Invigorating the Economy through Entrepreneurship

ack in April 2008, I gave a small talk at a CIO conference to a group of 100 CIOs about the future of the IT industry and the ripple effects the global financial meltdown will have. Unfortunately, most of what I predicted happened including the problems related to subprime, credit, housing, oil price, insurance, depression of dollars, weak Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), unemployment, Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), and the national debt, and we are still feeling the pain of all these problems.  The official recession ended some time ago, but it does not feel that way. In fact, we may be entering into a double recession.  We are going through a recovery without new jobs. There are many plausible reasons for this jobless recovery including the following:

• We have become largely more efficient in what we do by automating many of things that we used to do manually.  As an IT community, we have been driving this efficiency for decades and finally, it is more profound and noticeable.
• We have shifted low-level skill jobs to outsourcing.
• We are moving from a service-oriented to a knowledge-oriented society, which demands a more analytical workforce.  In this environment, more can be done with less people.
• We simply have not kept up with innovation, so that there is no next big industry to move the excess in the labor pool. In addition, many displaced workers may not have the high-level skills to move into the new high-tech industry and it will take too much resources and time to equip these people with the appropriate skillset.
• Finally, there is a lack of emphasis on STEM education, a vital element for success. From Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO’s perspective, ‘Public and private partnerships to promote STEM are critically important. We all have a vested interest in advancing our country’s proficiency in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math as a means to driving innovation and jobs – which are key to fueling our economic growth and global competitiveness.’[1] This has to be realized by the policy makers and should be seen as an investment.

Read the entire post by Dennis Anderson, Dan’l Lewin, Sharon Koshy and Rogerio Panigassi at the TechCorner on Microsoft’s TechNet site.

With Sustainability Rising on the C-Suite Agenda, is Green IT a Game Changer?

Original posted on TechCorner, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/gg617967.aspx

Green IT continues to be one of the most discussed topics this year, along with virtualization and cloud computing. Those of us who have been in IT know very well that some of these things are nothing new. When the old things come back with new names, however, it usually means that they are ready for primetime, but not always.

While an increasing number of CIOs have already integrated Green IT initiatives into their overall IT strategy (from two-sided printing policies to digital archiving; from storage consolidation to virtualization), the exact status of Green IT adoption is hard to pin down. Partly to blame is the continued evolution of Green IT. While overall advancement of Green IT is laudable, it also led to the creation of various shapes, types and labels for Green IT. Organizations might be doing Green IT initiatives but simply not labeling them as such.

Let’s look at some statistics. The results of Forrester’s Global Green IT Online Survey¹, conducted in April 2010, showed that only 25 percent of the interviewed IT executives had a comprehensive Green IT plan in place. Forty-four percent of the respondents stated that they have no defined ownership of Green IT initiatives. The analyst firm concluded that some type of Green IT role manager exists in about 32 percent of organizations and expects this role to grow.

IT initiatives with high priorities in the survey included improving the efficiency of IT, improve customer management capabilities and streamline business processes. Sustainability and energy efficiency ranked low on the agenda at that time. However, Chris Mines of Forrester argued that improving “IT efficiency should be directly related to green characteristics of assets and processes, particularly in terms of energy usage.” He also stated that risk and compliance strategies are related to Green IT initiatives, such as e-waste disposal and carbon reporting.

This means that some companies that pursued Green IT initiatives – intentionally or unintentionally – labeled them differently. As for the business drivers for Green IT adoption, the Forrester report concluded that cost reduction, not compliance requirements, drives the adoption of Green IT practices.

In the future, the analyst firm estimates that organizations will spend approximately $6.85 billion on sustainability consulting services, with $3 billion going to Green IT services, $2.4 billion for IT-for-green projects, and $1.49 billion going towards green business initiatives that include an IT component. While IT energy and resource efficiency remains a dominant driver, Forrester predicts a new focus on IT-enabled green business processes in its report “Capitalizing on the Sustainability Consulting Services Opportunity”, published in October 2010.²

What can change the game for the CIOs and make them a regular in C-suite discussions? Over the past year, sustainability has become a board room topic and moved up high on the CEO’s agenda. As a result, this year’s discussion has shifted towards using the term “sustainability” instead of Green IT. Sustainability is a continuing process of refining and extending the life cycle of products, services, or environment to stimulate social and economic growth without depleting resources.³ It is about making processes so efficient that companies can decrease their environmental impact while nurturing socio-economic development. Proponents of the sustainability terminology argue that it is better suited to demonstrate the overarching role that IT can play to help organizations conduct business in a more sustainable manner.

Stirring up the discussion, the UK-based analyst house Verdantix recently claimed the end of green IT. The analyst firm’s Green Quadrant: Sustainable Technology Services⁴report approaches the market definition from the eyes of IT services providers. Analysts estimate that the revenue opportunities for firms providing sustainable technology services far exceed those associated with Green IT. The Verdantix study compares 15 of the largest global IT services firms, with combined revenues of $324bn, using 49 criteria. It concludes that companies currently have a high implementation rate in the areas of carbon and energy software, sustainability reporting IT systems and product lifecycle assessments. In addition, traditional building and data centr energy efficiency implementations remain important. In the future, Verdantix expects projects in the areas of climate change risk assessment IT systems, water management IT systems, utility smart grid IT system, renewable energy IT systems and intelligent transport IT systems to grow in importance.

Looking at corporate agendas and priorities, Green IT can be a game changer for CIOs. Green IT can get CIOs a place at the board room table. Compared to social goals, green IT metrics are currently the easiest one to measure. However, the opportunities are larger. The IT department sits at the core of making a company’s entire sustainability strategy measurable. By collaborating with other functions, such as facilities management, human resources, and travel, the IT department collects and analyzes the underlying data for a company’s sustainability strategy and measurement. IT executives can not only show how IT-led green initiatives contribute to the bottom line, they can also show how IT can measure and analyze the other hard-to-measure components of a company’s sustainability strategy.

In short, Green IT is and should be part of every company’s sustainability strategy. Sustainability goes beyond Green IT or increasing a company’s energy efficiency. Sustainability puts the spotlight on the IT department’s ability to track and measure every objective and component of a company’s sustainability strategy.

By Dennis Anderson, PhD

Guest contributors: Rogerio Panigassi, Katja Schroeder

References

¹ Mines, C. (2010): Green IT Adoption Is Driven by Business, Not Environmental, Considerations, Forrester Blogs, July 22, 2010

² Kraus, D./Mines, C./Green, C (2010): Capitalizing on the Sustainability Consulting Services Opportunity, Forrester, published October 2010.

³ This article uses the term sustainability as defined by Dennis Anderson: Sustainability is the continuing process of refining and extending the life cycle of products, services, or environment to stimulate social and economic growth without depleting resources.

⁴ Verdantix (2011): Green Quadrant: Sustainable Technology Services, published January 11, 2011.

About the writers:

Dennis Anderson, Ph.D. is Chairman and Professor of Management and Information Technology at St. Francis College, New York City (effective September 1, 2010). Prior to this appointment, he was a professor of information systems and associate dean at Pace University. He has also taught at NYU Courant Institute. He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Columbia University and completed Harvard University’s Institute for Management and Leadership in Education Program. More information can be found at http://www.drdennisanderson.com.

Rogerio Panigassi is a program manager at Microsoft Server and Tools Online Division, working as the TechNet site manager responsible for the website’s learning content dedicated to develop IT professionals’ capabilities with Microsoft products. Having worked for ten years at the company, he experienced many different positions in services, marketing, evangelism, and engineering. He obtained his Masters in Electric Engineering title from the Polytechnic School of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil in the field of Digital Systems, after getting an Electrical Engineering degree from Maua Engineering School, a university where he returned later and taught computer sciences for four years.

Katja Schroder is president of Expedition PR and vice president of the sustainability expert community NABU – Knowledge Transfer Beyond Boundaries. She has over 16 years of experience working with technology companies on globalization, innovation, and sustainability topics in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Ms. Schroeder holds both a Master in Information and Communication Sciences from Sorbonne in Paris, France, and a Master of Arts in Communication from Free University in Berlin, Germany. She is certified as a CSR practitioner (CSR-P) by the Centre for Sustainability and Excellence and the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA). Follow her thoughts on sustainability @schroek.

Watch Out for Clouds

Dennis Anderson, Rogerio Panigassi, Albert Eng comment on the opportunities of cloud services in their blog post” Deploying Cloud Services in Challenging Times?” on the Microsoft’s TechNet site. They believe it is the right time to assess what can be “cloud-itized.” IT can focus on new business products or services that could generate profits rather than building things in house.

This not only applies to corporations, it equally applies to NGOs and the public sector.s/gg475853

Follow the link to read the blog entry: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-u

 

 

GE ecomagination Challenge…and the Winners Are

Yesterday GE revealed the five GE Innovation Award winners in New York City: Icecode Technologies, GridON, Capstone Metering, Electric Route Systems and winFlex. The award winners received $100,000 each to get their products and services market-ready.

In addition, GE announced 12 investments in start-ups with five of them being in the smart grid space. It is the first round of GE’s investment $200 million in innovative companies over the next 18 months together with VC partners. The twelve selected start-up companies are: Columbia Engineering, SecureRF, FMC-Tech, Sentient Energy, Joulex, ClimateWell, Scientific Corporation, OPower, Soladigm, Consert, SustainX and SynapSense.

GE received more than 3,600 submissions. 50% of the submissions came from students. More than 50% of the submissions came from outside the U.S said GE’s Beth Comstock.

Throughout the event GE stressed that the company realized that not all of the ideas can be born within GE’s own walls – and that innovation requires an open and collaborative process.

“Creating a clean energy future requires collaboration. GE continues to drive growth and innovation in the clean energy space. We might own 50-60% of the smart grid projects, the rest is white space, open for partners,” said Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE. The challenge was developed based on business goals and not as a “do-good”, CSR initiative. “Working with small innovative companies will help GE grow faster,”  stated Immelt.

Immelt also defined technology as the “liberator to solve business problems.”

Chuck McDermott, general partner at RockPort said that the VC community plays a vital role of nurturing early stage companies to bring innovations to market. According to him the sheer volume of the ideas was attractive for the firm to be a partner of the ecomagination challenge.

In addition to the 12 investments and the innovation awards, GE also announced to invest US$10million dollars  in partnerships with universities to build tech skills.

Panelists commented that U.S. universities have lost their edge and “best-in-class” status. Universities from other parts of the world now offer better skilled students, especially for technology and engineering. The panel discussed the speed at which China is moving in the clean tech sector. China has the highest number of university graduates worldwide.(Side-note: China is also on its way to take the number one spot for patent filings worldwide)

Immelt concluded that the U.S. still has the best entrepreneurial community in the world, especially in the technology space.

But how long could the U.S. remain this lead and what does it take to bring the universities back up to where they were. Considering that already more than 50% of the submissions came from outside of the U.S. and highly skilled IT workers are available in many parts of the world,  and global companies already working with  “transnational” IT teams, innovation could require a broader scale of collaboration as initially imagined.

More on Sustainable Supply Chain Practices – IDC/UPS Survey Results

On November 16, The New York Technology Council hosted an event on high-tech supply chain management and logistics optimization. Charlie Covert, VP of Customer Solutions for High Tech and Manufacturing at UPS presented findings from a UPS sponsored IDC survey entitled “2010 Change in the (Supply) Chain” for which IDC interviewed senior-level decision makers at 125 high-tech companies across the U.S. IDC also conducted approximately 25 in-depth interviews with companies that are located in Los Angeles, San Jose/San Francisco, Dallas/Fort Worth, Miami and New York City.

While Mr. Covert was more focused on covering general supply chain trends, including customer service and the role of reverse logistics, the study had one section about sustainability.

Here are the key facts based on the IDC White Paper:

• Sustainability ranked lower as a current priority for high-tech companies than in the previous years, with only 19% of companies ranking it as a top issue driving changes in their supply chain over the next 3-5 years.
• When asked how often they factor environmental or social sustainability into supply chain decisions 47% of the companies said “always”;
• Only 26% of the companies said sustainability was an important value driver
• Another 21% reported this as a company or industry mandate
• About 33% of the companies categorized sustainability as a “nice to do” but not imperative
• Only 3% of companies never factor sustainability into supply chain decisions

In terms of drivers to adopt sustainability, 36% say their customers will demand it, and 26% believe that legislation will require it. Only 11% saw sustainability as a key to their competitiveness in the future.

Overall top priorities and drivers for supply chain executives were reducing costs and better responding to changing customer demands (customer service).

While sustainability and innovation ranked low on the overall market driver list, improving supply chain visibility remained the top three driver with 73%.

Considering that sustainability strategies demand increased supply chain visibility, one could argue that the sustainability topic is a driver of change in the supply chain; It’s a matter of how you label it.

When Investing in Start-Ups- Could Sustainability be the Icing on the Cake?

The New York Entrepreneur Week (NYEW) today had a very thought-provoking session on why investing in green works. Josh Wolfe, Founder of Lux Capital, moderated a panel of clean and green tech experts, including Micah Kotch, Director of NYC ACRE, Maria Gotsch, President & CEO of the New York City Investment Fund, Neil Chambers, Founder & CEO of Chambers Design, Inc., and Giles Watkins, Founder of Concentium.

The panel – and also the audience – expressed their concern about where the U.S. policies for climate protection and alternative energies are heading, or not heading, based on the results of the recent midterm election. Micah Kotch took a stance – defending climate protection as a top priority for governments and businesses, even in tough economic times. For him investing in clean energy means job creation.

Technologies that are expected to be part of our daily lives in about 15 years are electric cars and smart grids, according to the majority of the panel.

The panel also discussed how green businesses can get funding in an uncertain regulatory environment, given that some of their concepts could take years to develop and implement.

Maria Gotsch recommended green start-ups to show the VC community a proof of concept. Municipalities offer different opportunities and infrastructure set-ups to beta test products and services.

One of these incubators is NY ACRE. Its director, Micah Kotch added that demonstrating domain expertise and using the existing infrastructure is also key to get traction within the financial community.

The panel echoed the comments of a social entrepreneur session earlier this week. Mike Del Ponte, founder of Sparkseed, recommended green start-ups to show the financial community that they are a fantastic business first, and then add that – by the way  – they are helping to improve the planet.

Is sustainability the icing of the cake for a good business? Could sustainability be added as a criteria to rate businesses as an investment opportunity on the long run? Sustainability could be the extra bonus to get a A+ rating by VCs. Existing businesses have already indexes, such as DJSI and Global 100.

Girismo interviews Dr. Anderson on the role of the Turkish IT sector for development

The following interview with Dr. Anderson was published on the Turkish blog Girisimo

How is Turkish IT sector’s impression on developed countries?

Turkish IT sector is still largely unknown to the developed countries.   It is mostly untested and invisible to the developed countries even though it has great potential for business.  Turkey has the growing well-educated youth population which presents many opportunities for developed countries.

What will be waiting us in the future of IT? Where will be Turkey’s position in the future of IT?

The IT revolution has just begun.   It will drive the business innovation.  If Turkey can create a business friendly environment for young entrepreneurs and foreign companies that want to do business in Turkey, it will be the IT hub in the region.

Do you think global standart regulations for Internet will better-off global online economy?

Having a global standard is must in order to focus on the real business and it will help grow the global e-business.  Today, there are too many barriers to have a real global online economy.   We have to agree on transaction fees, tariffs, currency conversions, etc.

What will be the Web’s future and what do you think Web 3.0 era will bring to our world?

As per my keynote speech at Bilişim 2010, Web 3.0. is about bringing intelligence to the systems that we have created over several decades. The future web is about helping people make better decisions based on real data.

IP TV era has been started, what do you think about the assesments and possible effects of this technology?

IP TV is still very young.  It will give a new life to TV which is struggling to be relevant when everyone has moved to the Web.  TV will evolve into more interactive media.  It will converge with the Web and it will be more difficult to differentiate TV from the Web.

E-Government system in Turkey has started to be developed . What are the most important milestones in the E-Government system’s innovation curve? How will E-Government will effect the society and IT Sector?

In order to make the e-government to work for the citizens and improve the government services, it is very important to have a clear governance, transparency, and citizen centric system.  A carefully designed e-government system can improve the services that government provides and also generate revenues through private-public partnerships.  A clear national strategy on IT and e-government is must in order to achieve an effective e-government.

Lastly, do you have any advices for Turkish entrepreneurs?

IT sector is one area that can create new businesses and jobs and change the world without a major capital investment.   As Turkey becomes a global economic power, the economy will be more based on services and new technologies.  This means the possibilities are unlimited.  New bold ideas will create new businesses in Turkey.

Source:

Girişimo Röportaj : Birleşmiş Milletler IT Danışmanı Dr. Dennis Anderson

November 5,  2010

Sustainability across the Supply Chain

The enterprise software leader SAP recently hosted a roundtable to discuss the challenges and opportunities for companies to extend their sustainability strategy across the entire supply chain. Hosted by SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer Dr. Peter Graf, Executive Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer, the panel included John Gagel, Manager of Sustainable Practices at Lexmark, Kevin Myette, Director of Product Integrity at Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) and Dr. Jay Golden, Assistant Professor, Duke University and Co-Founder/Co-Director, The Sustainability Consortium.

The panelist agreed that sustainability is an opportunity for companies to drive innovation and competitiveness.

Peter Graf, Chief Sustainability Officer at SAP, outlined three key reasons for companies to drive sustainability across the entire supply chain: win market share, find new sources for innovation, and decrease risk through better compliance.

Kevin Myette, Director of Product Integrity at REI agreed that “sustainability is the next quality and the next platform for innovation.” The discussion focused on the path that companies need to take to drive sustainability across the entire supply chain, including provide transparency, define common benchmarks and measurement.

“The challenge of sustainability is that it is very complex. You tug on one thing; you are pulling on something else,” stated Kevin Myette. According to Dr. Jay Golden, Assistant Professor, Duke University and Co-Founder/Co-Director, The Sustainability Consortium companies need to look at the science and analytics to verify claims that a product is greener than the ones of their competitors.

“Sometimes it can take digging down six or seven layers into a company’s supply chain to make changes,” stated John Gagel. For example, the U.S. financial legislation signed in July 2010 made it necessary for companies to disclose whether or not they use “conflict materials” in their products. Lexmark makes sure not to source tin, tungsten and tantum (key components of many hardware products and gadgets) from the Congo.

There are approximately 400 eco-labels in the market today. “Companies need a consistent way of measuring sustainability. They cannot afford to do it in twelve different ways,” said Jay Golden.

“Information technology is on the path to find solutions that can help companies cope with sustainability challenges. It can help create transparency, optimize processes and create life cycle analysis,” said Peter Graf.  According to Graf, today’s software technology can to track more than cost, time and quality; it can add specific sustainability criteria, such as carbon, water, and waste.

Welcome & Get Involved

Welcome to Project NABU – Knowledge Transfer Beyond Boundaries.

We are a team of sustainability experts and enthusiasts who are dedicated to the empowerment of local communities through sharing of the knowledge, technology, and human resources. The NABU network of experts goals is to improve living conditions, understand global issues, and attain sustainable development.

The guiding principle behind NABU’s commitment to sustainable development is the implementation of distance education and Information Communication Technology to reach and interact with ethnically and geographically diverse populations.

Contact us at Dennis.danderson@gmail.com if you would like to become part of NABU’s global network of sustainability experts.