. Perhaps now is the time for business to dust off those old document management strategy papers and re-evaluate the need for printers, the paper and ink they consume.

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

What’s going on in both cases is that sub-groups of the general community have captured these niches and are now using Wikipedia as a marketing tool for their viewpoints - and while that’s expected and reasonable for agenda sites like groklaw or dailykos, it’s fundamentally inappropriate in a site nominally dedicated to the provision of objective information.

As many readers will know, if you do a Google search on a particular topic, the chances are high that a Wikipedia entry will be close to or at the top of the list. If by clicking on a Wikipedia link, you are directed to fundamentally distorted information, then Paul’s assertion has reasonable foundation. Hardly the wisdom of crowds that Wikipedia promises. Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins thinks Murphy’s argument - or rather its extension to suggest the collapse of democracy via social media is disingenuous:

Modern democracy, at least in the form practiced commonly on websites like Wikipedia tend to include what can basically be likened to ’super-delegates.’ There’s editors in charge that will often over-rule the concensus opinion as well as roving mobs will look for articles created by large communities with little influence within the ecosystem of Wikipedia who will exert their sway to remove documentation (the entire tree of RantMedia and Sean Kennedy related articles were subject to this effect a year or two ago). This social structure Peter-MacIntosh-Geisha-Expert is more akin to something slightly more organized than anarchy (tribalism, perhaps). In any event, this isn’t pandemic to all social media and democraticly crowd-sourced websites.

I don’t think Mark’s argument stands up to scrutiny. As mentor in SAP’s community and as one of the early (and most vocal) members of the Irregulars, I know for myself how small groups and individuals can wield power out of all proportion to their number. Sometimes their thoughts and actions are plain wrong. I also know that individual blog entries can have consequences far beyond their original intent.

The truly worrying thing is that we seem to be substituting objective thinking for whatever we find on the Internet. I’m pretty sure that’s true for the current generation of teenagers who’ve known little else except Google and who, through no fault of their own, will be drawn naturally to Wikipedia. That is because of the ranking weight Google’s algorithms apply to Wikipedia entries. To me, it is a commercial form of mutual masturbation driven by AdWords and an obsession with page views. It is ironic for instance that when typing in ‘wisdom of crowds’ into the Firefox 3 address bar that the Wikipedia entry was served up to me.

As Andrew Keen has consistently warned, we will be left with truthiness and not truth. I am one of the few bloggers I know who believes there is a great deal to be considered in what Andrew says. His latest article, which pokes fun at Tim O’Reilly, the person who foisted Web 2.0 on the rest of us makes the point that:

And if you really want to read about O’Reilly, then read his novels. There’s an appropriately long entry on Web 2.0 — O’Reilly’s latest and greatest work of fiction.

Keen is of course speaking ironically and in his own words, he remains a professional (if incredibly articulate) troublemaker. But people believe what they read on the Internet, often without fact checking for themselves. (sic) Today, it is all about opinion with little attention to the detailed underpinnings of fact that are necessary to make sense of what is being read.

Is it any wonder then that in a world where the rules have failed us, that in the US at least, there is a call to reconsider the implications of applying value judgment under FAS157 for compliance purposes? Putting aside the collective squeals emanating from Wall Street that forms the basis for this particular siren call, we simply don’t have the people sufficiently grounded in understanding the technologies that deliver information. And it is only likely to get worse before it gets better.

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’t.

And while we’re at it, it’s worth mentioning SAP. Its community of more than 1.5 million code heads and business process experts creates blog posts and wiki content at a phenomenal rate. Each piece of individual activity on the SAP Community attracts a certain number of points. This year those points are going towards a specific target. When the number of points earned reaches 2.5 million, SAP will donate €100,000 to the UN World Food Programme. The more points, the more money given. If the total reaches 3.5 million points then SAP will give €200,000. Apart from being a laudable objective, the knowledge created inside the SAP community is an invluable resource to those looking for help across a broad range of topics.

Disclosure: I am a mentor in the SAP community. It is a pro bono engagement. I create some content for SAP’s BPX community on a paid basis.

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.)  One of them requested I join the project as they needed some business use case scenarios as a guide to the kind of functional requirements the design team will need. I’m no nerd (though I can code a bit of PHP and a fair bit of CSS) but I do understand how business processes work so I signed up for what is now known as ESME.

Serendipitously, around the same time, I was scheduled to talk with Aaron Williams who manages some of the advanced technologies being worked upon at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. We were due to discuss Collaboration Workspaces, a Jive Clearspace based platform that I have used in the past and which is being enhanced by Williams’ team for internal use.

As part of the discussion,Williams mentioned the magic ‘w’ word - widgets, saying that CW will include an Adobe Connect widget at some stage in the next couple of months or so. That’s cool in its own right because it means CS members can schedule and hodl conference calls with all the shared desktop features that Connect offers. I casually mentioned that a team is in the design phase for ESME and asked whether Williams is up for ideas like that which can be incorporated into his initiative. ‘Why yes, even if they’re really crazy ideas,’ came back the reply. W00t! How often can you say that about a behomoth like SAP?

Why should this matter? CW and ESME are firmly in the Web 2.0 camp, offering facilities that enable collaboration and which can be used as part of informal networks designed to solve specific problems.  But; context without process is a waste of time. When problem solving, you still need to be able to have those contextual thoughts expressed through business process - in other words you need to be able to act upon the outcomes. The way I’m looking at this is as an environment that allows business people, business process experts, who may also be technical analysts and developers to come together in a way that collapses time to value for customers. Adding in ESME allowscommunication to takeon an extra dimension that might prove useful in cases where near immediate answers and actions are required. An example might be clarification around policy documents.

ESME is a fascinating idea which is currently considered a ‘thought experiment.’ Its fascination comes from the fact I’ve heard plenty of talk about such projects among Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle (MISO)_ people, but not seen anything get under way. ESME will be entered for consideration as a potential short listed solution for TechEd DemoJam. If successful, it will be interesting to discover how just how far such a service can go and whether it will be possible to get a widget into CW. That only leaves the BPX’ers to get enthusiastic about the project to amplify use cases so they are more ‘real’ than the ones we have at the moment. It will be an interesting ride.

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 €219
• Flying with Jet2.com from Malaga to Leeds-Bradford costs €470
• The train from Liverpool to Leeds costs £37.80 (single) while Bangor to Leeds is £44.00. I’ve not factored in Liverpool to Bangor because it is possible we can get a ride for that part of the journey, assuming we fly into Liverpool and go to Bangor first. I could hire a car at Liverpool which would come in at around £100 plus fuel for the time we will be in the UK.
• If we travel from Granada then long stay parking works out at €40 but is free in Malaga but the journey to Malaga is an extra 130km in both directions which will cost roughly €28 and involve an extra hour’s driving each way. If we fly to Liverpool then on the return we either book a hotel for possibly 4 hours sleep at a cost of £65 or hang out in the airport and conserve some cash. Any thought of getting sleep on a RyanAir flight is wishful thinking. Returning from Leeds means a cab ride costing aorund £13-15 as there is no reasonable public transport option that allows us to reach the airport for check-in.

It seems to me that which ever way we organize the trip, we’ll end up with roughly the same cost because the savings in flight fares in going to Liverpool will be swallowed up by additional costs elsewhere. I’m not sure we gain anything from flying to Leeds because we still have the problem of making the Bangor journey. I’m not convinced there is any real difference in carbon emissions cost as the flight times are virtually identical and the train journey times are not so far apart as to make a demonstrable difference. I’m prepared to be flexible if I could only work out the best combination of travel methods.

What I really want is a service where I can input those parameters and have it spit out the optimal combination of cost, time and carbon emissions load so I can then assess the best way to make the journey. Unfortunately, I can’t find a site that does this. Surely if we’re going to get serious about traveling in a cost effective yet least harmful manner, then a service of this kind makes sense? Today, we have discrete aggregator services like Kayak, that focus on flights or Travelocity that only factor flights, hotels and car hire. And yes, I also want SMS notification in case there are any likely delays. Some might argue that is good enough but I’m far from convinced. I’m reasonably certain I’m not an edge case on this one so if anyone does know a service that provides the information I’m trying to find then I’d love to hear about it.

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’s are replacing an individual server but say 100 PBWikis replaces one server, or 1,000. That’s still somewhere between 600 and 6,000 tons of CO2 PBWiki are saving the planet per annum.

That’s still pretty impressive but like Tom, I’d like to see harder numbers. Elsewhere, Simon Wardley, whose thinking is generally both out of the box yet spot on talks about finding new ways to shed extra pounds.

Anyway for reasons of vanity I’ve decided to do something about my additional mass. Having caused environmental damage gaining it, I’d rather minimise the environmental cost of removing it. Whilst one obvious option is to spend time down the gym, I was wondering whether anyone has done a study of how much additional co2 such pointless exercise causes. I say pointless because there are usually no additional benefits to gym exercise other than the exercise itself.

What I’m looking for is exercise with some form of point, such as an allotment or forestry work or volunteer gardening. However, I’d still be interested to know what each kilo of my additional mass means in unnecessary and unsociable environmental damage caused.

That seems like an eminently good way to look at the problem of exercise that yields a net-net positive outcome. Until I read Simon’s post, I was thinking about investing in a WiiFit. But then I’d also have to calculate the amount of energy I’d be consuming by running the Wii. Ugh!

It seems that sometimes, you just can’t win. Unless of course you’re prepared to consider Simon’s option.

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.  While struggling to find any meaningful justification for the invention of ever more powerful exploseives, it makes me think about another set of vague connections. Alfred Nobel was both an inventor of dynamite who ended up giving his fortune away in a supreme act of philanthropy. There is a certain paradox in those events. On the one hand we have the invention of something meant for industry that has become much more closely associated with destruction. On the other, a enduring gift that retains its prestige to this day.

Could we by any chance make the same connections between Bill Gates and his mastery in beating out competition, in the process having his company dubbed ‘evil’ yet bequething his wealth to a philanthropic foundation that will no doubt benefit for years to come?

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.