Sustainability standards ... unifying several standards into one integrated sustainability standard

How Are Companies Putting Sustainability Standards to Work?

As Joel Makower highlighted back in February of this year, sustainability standards, particularly those that represent the broad spectrum of indicators within sustainability, are needed and becoming increasingly common.

But the unanswered question is this: Does a company's investment in implementing a sustainability standard have tangible business benefits? The question remains no matter whether a company is exploring a product certification, operational system, investor ranking or set of supplier requirements.

To try to dig up an answer to this increasingly pressing question, I set out to speak to a few industry leaders about the sustainability standards they had implemented. In defining the term "standard" in this realm, I included product certifications, sustainability rankings, operation standards and supplier standards.

What I found was that, regardless of whether the company's experience in standardization was focused on the supply chain, on consumer-facing green labels or on broad industry rankings, some key themes emerged:

  1. The usual reason for creating or utilizing a standard was to clarify a fuzzy concept and create differentiation;
  2. The flip side of this is that standardization begets commoditization, and in some cases it isn't clear if these standards are a good use of scarce resources and attention;
  3. We should beware of trendy "declarations" or rankings that may not truly demonstrate environmental or social benefit.

Why Utilize Standards?

When a company creates or utilizes an industry standard, it requires time and financial investment. A champion inside the company has to make the business case to the organization's leadership that the standard will be accretive to the brand or produce some beneficial business result.

The champion then has to learn or teach the standard to affected stakeholders within, and outside, of the organization. The standard then has to be implemented, and product or operational changes made.

Invariably, there is then marketing cost to explain the standard or communicate benefits to consumers or other stakeholders. A company should also be transparent about the status of a standard's implementation within the company -- and its value chain.

This seems like a lot of work. So why bother?

As anyone working in sustainability or corporate social responsibility can attest, explaining what it means to offer a "sustainable", "green", "responsible" or otherwise environmentally or socially beneficial product or service is an uphill battle. These words have many interpretations. When trying to communicate intentions, requirements and accomplishments -- specific, measurable clarity is essential.

Next page: How Clorox, Bonterra Vineyards and AMD Put Standards to Work

For instance, when Clorox launched its Green Works line in 2008, it recognized that there were 5,000 new products each year that call themselves natural. Consumers needed a way to sort through the claims and understand what they were really buying.

Clorox first partnered with the Sierra Club to review its formulas and then earned third party certifications, in 2009 from the EPA through its Design for the Environment (DfE) program, and in 2010 obtained the Natural Products Association's Natural Home Care standard.

"We sought out third-party certification for our Green Works product line, because we felt this helped build trust from the consumer," said David Kargas, Sr. Group Manager, Public Relations at The Clorox Company. "Third party certifications like the ones from the EPA and the Natural Products Association help give consumers peace of mind that products that say they are natural truly are."

Ann Thrupp, Manager of Sustainability and Organic Development at Fetzer/Bonterra Vineyards, feels that USDA Organic is still a differentiator in the wine industry -- and in Northern California is relatively inexpensive to achieve.

Organic methods also contribute to product quality, and the certification (which Fetzer has held for 20 years for the Bonterra brand) is so intertwined with the brand that it would be difficult to tease out the benefit of the certification from the demand for the Bonterra brand itself. The Fetzer winery also is certified by the California Certified Sustainable Winegrowing program (CCSW).

Although the benefits of that particular certification program are less clear in the market currently, Thrupp commented, some buyers are paying attention to sustainability standards as well, so it makes sense for their company to have third-party verification of their track record of using comprehensive sustainable approaches.

Another example of the benefit of standards for clarification is in the supply chain. "Standardization begets commoditization," says Tim Mohin, Director of Corporate Responsibility for AMD. "And while I don't know if the industry is ready for broad sustainability standardization, it is very helpful for areas that are complex, such as in the supply chain, where conformance is necessary."

Does adherence to standards allow companies to reap the benefits of sustainability?

Mohin points out, though, that the commoditization that accompanies broad sustainability standards is not necessarily conducive to business advantage. "The alignment of CSR with specific strategies, operations and products of a given company almost defies commoditization. Creating differentiation can create specific business benefits."

Next page: The Walmart (and Kaiser Permanente) Example

It seems that being the first to the table, even simply within an industry, can be that differentiator and potentially drive costs out of system. For example, purchasing decisions made by Kaiser Permanente's Environmentally Preferable Purchasing program in 2010 alone will result in $26 million in annual purchasing and operational savings, including 5 million Kwh of energy conserved, 300 tons of plastic waste eliminated, and substantial reductions in consumption of hazardous metals and toxic chemicals.

Says Rachael Baker, Environmental Supply Chain Manager at Kaiser Permanente, "Our program clearly signals the market with our purchasing requirements and contributes to cost-neutral or cost-saving decisions. We then work hard to document our savings and share these success stories with others because we can influence suppliers to create healthier products ever more rapidly if additional buyers incorporate similar requirements."

This takeup by others in the industry is evidenced through Kaiser Permanente's Sustainability Scorecard. Since late 2009, this scorecard has required detailed environmental data disclosure by all of Kaiser Permanente's suppliers of medical equipment and products (representing $1 billion in annual spending) and is now being adopted by Kaiser Permanente's key supply chain partner and others in the health care industry to influence $10 billion in annual purchasing.

Other company-led leading standards such as Walmart's scorecard and other supply chain initiatives (said to have derived $140 million in supply chain savings for WalMart in 2009 alone) have also demonstrated that there are real dollars to be gained in creating and implementing standards, particularly in the supply chain.

On the product side, I asked Clorox whether they felt the use of the DfE label or other certification bought them market share. The sense was that the real market driver for GreenWorks was the decision to focus on being a cost-competitive product for the mainstream -- one that worked just as well as less environmentally friendly products. The certification itself may not have been the market driver, but it was necessary in order to maintain credibility and therefore have the right to derive revenue in the mainstream market as a differentiated product.

Are Standards Meaningful?

Where there is a great need for standardization in sustainability, or at least transparency, Mohin argues, is in sustainability ratings such as DJSI, FTSE4Good, Corporate Social Responsibility Index, Newsweek, Corporate Responsibility magazine and many, many others. Recent efforts such as those by SustainAbility to "rate the raters" help clarify what these ratings really tell us. There is a wide variety of criteria and entrance requirements (including, in some cases, a "pay-to-play" model) in the ratings world that brings to question the validity of many of the rating schemes.

Tim Mohin of AMD and I also had an interesting conversation about the state of sustainability standards, particularly as they relate to consumer-facing products, and how helpful they really are in reducing risk to society and the environment.

There is a movement to say that products are "free of" some chemical or other perceived hazard. Mohin calls this the "X-free movement." "But any toxicologist will tell you that hazard x exposure = risk. We are spending millions on the hazard part, and are doing much less to understand exposures or explain to consumers what the real risks are."

I recently gave a presentation with my colleague Julie Panko of ChemRisk on chemical footprinting of products [PDF]. This very concept was explored as an extension of our understanding about the true lifecycle impact of products. We cannot simply extrapolate a products' impact on society, the environment, or any individual, family or community by doing an LCA or claiming that the product is free of a certain chemical.

So in this sense, standards are not always helpful in determining true sustainability impact -- particularly when it comes to products. So what is an appropriate response for a company, given this reality?

"We have to be proactive in the face of uncertain science", says Mohin. "For instance, radio frequency of electronics is a hot issue right now. There is a lack of science and information, and the science that exists is conflicting. What if this changes? If there is a risk, we want to be the first to know."

Ann Thrupp at Fetzer/Bonterra raises another important point. "One of the biggest dilemmas in food is that there are a huge number of sustainability certifications -- and no one can agree on what they should be. Consumers get sick and tired of the confusion. For instance, a group effort like the Sustainability Consortium is good in that there is collaboration, but the group can't reach any kind of consensus. So efforts like this may ultimately be a waste of time. It is so hard to define sustainability -- it is contextual and involves continual improvement. Standards don't allow for that."

The Bottom Line

So it seems that where a standard exists or can be created, it can lend credibility and simplification to complex problems such as supply chain compliance, and sometimes even drive cost savings. There is potential to differentiate your product through a standard especially if you are leading your industry in doing so.

But simply adhering to a standard or certifying won't always create value, and the standard it isn't an end in itself. The end is in improving environmental outcomes and safety for humans and other living beings. And in that quest, it pays to be proactive; and to spend precious sustainability development resources on those areas that will have most impact.


The importance and usefulness of a CSR report

Why CSR Reports Are a Useful Tool for Greening Your Business


How CEOs view Sustainability

Read more here for what CEOs think about sustainability. --> http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-un-global-compact-reports.aspx

An Inside Look at How CEOs View Sustainability

Many business leaders have approached us giving markedly different assessments of the opportunities they see and the challenges they face since last year's CEO study on sustainability by the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and Accenture.

It is clear that there is no unified view of sustainability, let alone a single snapshot of progress. There are real differences in attitudes, approaches and obstacles from sector to sector. What is clear, however, is that CEOs believe environmental, social and governance issues are becoming increasingly material to business performance and future success, and a growing number of companies are looking at the growth and innovation opportunity it might promise.

Today, Georg Kell, UNGC executive director, joins me and Sander van 't Noordende, Accenture's group chief executive of management consulting, as we unveil seven industry deep-dive studies based on the most comprehensive CEO survey on sustainability in business to date, spanning 766 CEOs across the globe.

We are launching these studies on Sustainability 24, a global online experience which brings together hundreds of leaders from the private and public sectors for a series of debates and discussions on business and sustainable development.

There's no surprise that, at this relatively early stage for more commercially driven sustainability at scale, most industries see the main opportunity in enhanced trust, brand and reputation. Fully 85 percent of banking CEOs, and 75 percent of those in consumer goods, report that enhanced brand, trust and reputation will be an important opportunity presented by sustainability over the next five years.

Significantly, we are also beginning to see sustainability issues reshaping demand across industries, leading CEOs to perceive their response to these challenges as a core part of their growth and innovation agenda. Seventy-nine percent of consumer goods CEOs, for example, see the consumer as a primary stakeholder in driving their action on sustainability: Consumer electronics companies Philips and Siemens now view a significant proportion of their revenues driven by products and services which help consumers address their own environmental impact.

Similarly, 67 percent of automotive CEOs, and 61 percent of those in banking, report an important role for the consumer in shaping their response to sustainability challenges: For the automotive sector, consumer demand for new mobility solutions will provide new waves of growth, and banks' response to sustainability challenges will play an integral role in rebuilding public trust in business.

Our industry analysis suggests that some sectors may be ahead of the pack when it comes to integrating sustainability into core business. Eighty percent of utilities CEOs, for example, report their company has embedded metrics to track sustainability performance, ahead of the cross-industry average of 64 percent. Similarly, 83 percent of CEOs in the energy sector and 81 percent of those in infrastructure say their company measures both positive and negative impacts of their activities on sustainability outcomes, a finding which suggests sustainability performance management capabilities are beginning to take root in leading industries.

Perhaps most interesting is the clear performance gap that has opened up between ambition and execution in the integration of sustainability. For example, while many CEOs recognize that a true commercially driven approach to sustainability can only be achieved by instilling the right knowledge, skills, attitudes and behavior at every level of the organization, companies are not meeting their ambition with practical action. Ninety-five percent of automotive executives believe that companies should invest in enhanced training of managers to integrate sustainability into strategy and operations, but just 52 percent report that their company already does so.

What can we conclude from this rich seam of data? A growing number of CEOs indicate that sustainability is becoming part of their innovation and growth agenda.

And while most CEOs are placing sustainability at the core of their strategies, many are struggling with execution. As we demonstrate today with the participants in Sustainability 24, cross-industry conversations are more common in sustainability than in most other business areas, and we believe that executives in every sector can learn from others as they turn ambition into action on the journey to a new era of sustainability.


Why the CIO Should Be Your Sustainability Champion

Why the CIO Should Be Your Sustainability Champion

By Mark Greenlaw
Created 2011-08-03 04:45

A recovering economy, rising energy costs and increased energy consumption are driving the need for a more environmentally conscious organization. But who is the best qualified person to lead the charge for a greener, more sustainable business?

While some of the world's largest companies have established the position of Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), many companies have yet to identify a point person for their sustainability efforts. When these companies look to fill the CSO role, they might want to consider looking in an unlikely place: the office of the CIO.

Across many industries, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) may be a natural choice to lead corporate-wide sustainability initiatives. And for those companies that already have CSOs, CIOs are well positioned to partner with CSOs to ensure their success.

As green IT has expanded from buying more energy-efficient servers and data centers, to finding ways to optimize lighting, monitor green house emissions and even implement new technologies to improve business processes, the CIO's role has expanded to encompass innovative strategies that deliver cost savings and energy efficiencies across the company.

The CIO is ideally positioned to work on corporate sustainability initiatives. The CIO already works with every department within a corporation and understands how to optimize the business processes that make the organization work. IT is tasked with eliminating waste and inefficiency within these everyday processes and, in turn, can work to eliminate waste and inefficiency in energy and resource use.

IT is often equipped to do address enterprise-wide change initiatives, such as launching a sustainability program, having built that experience leading transformational initiatives such as ERP and CRM implementations.

Technology such as online portals, video conferencing and remote, mobile access make telecommuting feasible and reduce the need for business travel, thus minimizing the company's carbon footprint. Efficient use of technology can also dramatically reduce the use of paper, which is both costly and a drain on staff time.

Additionally, application portfolio rationalization reduces the need for servers and associated hardware, further minimizing the organization's carbon emissions. This broader view of green IT goes far beyond data center operations. By leveraging IT capabilities to streamline business processes and reduce waste, it can deliver maximum environmental and cost-reduction benefits.

How the CIO can make your CSR reports more valuable

But sustainability encompasses much more than just the environmental impact of a business. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), considered to be the gold standard in sustainability reporting, defines sustainability as a triumvirate that not only encompasses the company's environmental impacts, but also its economic and social impacts.

In addition to environmental performance indicators, the GRI framework addresses how a company treats its employees, addresses customer needs, impacts local communities, and acts in an ethical manner on dimensions such as its competitive practices, anti-corruption, human rights, child labor, and diversity. This triple play of sustainability balances the needs of the people, planet and the company's profits to create long-term shareholder value.

The idea of operating in a sustainable way, and being able to report on it, is becoming increasingly engrained in the way companies conduct business. In 2010, the number of companies with corporate social responsibility (CSR) information on their websites jumped to 81 percent from 75 percent the previous year. In 2010, nearly 1,800 organizations used the GRI's framework in a published sustainability report.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of organizations are publishing company rankings based on their sustainability measurements, including the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, the CRD Analytics Global 1000 Sustainable Performance Leaders and FTSE4 Group's FTSE4Good Index Series.

As a result, sustainability reporting has become a key differentiator for businesses.

This trend towards increased disclosure and reporting leads to one of the most important roles for the CIO and IT in a company's sustainability journey: implementing new frameworks, strategies, technologies and tracking and reporting tools to help measure and manage a sustainability program.

IT has a vital role in gathering information, creating capabilities and tracking progress against these goals. Through developing the integrative technology that can monitor and collect data and analyze the company's sustainability performance, IT has the ability to chart performance and make recommendations in order to maximize efficiency.

No matter the motivation behind companies beginning to look at the sustainability efforts of their organization, the growing trend of setting sustainability goals and tracking against them has undoubtedly led to more sustainability conscious organizations worldwide.

Using the tools and expertise of this naturally tech-savvy department, companies can appeal to the needs of all its stake-holders, enhancing their social impact while minimizing their environmental footprint, and driving down cost and inefficiency.

The CIO can often help organizations broaden their sustainability efforts to cover the environmental, economic and social impacts, leveraging cross-functional relationships across the company to ensure the success of these initiatives. So the next time your organization thinks about who's going to lead the sustainability charge, consider looking to the office of the CIO.

For more information, please see the Cognizant paper "Beyond Green" The Triple Play of Sustainability." [PDF]


Why UPS Takes Its Role as a Green Supply Chain Seriously

Ninth SR? Amazing!!!

Water footprinting measured using WBCSD's Global Water Tool

3rd party assurance and carbon footprint data verification

GRI 3.1 Guidelines adherence


Why UPS Takes Its Role as a Green Supply Chain Seriously

Late last week, United Parcel Service published its ninth annual sustainability report. As has been the case with UPS for some time, each successive report finds the company digging in deeper and broader in terms of measuring its impacts.

This year is no different: In addition to continuing to report detailed data on its carbon footprint and energy use, UPS has stepped it up another level to report its water impacts for the first time, using the WBCSD's water footprinting tool to assess how much of its global operations are at risk from water scarcity.

"We've always had a thought process that said that at the foundation of our sustainability program we've got to understand our numbers," Scott Wickers, UPS's first Chief Sustainability Officer, said in an interview.

Expanding on the mindset that drives UPS's CSR reporting, Lynnette McIntire, the company's director of corporate reputation management, said: "We are the supply chain [for our customers], and often the scope 3 emissions for our supply chain. It's our philosophy that if any company wants to improve their impact, they have to know the numbers."

The numbers in this year's report show a company that continues to improve the efficiency of its operations -- even though emissions are still on the rise.

The chart below shows how emissions in all three scopes of UPS's operations have changed since 2009's report. Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions from UPS's operations, Scope 2 emissions comes from the company's purchase of electricity, and Scope 3 emissions are from the company's own supply chain.

Figure 1

As you can see, Scope 1 emissions are slightly higher, Scope 2 are slightly lower, and Scope 3 emissions are up significantly -- a change, the report notes, that's due to UPS gathering data on five of 15 categories included in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's Scope 3 reporting standard. The areas of UPS's supply chain that added the most carbon to its footprint in 2010 were:

• “upstream” emissions associated with extraction, production, and transportation of fuels consumed by UPS (1.18 million metric tonnes of CO2e emissions);
• emissions associated with employee commuting (1.65 million metric tonnes); and
• emissions resulting from electricity and natural gas use by franchisees of The UPS Store (0.05 million metric tonnes).

Another set of data shows how UPS is improving the efficiency of its operations; even if emissions are inching slightly higher, the intensity -- as measured by the number of gallons needed to deliver each package -- is steadily shrinking, from .127 gallons per package in 2007 to .117 in 2010.

figure 2

Among the other notable inclusions in this year's CSR report, UPS is reporting for the first time its global water consumption and the water intensity of its operations.

The data was developed using the World Business Council on Sustainable Development's (WBCSD) Global Water Tool, which was launched in 2007 to help companies identify where they're most at risk from water scarcity.

Scott Wicker said that, even though UPS is not what most people would think of as a water-intensive company, water is a big environmental issue that the world has to address as soon as possible.

"Everyone has an obligation to be cognizant of their impacts," Wicker said. "We've used the [WBCSD] tool to see in what locations we have facilities where water is a bigger issue, and then we're taking action in those areas."

Wicker said that UPS operations in water-scarce areas, like at company headquarters in Atlanta, can do things like wash cars without water and recycle greywater to flush toilets as ways to reduce their water footprint.

Beyond the data contained in the report, UPS's report itself is worth noting. The company is one of a small number that has gotten third-party assurance -- from Deloitte & Touche -- for the data contained in the report. And UPS also took an extra step on this point and had their carbon footprint separately assured by the Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS), which verified that the company's carbon footprint is what UPS calculated.

In addition to third-party assurance, UPS is reporting to the Global Reporting Initiative's new 3.1 guidelines; Lynnette McIntire said UPS was the first company to follow those new guidelines.

The third-party assurance and GRI compliance make UPS's report a rarity in the CSR world -- though likely not for long.

"Anyone who's not doing [these things] today will be doing them soon," Wicker said. "It's all about being transparent, having a good, accurate rendering of your impacts to the environment -- it makes you more credible."

McIntire, who was the editor of this year's report, added: "One of the things we've been trying to do is in terms of providing context around the actions we do, and talking about the ultimate impact of that, not just within the walls of our own operation, how we're impacting the planet, our customers."

Both Wicker and McIntire repeatedly stressed UPS's role as the supply chain for their customers; and with green supply chains being a hot-button topic for companies in all industries, UPS is in a way just getting out ahead of what more and more of their customers will be asking for in the coming years.

"We're a part of their business model," Wicker said, "and we want to help them be more sustainable."

"At the end of the day," he added later, "this book is for them, and we want to make sure that we're meeting their expectations."

As we see in almost every company's progression of sustainability reporting, each year's report brings a deeper dive as well as a broader reach. For UPS, that will hold true. Wicker, who started in this role just five months ago, said that a big part of his job will be taking UPS to the next level of managing and communicating sustainability.

For next year's report, Wicker predicts that it will be focused more on how UPS is spreading sustainability throughout the organization. The company has recently identified key functions in the organization -- including sales, marketing, procurement, HR, communications and engineering -- and assigned directors of sustainability for each of those functions.

The results of the first efforts from those new sustainability directors will no doubt be front-and-center in next year's report.

"We know that we're going to get better," Wicker said. "We want to make sure that this is a great place to showcase what we're doing."


Why Sharing Even the Messiest Sustainability Story is a Good Idea

I love this article a lot. In the literature, we seldom find failure stories or how organisations share their complex journey towards sustainability. Such stories (be it successful, failure, or on-going) would help others to understand the complexity there is in the emergence and the shaping of eco-sustainability field.

Why Sharing Even the Messiest Sustainability Story is a Good Idea

This article originally appeared on BSR's blog, and is reprinted with permission.

We all know that a picture tells a thousand words and creative visuals are a powerful way to engage audiences around an issue of concern. In the world of sustainability communications, slideshows, video documentaries, and case study success stories are common -- and often very effective -- tools to highlight the many environmental, social, and economic challenges and opportunities facing global business today.

So the question becomes, in the midst of all this creative cacophony for the greater good, how will your company's own sustainability story stand out from the crowd?

I had an ah-ha moment about this challenge today while reading social media guru Beth Kanter's excellent blog, How Networked Non-Profits Are Using Social Media to Power Change. In a recent post, Kanter describes the "living case study," a work-in-progress that shines the light on an issue or cause by sharing the ride, not simply celebrating the arrival.

As Kanter writes, "While the traditional case study is tidy, packaged, and finished -- the living case study is open to input, questions, reflections, and most of all, empowerment of peers."

This notion of sharing a messy work-in-progress to audiences engaged in the business of sustainability is not new. Retail giant Walmart, for one, has been telling the story of its long and complicated sustainability journey for many years now, opening itself up to everything from caustic criticism to resounding praise from analysts, environmentalists, media, corporate leaders, consumers, and others.

In fact, I would argue that Walmart's willingness to open itself up to multiple stakeholders on how to minimize its global environmental footprint has been a large part of its sustainability success to date.

And while airing dirty laundry isn't everyone's first-choice approach to engagement, here are three quick reasons to consider sharing your sustainability struggles as you go:

  1. Others have been there, done that. Learn from others who have faced the same challenges. If you ask for help to solve a particular challenge that's keeping you up at night, you just might get it.
  2. Social media loves social inquiry. Pose your challenges publicly through social media channels. Start a blog tracking your sustainability efforts. See who responds and engages. They might just become your next biggest advocate -- or most loyal consumer.
  3. True leaders have the guts to reach out and engage. As we explored in our recent BSR Report, leadership today is no longer equated with top-down, didactic messaging and communications. Include multiple voices into your platform for impact and change. The more you share, the more you stand to gain from the perspective of others.

We'll be exploring the nexus of leadership and storytelling this fall at the BSR Conference 2011 in San Francisco at a session with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes (author of Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Walmart's Green Revolution). Join us there to start mapping out the most effective ways to craft and share your sustainability story -- warts and all.


How Sustainability is Driving Growth in IT, Telecom and Cleantech

Great article to demonstrate the power of software (Green IS) in greening organisations and industries.

How Sustainability is Driving Growth in IT, Telecom and Cleantech

Companies in a wide range of industries are using sustainability as a springboard to growth, often doing so by working across industries as GreenBiz Group's VERGE conference recently demonstrated. I've written on GreenBiz.com  about the three main strategies companies are taking to innovate and grow with sustainability as a primary driver.

While companies develop and execute comprehensive sustainability strategies with a range of stakeholders and business partners across their ecosystem and even across industries, the success of sustainability-driven revenue growth strategies ultimately depends on how well a company serves the needs of end markets and specific customers. Looking deep within an industry, in addition to across them, underlines how large and important the sustainability innovation and growth opportunity has become.

My work recently with the executive team of a multibillion-dollar client in the communications and high-tech industry brought this point home. This company manufactures hundreds of products from facilities in over 20 countries across the world. They win business and make money based on how well they procure components, run their supply chain, and operate their facilities.

Certainly any company with this range and complexity of operation would be highly focused on the environmental and social responsibility and the cost effectiveness of their business, and indeed this client is. But, in the midst of the global focus on sustainability, they wanted to determine what competencies they had and needed to be able to innovate and grow new businesses in markets driven by sustainability including those for solar panels, residential meters, power distribution, and water desalinization kits.

Look deeper into the communications and high-tech industry. Much has been written about how software will play an important role in monitoring environmental performance -- an estimated $12 billion market this year with some of the world's and industry's leading companies like IBM, HP and SAP actively competing for it. But, sustainability is playing a much larger, even pivotal role in remaking the competitive fundamentals, business models, and direction and growth of the industry itself. A snapshot of activity in three major sectors provides a compelling illustration of the industry-wide growth opportunity provided by sustainability.

• High-tech equipment and services -- Cloud computing is fundamentally shifting the way enterprises use communications and high-tech products and services. Enterprises are embracing "the cloud" to reduce capital and operating expenditures. Of course, one of the biggest operating expenditures in a data center is the cost of energy. The use of virtualization software (central to the operating effectiveness of servers in data centers) from the leading provider (VMware) saves more power than the amount of electricity used annually for heating, ventilation and air conditioning across all of New England. Further, the energy efficiency of computing and network equipment has improved by 70 percent to 90 percent in recent years. "Cloud" is the competitive game changer and a big growth opportunity that every major player in this industry is working on and sustainability is a fundamental reason for its emergence.

• Telecom services -- For major telcos and other players in the communications business, the focus on sustainability is reviving established services like video conferencing, fleet telematics, and telecommuting that date back a few energy crises. It is also putting communications companies in position to compete for business in the rapidly growing markets for cloud, hosting and vertical solutions like e-health against IT providers. New and potentially very large markets for smart buildings, smart grids, remote monitoring, and electric vehicle charging are also in the sights of many companies in this space. Leading telco services providers are beginning to put sustainability at the center of their product strategies and are looking to address the competitive and regulatory pressures customers are feeling around the sustainability issue. They are in a unique position to provide a broad and integrated set of solutions to the range of an enterprise's sustainability needs.

• Cleantech
-- Clearly a new and rapidly emerging, yet already large space ($188 billion market value in 2010, according to Clean Edge), more money is going into cleantech than any other communications or high-tech segment. Billions are being invested by venture funds, Internet players like Google and long established tech giants including Intel. Why? Solar, water, wind, power, electric vehicles and other cleantech products are highly dependent on information technology and communications in both their operation and distribution and represent the most significant growth and value creation opportunities in this industry for the foreseeable future.


Market and customer-driven growth that addresses sustainability needs in the communications and high-technology industry will provide important environmental benefits as well. Analysis by McKinsey showed that the potential to optimize energy productivity using existing technologies in just one, already identified opportunity area in each of the buildings, power, transportation and manufacturing sectors could abate at least 15 percent of all GHG emissions across the world by 2020. While emissions from communications and high technology products will also increase between now and then, the analysis also shows that the industry could abate at least 5 times what it is expected to emit.

Taken together, revenue growth and abatement opportunities put sustainability front and center in the strategies and success of communications and high-tech industry companies both now and in the future.


Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008-2011

Acis_13

Gartner is publishing this kind of report around October every year since 2007 (for 2008's analysis).

I summarised the top ten technologies for 2008-2011 as per Table. We can see that Green IT is highly recognised in 2008, went down to tenth place in 2009, reemerged as IT for Green in 2010. But disappear from the radar for 2011. Does that mean Green IT/IT for Green (Green IS) is no longer there or no longer a priority?

We don't think so. Green IS can be in the form of the use of technology for greening organisations, individuals or even a nation. So, whatever technology appropriated for, or designed and developed with Green in mind, it is a Green IS. Just the shade of its greenness for some can be more than in others.

And we also know that many organisations, across all industries subscribe to Gartner's services. We can also say that Gartner is shaping the technological direction of the firms, globally. They are in the dominant position to influence technology shaping based on their detailed and thorough evaluation of technologies, not just from their mere assumptions or gut feelings. They have experts who are tracking the technologies, some are focusing only on one specific technology over the years and therefore, have the expertise and credibility in shaping the direction, especially for strategic purposes of corporations.

Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011

While this is not new information, I am collecting such data for my own analysis of the works I am currently doing.

Source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221

Summary of the Top 10 Strategic Technologies:

1. Cloud Computing. 
2. Mobile Applications and Media Tablets.
3. Social Communications and Collaboration.  
4. Video.  
5. Next Generation Analytics.
6. Social Analytics. 
7. Context-Aware Computing.
8. Storage Class Memory.
9. Ubiquitous Computing. 
10. Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers. 

The full article:

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011

Analysts Examine Latest Industry Trends During Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 17-21, in Orlando

STAMFORD, Conn., October 19, 2010—  

Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 21.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.   As such, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

“Companies should factor these top 10 technologies in their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

“Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test or more aggressively deploy the technology.”

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions and management.

Mobile Applications and Media Tablets. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding.

The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.

Social Communications and Collaboration.  Social media can be divided into: (1) Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise. (2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing. (3) Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr. (4) Social feedback - gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon.  Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.

Video.  Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.

Next Generation Analytics. Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates.

Social Analytics. Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web. Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.

Context-Aware Computing. Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.

Storage Class Memory. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. It also offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where information is placed and must survive power-downs and reboots. Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up that valuable space on all the data in a file or entire volume, while a new explicitly addressed layer, not part of the file system, permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory.  

Ubiquitous Computing.  The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox's PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags and their successors, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized ways. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT. In addition, it gives us important guidance on what to expect with proliferating personal devices, the effect of consumerization on IT decisions, and the necessary capabilities that will be driven by the pressure of rapid inflation in the number of computers for each person.

Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers.  A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s). The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources — processor cores, network bandwidth and links and storage — into pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software component. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integrator — internal or external.

Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics

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Source: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Guide-to-Greener-Electronics/

Greenpeace has been ranking electronic companies since August 2006. As of today, they have been publishing 16 of such rankings. The latest being in October 2010. It's been quite sometime .. so where are the 17th and 18th editions, if I calculate their frequency of publishing on quarterly basis correctly. At the top spot is Nokia and the bottom one is Nintendo.

Ranking criteria explained

The ranking criteria reflect the demands of the Toxic Tech campaign to the electronics companies. Our three demands are that companies should:

  • Clean up their products by eliminating hazardous substances.
  • Take back and recycle their products responsibly once they become obsolete.
  • Reduce the climate impacts of their operations and products.

The use of harmful chemicals in electronics prevents their safe recycling when the products are discarded. Companies scored marks out of 51, which we present on a scale of 0 to 10 for simplicity.

Download the latest report here: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/toxics/2010/version16/Ranking%20tables%20Oct%202010-All%20companies.pdf