thinkingstring.com

A recent tweet by tebbo recommended a short article on a proposed in-wheel electric motor that can be retrofitted to existing petrol vehicles…. “RT @Vibroseis Retrofit hybrid kit for your car using electric wheel motors http://bit.ly/8gLox <<< Nice one Mr ex-IBMer”

Its an interesting idea. The technology proposal is for a set of electric motors to be installed between the wheel and the brake mechanisms, and powered by a battery array in the trunk. The motors will take up some or all of the load with the petrol engine therefore needing to work less, perhaps including down to only an idle speed. The petrol engine wouldn’t be able to be turned off completely when in motion as it will be required to power the vehicles existing essential systems - steering, brakes, aircon, digital-integrated-multi-media-web-browsing-GPS console, and heated 48oz coffee mug holders.

The practical challenges to making such a system work have to be: electric engine power limits; battery technology constraints,; integration with existing controls especially braking (incl. ABS) and acceleration - such systems may be fly by wire or cable/hydraulic; networking of motor units in order to synchronise output across the two/four wheels; the need to support multiple wheel size, stud pattern, rim offset configurations.

Wheel sizes and configurations are standardised more than you might think. A quick check of the webiverse finds that there are probably about 20 combinations of wheel size and stud pattern that are used across a high proportion of vehicle manufacturers and models. The practical consideration of deliverable motive power from the electric motors versus vehicle weight might reduce the range of cars the technology is practical for anyway, so the most common 20 size/stud patterns might well fit 75% of the addressable market. If the electric engine drive assembly is designed to allow for it then additional stud patterns can be bolted on easily. The published design schematic (see figure) seems to indicate that this is catered for.

The other caveat is that of bureaucracy. As the electric motor system is a change to the motive power source of the vehicle, and on paper adds horsepower over and above the existing petrol engine I would imagine that every vehicle in which it is installed will need to pass some sort of re-registration and roadworthiness inspection. There will no doubt be insurance implications as well.

There is another important design consideration - style. There is a trend toward Brake Bling. The designers will do to remember to cater for those who wish to greenvertise their new electric wheels.

It’s been an interesting week in jolly, old England. The thermometer that is positioned in a hanging plant basket just outside the kitchen window where it can be read of a morning from the climate comfort of the indoors crept to 39c on Wednesday. Allowing a few degrees for the fact that the rear of the house cops the full blast of the PM sun, and we can safely call the temperature that day as 35c. Meanwhile, due to the simple exercise of keeping the curtains closed on the sunny side of the house as the day went on, indoors maintained a temperature a noticeable 6-7 degrees lower than outside. If only he house (an extended 1930’s semi) had some decent shading verandas it’d be even more pleasant.

If only..

If only all those people who gleefully jumped up during this winter’s snowfalls, pointed out the window and jabbered “See…snow. In England. Just proves global warming is a load of hot air. If the climate was warming we wouldn’t have snow now would we?” would now take a sweaty moment to consider the meaning of a different day. As Goerge Monbiot points out, the same climate deniers are noticeably silent in the face of a heatwave.

A four day UK heatwave does not a global climate trend make however. It may be likely that the UK regionally gets more hot weather incidents as a result of changing climate, but the specific incident of a few hot days is not the indicator that we’ve suddenly reached climate tipping point.

However, the recent heatwave ought to provide something for the climate deniers to think about. Because they’re also fond of saying “We’ll anyway, I like hot weather. We fly to Spain every year to holiday in the beautiful heat. If it does get hotter, I’m all for it. Malaga in East Anglia I say. Bring it on!” That’d be the same people then who drearily moaned there way through four days of hot days this week? Moaning about sleepless nights, their faces flushed red after the small exertion of walking 200 metres from the town carpark to the school to pick up little Edward or Edwina. The same ones passing out at their desks due to the lack of office air conditioning, having already dangerously weakened themselves through the hot crush of the morning commute on the Tube.

What they might well think is “This hot weather is not as much fun when you have to live in it, going to work in a suit when its 35c, and going about the everyday humdrum of life under blazing, cloudless skies.” Because the lesson of this week’s heatwave is not “One heatwave = final proof of global climate change,” the lesson is “England’s infrastructure is not designed to deal with hot weather.”

England’s housing stock for instance lacks the wide eves or verandahs to be found in countries like Spain, Australia, and South Africa, that provides shading for the walls of the dwelling when the sun is at its hottest point. Meanwhile the county’s office stock is, aside from new structures such as The Gherkin, devoid of air-conditioning, and locked in a design that gives no thought to the need for extensive natural air flow on a hot day. Instead, what windows there are are likely to remain shut against the incessant roar and exhaust fug from the traffic below.

Little Edwina will be spending the day sitting in a school classroom, distracted from lessons by the heat, the stickiness, and her state of mild dehydration. The UK school system doesn’t do heat well - there is an almost complete lack of shady areas in the playground.

Summer hats that would protect faces, heads and eyes from the fierce midday sun (right when school lunch break is) are not a feature of 99% of school uniforms, and there is no universal policy anyway that would encourage / force pupils to wear them outside on the hottest days.

As the drought conditions across southern England showed a few years ago, this nation is also woefully unprepared to deal with any extended period of summer dryness; at the time of the hosepipe ban high street retailers (remember them?) continued to sell an extensive range of backyard wading pools “All of which can be filled and refilled with impunity.”

In short; 35c is an enjoyable lark when on holidays, dressed in swimming trunks, sunglasses, a beach hat and with nothing more taxing for the mind to do than read a Dan Browne novel by the poolside bar. Living with 35c: working, commuting, shopping, schooling, cooking, cleaning, sleeping and myriad of other daily activities are not at all as much fun. Its even less fun when the basic infrastructure of the country isn’t geared toward dealing with it. And changing that infrastructure will require a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of disruption.

A recent tweet by Monkchips caught my eye; “good question from @tomraftery. regarding smartgrid resilience how will we defend against electro magnetic pulses?”.
Having recently written about smart grids the question of potential security risks is a good one in my view. I got to thinking that the question of whether the vendor spokespeople had anything scripted to say was interesting, and perhaps indicative in a small sample way of the lack of strategic risk analysis in the vendor community. But the really interesting question is the other one; are smart grids inherently more at risk from an EMP incident?

“Compared to what?” is the first response. Compared to the status quo of national and international grids powered by baseload and demand plants fueled mostly by fossil fuels? Compared to individual off-the-grid power generation by the likes of smal PV and wind based renewables? Smart grids and the status quo approaches rely on networked generation, so they both carry the added risk of a cascaded failure, where a failure in one part of the grid unbalances neighbouring zones. Individual power generation failures cannot cascade; all failures are local failures.

Meanwhile smart grids share the same generation methods and technologies that are used in individual off-the-grid generation. A mix of renewable generation techniques including PV, wind, wave, water, thermal tower and the like would be used, as suited to the local environmental conditions. Is such equipment especially vulnerable to EMP? If the vendors Monkchips spoke with are indicative it might be safe to say that EMP shielding is unlikely to be a current design feature on standard, commercially available installations. There is inherently more electronics distributed throughout a smart grid than in the status quo grid, therefore it is fair to say that on a component basis the equipment used in smart grids is damaged more easily by EMP.

In a smart grid, some of those electronic components will be involved in managing the flow of electricity across the grid; controlling and measuring consumption and contribution whilst maintaining a baseload current. So a failure due to EMP would not only knock out local generation in the affected area, it would also knockout the controlling grid management nodes. There is in this case the potential for cascade failure flowing out from the area directly affected by the pulse.

In reality however, the status quo grid is today national and international structure of both radial and interconnected design. Switches between network branches control the flow of electricity, dictated by spot market price fluctuations and efforts to balance the grid to baseload demands. Switch changes are made both manually and automatically. The existing danger of cascade failure was famously demonstrated in the 2003 failure of the grid in the North East of the USA. This article (http://www.newsmax.com/weyrich/emp_radiation/2008/06/25/107194.html) holds the view that the existing grid is already gravely at risk from cascade failure.

Arguably, smart grids might actually be more resilient than the existing switch grid networks in two important ways. Firstly, the modern equipment may detect an up or downstream fault faster, make a decision faster, then enact a switch change faster than current systems. The difference may only be milliseconds, however that may be the difference between cascade or otherwise. Secondly, smart grids are intended to have a more granular switching capability, though they will likely share the same suburban and rural trunk and backbone transmission as is already used today. “Lower” down the food chain from the suburb level subgrid might be street level controlling nodes and so on. The greater granularity of such control nodes may also isolate a cascade faikure within a smaller zone.

So far its a fairly even match. The generation nodes in smart grids and local off-the-grid designs is likely to be less EMP resilient than a coal fired power station. On the other hand both the smart grid and the status quo share a risk of cascade failure. The smart grid design may even be a little more resilient to cascade failure.

But there’s one more thing worth considering; that is the question of whether there is a material risk of an EMP incident anyway. An EMP incident isn’t something that is likely to occur everyday; the detonation of a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere would do it. There are a few other ways, but all require nothing less than considerable money, skills, madness, and balls. A hostile EMP incident will either be an active of war launched by a nation state, or one of terrorism by an unallied group. There is also the possibility of friendly fire by way of an industrial accident, or the failure of one or another item of ill maintained national critical infrastructure (whether privately or publically managed).

If the EMP incident was as a result of friendly fire then it is highly unlikely that an atmospheric nuclear detonation would occur. If the attack was an act of terrorism then it is on the balance more likely that an EMP pulse could be generated locally to a generation plant or other critical element, and less likely that a nuclear bomb could be procured and exploded in an aeroplane or launched in a rocket to explode over the target company. Again, the affect would therefore be localised and unlikely to result in catastrophic cascade failure throughout the grid.

In the event that a nationwide EMP incident did occur, the country is probably at war. At that point all this discussion is perhaps interesting, but whether we have a smart grid or the status quo grid probably isn’t our biggest problem. Other than the fact of course that it is arguable that there will be more international conflict ahead of us if we continue the status quo approach, fuelled by resource shortages and social disruption resulting from the effects of climate change.

Originally posted in computing.com

CSC this week hosted their EMEA Industry Analyst summit; Innoventure, in Paris. It was never quite explained what exactly an innoventure was but it sounds like a cross between innovation and adventure so perhaps it is like inventing something while dressing up in swashbuckling clothes. This potential for glory mixed with a lack of clarity unfortunately extended also to CSC’s cloud strategy, which the vendor struggled to convincingly explain.

Like several other vendors, including cloud enabling infrastructure providers like VMware, Microsoft and CITRIX, CSC recognises that there are a number of potential approaches to implementing the cloud architecture. CSC refers to cloud architectures implemented for single tenancy within an owned (or internal) datacentre as private clouds, and internet hosted multi tenancy external models as public clouds. The company uses the term hybrid clouds to refer to the mix of internal and external clouds that is really most likely to occur in a production, enterprise environment. While other vendors will interchange the terms “private” for “hybrid” while using “internal” where CSC uses “private”, CSC’s story is pretty much so far so good.

Where it all began to get a lot less clear was when CSC went on to explain that the internal cloud architecture was actually a simple extension of the existing datacentre architecture and therefore something that CSC has actually been doing for decades(!). Furthermore, internal, or in CSC’s parlance “private” clouds are in fact “legacy”. June 23rd 2009 thus goes in this writer’s diary as being the date on which the first use of the term “legacy cloud” was heard. No doubt we will soon hear of “Cloud three-dot-oh” from some overly keen brand hack.

Moreover, CSC’s states that the driving philosophy behind their cloud strategy is “If we’re going to be disrupted, we may as well disrupt ourselves”, inferring a forward looking and proactive strategy. However in relation to the question of how they see adoption of cloud architectures in the market playing out they state, “The market will decide and we will track the market direction and speed (before deciding on our own strategy).” As any backseat driver knows you either need to climb into the driver’s seat and grasp the controls, or you ought to stay in the back and be gracefully taken wherever the vehicle is headed - trying to steer from the comfort of the rear is however just distracting to everyone concerned.

All of which is disappointing, especially given the outsourcing vendor’s clear strength in underlying datacentre infrastructure, courtesy of their extensive portfolio of global and high capacity computing estate. The vendor has no shortage of processing capacity, IT skills, IT enabled business transformation acumen, and a track record of delivering innovative projects to the likes of Zurich Insurance, British Post, SNCF and long list more. Having thus helped disrupt others in a positive way, they might therefore reasonably be expected to demonstrate more real progress toward “disrupting themselves” than they currently show.

The one bright indicator of CSC’s intent is their push for use of the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) as a method for advertising the security and trustworthiness of a cloud based service. SCAP provides for 15 assertions related to security state, and CSC intends to be able to assert capability in all 15 areas. whilst encouraging the use of SCAP as a de-facto standard across the ICT industry for deploying trusted cloud computing services. SCAP assertions can be consumed automatically by a potential cloud services customer, thus providing an initial and ongoing statement of security capability and state, which could furthermore also be tied to a SLA via contractual terms. CSC’s intended reliance on SCAP demonstrates that at least from an info-sec point of view, they have a firm grasp of the minutia involved in actually delivering cloud architecture on a workable basis for the enterprise customer.

CSC’s biggest problem in navigating a successful path around cloud will be to pay the same level of attention to detail to their overall cloud services go-to-market strategy as they are demonstrating toward the details of cloud security and trustworthiness. Cloud is more than technology architecture, it is also a shift in the customer relationship management, in the billing approach, and in the range of services of potential interest to the customer. CSC’s stated intention to “disrupt themselves” is currently likely to be achieved only through inattention to the need to formulate and execute a joined up strategy. Hardly innovative, and hardly a swashbuckling adventure for CSC’s shareholders and customers.

Originally posted in computing.com

Though their lineage dates back to before World War II, ATMs in their modern form appeared widely on the high street in 1973. Since then they have bred like rabbits and spawned numerous cousins in the form of automated ticket dispensing machines and point-of-sale devices. They have also arguably created the payment services backbone that has enabled the “cardholder not present” transaction capability that is internet payment services.

Along the way ATMs have also fundamentally altered the relationship customers have with their banks. Gone are the days of queuing at inconvenient times in actual banks and dealing with real tellers, bank managers and advisors. All replaced with anytime, anywhere banking, in whatever currency of whichever country you’re standing in. Meanwhile branches have closed, and while almost everyone appreciates the convenience, there are many who rue the dehumanising of the bank/customer relationship.

All of this is worth keeping in mind as the NHS, and its international health care counterparts, dabbles increasingly in technology-enabled remote diagnosis and treatment of patients. The efforts of the NHS’ Aberdeen TeleHealth initiative, based in no small part on Cisco’s telepresence technology, have yielded some impressive results.

The NHS trials used high-definition telepresence communications, enhanced with customised cameras, scanners and a wide variety of other electronic diagnostic tools. The patient, normally assisted by a relatively unskilled helper (who may have no more than rudimentary first-aid skills), can be subject to an array of tests as well as being interviewed by the remotely located GP or specialist.

The healthcare service has field tested such diagnostic services in the remote wilds of Northern Scotland, out to the remote North Sea oil drilling platforms and with the communities on the Orkney and Shetland islands. Such communities are remote, sparsely populated, and suffer from a lack of dedicated and local health professionals. If enough trained personnel were to be supplied, they would be underworked - but horrendously expensive to maintain and manage.

The NHS trials have delivered impressive results, with the service reporting that diagnostic accuracy is on a par with in-person capability. While the telepresence approach requires availability of relatively high network bandwidth between the patient location and the remote healthcare professional, as well as a not-insignificant capital cost in technology, it is cost effective compared to providing comparable healthcare to remote communities via traditional means. Telepresence-based medicine makes it possible to more accurately and more rapidly diagnose a patient compared to the service that could be provided by way of the irregular in-person approach that such remote communities have historically suffered.

Such benefits are substantial, and it is clear that remote diagnostics provide important potential benefits in terms of service and cost. That said, it is also critical to remember that effective healthcare ought to be more than just treating patients as “units” to be pumped through an increasingly automated health service factory. Arguably, telepresence-based health services are another step down the path of dehumanising healthcare and turning it into an assembly line for the dispensing of treatments that address mainly the symptoms, and rarely proactively address the causes. The provision of telemedicine to a remote community that previously had no service is better than nothing, but is it the best we can do as a society?

The old bedside manner has to become the new telepresence-side manner. If some of the more mundane reviews and check-ups can be automated out of the health system - such as repeat prescriptions, blood pressure tests and anything else that can be made self service through web interface or remote monitoring - then more time should be freed up for the medical professional to spend in real consultation with the patient. This can then help with preventative treatment, so minimising reactive treatments, and again freeing up more time.

Therefore, technology used correctly can create a virtuous circle - whereas used wrongly can be counterproductive. Let’s ensure that the healthcare beancounters don’t ruin it - and that healthcare professionals can get back to caring more about their patients, and focusing less on the profitability of the service.

Many people would complain already that they are treated as walking wallets rather than individuals by GPs, as they are herded through community clinics in 10-minute appointment increments. We need to be careful as we take this path that we do not end with unintended consequences whereby there is some added convenience to some, at the expense of degraded and dehumanised services to everyone.

Originally posted at http://quocirca.computing.co.uk/

In 2008 when UK retailer Woolworths went bankrupt I observed to a friend, who happens to be an actress, that the defining visual that would instantly anchor any piece of UK film or stage creative work in the desired time would be whether the retailer’s stores in a High Street scene were seen to be open, shuttered, or long abandoned and a distant memory. Of all the rumbling and crashes of that long, grey economic winter that seemed the stomach punch to the British soul. The British may miss their middle class tea shops and wince at record losses posted by BA, but its the death of 99p clearance chains like Woolworths that cut deep.

I am reminded of this today as General Motors files for protection under Chapter 11 bankruptcy laws. America will suck in its collective breath over Merrill Lynch, AIG, a £50,000,000,000 Ponzi scheme and many, many more. But I suspect that it is GM’s humbling that will most of all define the long stumble for the USA, and also provide the clearest indication yet that when all this blows by, the way ahead looks quite different from the view so far. GM will eventually emerge out of Chapter 11 in a new form: GM-II and it will be that manufacturer that will bring to market future products, under a much diminished brand set.

GM’s management failings are many, and a vehicle strategy that was utterly tied to a dependency on cheap oil and little consideration toward pollution was by no means the single largest problem the company had. However a product set that was finally proven to be unfit for the market direction might well have arguably been the final nail in the coffin. Even with all the effort the company has belatedly have put toward their Chevy Volt project a launch date is still the other side of 2009, and that surely doesn’t count any delays incurring from dealing with the Chapter 11 restructuring. Toyota’s Prius will by then be a generation three product with established brand credentials and millions of miles of road use behind them to iron out problems. Not to mention having generated a Yen or two of revenue for Toyota along the way.

Even once GM-II, Ford and Chrylser manage a half decent volume manufactured domestic hybrid, HPEV, or PEV vehicle, they face market challenges for some time. The lack of demand for SUV and similar vehicles is of course one of the market realities that has brought GM to their current state, so we can take the existence of the market’s undesirability for such vehicles as a given. In the short term that has dealt a blow to GM, in the long term there is also a problem of there being a massive stock of existing gas guzzlers already on the road that are depreciating at over the odds rates as people don’t want them either.

Imagine it’s 2010, Mom and Dad have just rolled up in their spanking new GM Volt. They’re proud of the low emissions, they’re proud to buy American, they’re happy they saved money due to federal tax breaks designed to encourage purchasing and use of a low emissions vehicle, oil is at $85 a barrel so the pump price for gasoline is more than they would want to pay anyway. So what are they going to buy for their newly licensed 17 year old kid, Johnny? Well they’re not going to want to buy a second hand SUV, the gas would be a hole in the wallet and the emissions will make little Johnny very unpopular on the hottest dating circuit in town: eco-babes.com. They can’t afford to buy him a brand new Volt of his own (much as they’d like to) - bonuses at work still aren’t what they used to be and redundancies are always on the cards, and there’s a million competitors still out there on the jobs market ready to step in any day. The answer is perhaps a second hand hybrid or HPEV. And that’s going to be a Toyota or bust. So Toyota gets the ongoing parts business, a slice of the services pie, the potential for an upgrade-sell later to an established driver, and meanwhile the value for their second hand vehicles is likely to be strong. GM-II et al, merely face the image of their unvalued old SUV’s being encouraged off the road entirely through a vehicle scrappage scheme similar to the UK’s scheme (see www.vehicle-manufacturers-name.co.uk/scrappage. For example www.fiat.uk/scrappage

GM’s failings therefore serve as testimony to how far many companies have missed the mark as they’ve set their strategies over the last decade, exhibiting an almost feral avoidance of consideration to the needs of the market come a time of rising concern on emissions, together with an end to cheap energy. The transformational nature of such factors is clearly not to be underestimated, while the challenge of effectively dealing with them is multidisciplinary to an almost unprecedented degree. Governing through such transition effectively will bring potential catastrophic market failure if done extremely poorly, allow an organisation to limp through if done middlingly, and place an organisation in a strong to winning market position for the opportunities that lie ahead in a “green economy” if done well. Green, or eco-governance therefore is not simply a trendy turn of phrase, it is a movement that will eventually come define the winners of the green economy.

The concept of “peak oil” remains a touch too uncomfortable for most. Too close to being “big conspiracy”, too far from the everyday, and the implications too far reaching for the idea to sit comfortably in the repertoire of the polite dinner party conversationalist. Religion, politics, and peak oil to be avoided at all costs - best to stick to something safe and controversial like whether its OK or not to build a duck house at the taxpayer’s expense.

Only there are some interesting indicators pointing to the fact that in many ways, we’re already beyond the peak point. Here’s a list of indicators, which can be handily printed off, kept to hand, and ticked off the list as each occurs:

- the price of oil increases by a significant margin in a short period of time. Say, doubles within the space of 6 months. Its important that such price increases are not aberrations related to factors such as short term political instability in a producing country, or a war, extreme weather event, buy-side price manipulation and so on.
- the target price talked up by the various oil ministers of the major producers is even higher still, with the justification being that such a relatively high price is required “in order to fund the required infrastructural investments necessary to maintain supply”.
- the target price that OPEC et al aim for is within the range deemed by the USA’s Department of Commerce to be dampening (all other things being equal) on the US economy. Indeed, in this 2006 study the Department predicted significant downward GDP pressures, unemployment, and a slowdown in manufacturing sector output resulting from oil prices in the $70 to $80 range.
- vehicle manufacturers that have ignored fuel efficiency in their ranges struggle to sell their models as consumers become more sensitive to oil price.
- major oil consuming businesses like airlines post significantly poor results citing high oil prices as a major catalyst for their poor trading results.

So lets compare that to today’s reality:
- oil price has doubled so far in 2009 and is currently in the high $60 pbl range (hitting a $66 high Friday last)
- the target price is in the $70 to $80 range. OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri has called for oil to hit that range by the end of 2009. Other OPEC ministers, including Ali al-Naimi of Saudi Arabia saying “the world was ready to cope with oil at $75-$80 and that it could reach that level before the end of the year.”
- GM has shed $50B of shareholder value in the last decade and will roll into Chapter 11 bankruptcy faster and more predictably than a Chevy Tahoe drinks Texas Tea.
- British Airways as one example posted a “worst ever loss” of £401M after being hit with a fuel bill just shy of£3B. The weak pound and the drop in passenger numbers as a result of trimmed travel budgets (itself a result of the recession) didn’t help at all. In the lead up to the loss it was reported that “Costs far outstripped revenues of just under £9bn due to high fuel prices”

So this is what it looks like - we’ll know where at the point of peak oil not when the unaudited reserves of Ghawar are finally shown to be a sham, but rather when the economic indicators “downstream” of the depletion point exhibit the market behaviours associated with sensitivity to the resulting high oil prices. Because at that point the level of actual reserves is somewhat academic, and we’re dealing with the reality of the actual price point.

Interestingly, the Department of Commerce itself states that “Over the long-run it is possible for the economy to adjust to the higher prices of energy imports by improving its energy efficiency, finding alternative sources of energy, or searching out additional supplies of energy. ”

So the bright lining is that investment in alternative energy sources, and also in fuel consumption efficiency ought to be accelerating.

Organisations seeking to develop a successful sustainability strategy will need to do much to develop and foster a “culture of sustainability” amongst staff. The aim for such an exercise is to develop a consideration for sustainability in all decision making that is second nature. There are a lot of parallels here to the efforts that companies undertake to bed in attitudes towards “putting customers first”, “ethical behaviour”, “thrift and financial efficiency”, “information security and handling practices” and even just the general “winner’s attitude” that is especially valued in sales teams. Developing such cultures involves leading from the top, and ensuring that staff are not simply trained, nor “wacked” when out of line, but rather than they are provided the skills and awareness they need in order to make informed decisions, while being rewarded and encouraged through alignment of organisational goals, compensation models and personal development goals towards that end.

Effectively leading from the top will require executives and senior management to set a direction and tone, and to clearly communicate goals and progress. While detailed measurement of progress will be part and parcel of project management efforts, internal and external reporting and strategic governance, there will also be a requirement for somewhat abstract “high level” signposting of the importance placed on sustainability, and the relative priority given towards achieving related targets.

Setting such a compass is about internalising a simple balanced ratio between the relative importance assigned to profit making compared to that assigned to “treading lightly”; “Economic Sensibility” versus “Ecological Sustainability” ($ES:ES). Imagine you have $/£/€200 to spend in the best way possible to help your business, how much of the money do you assign to “economic sensibility” measures and how much to “ecological sustainability”? $190:10 might be a score for Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (i.e. disproportionately more emphasis placed on revenue generating business as usual and hardly over that placed on safety and sustainability), while an eventual score for on target balanced company might be $105:95, and for one that has a lot to achieve on the green front perhaps $65:135 (note that putting the “$” at the front serves to remind everyone which number refers to profit and which to sustainability.). At a top level, a target $ES:ES score can be set toward which everyone in the chain of command can aim towards as they perform their everyday roles, providing a simple and perhaps more meaningful top level performance indicator than the “traffic lights” so often used.

Anyone who’s ever attempted to avoid certain foodstuffs, whether for reasons of taste, allergy, diet, belief or morals, will know that it’s the fine print in the ingredients list that is all important. The ingredients list, together with standardised disclosure labels such as the Soil Association’s “Organic” symbol, the Fairtrade mark, and the Food Association’s “traffic light” symbol help consumers make informed decisions over what they put in their mouths. It’s worth noting that many foods have ingredients lists longer than the fine print in a mobile phone contract, which is an indicator that when required to by legislation, manufacturing companies can manage to track a complex set of base ingredients in a way that supports required disclosure.
It must be said that such disclosure requirements aren’t always welcomed by industry, however there’s a grudging acceptance of the need to label together with a strong desire to happily seek a stamp of approval if having one is suddenly recognised as being a positive brand differentiator. Disclosure, and informed choice, are after all powerful market shaping forces that have created new markets and enabled the phasing out of products, sources, and manufacturing methods newly considered undesirable or dangerous. There are many examples of these phenomena, but the two most powerful examples in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) food market in the last two decades are the Fairtrade and Organic Produce marks. There have also been notable “issues based” campaigns such as that conducted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the UK against battery farmed chickens during 2008 and 2009. The power of such issues-based campaigns ought not to be downplayed especially when sufficient media attention gets behind one. Consumer preference can be extensively shaped when attention is drawn to the sourcing of produce tainted with the whiff of dubious morals or unsustainable practices.

Disclosure also supports one of the most basic and powerful tools of international diplomacy; the application of economic pressure through sanctions and market control. Forcing companies to identify and disclose the use of materials sourced from a particular country allows for the enforcement of laws restricting trade between certain countries. The U.S.A’s Export.gov site provides full information regarding international trade restrictions, as does the UK’s Foreign and Commercial Office site. Such restrictions fundamentally shape market behaviour, and restrict everyday company actions such as selling to or sourcing from specific countries.

By now, you may be wondering what all this has to do with the ICT and consumer electronics industries; and the answer is Tantalum. Tantalum is a rare mineral with conductance properties that make it an essential ingredient in the capacitors inside every mobile phone (and many other ICT devices). Tantalum is sourced from only a few mines around the world, with the majority of supplies now coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC has been in a state of guerrilla warfare for many years to the tune of around 6 million deaths, and Tantalum mining and export is to the conflict what opium poppy farming is to Afghanistan; providing a rich source of international trade that funds continued conflict. Tantalum’s role in the DRC conflict has long been recognised, with the U.N. creating a panel to look at the issue back in 2001, at the direction of then UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

While the intervening years have seen little real change, Tantalum’s presence in consumer and office electronics goods is facing renewed focus. In April, U.S. Senators Sam Brownback, Dick Durbin, and Russ Feingold drafted and introduced a new act called the Congo Conflict Minerals Act of 2009. Under the draft legislation, U.S.-registered companies selling products using columbite-tantalite (a source of tantalum), cassiterite, or wolframite, or derivatives of these minerals, would be required to annually disclose to the SEC the country of origin of those minerals. If the country of origin is the DRC or neighbouring countries, the company would need to also disclose the specific mine that the minerals are sourced from.

How significant that act might be in shaking up the electronic supply chain is perhaps indicated by the fact that meanwhile, the world’s largest source of Tantalum outside of the DRC is busy shutting down operations. Australia’s Talison Minerals, which previously enjoyed a 50% market share for supply of the mineral, mothballed its largest mine at the end of 2008, a move that reduced its active Tantalum mine operations from three to one. In announcing the action Talison cited unviable market prices related in part to cheap supply from the DRC. Perhaps the U.S’s Congo Conflict Minerals Act will see a reversal in this market state in the coming years, as the restrictions and market pressures make electronics manufactures reconsider their supply chains. Right now, electronics manufacturers are unnecessarily and significantly exposed as far as the provenance of the Tantalum supply.

All of which is a good lesson as to why “sustainable IT” is more than a passing nod toward an energy efficient server or a refillable printer cartridge. While the newly drafted Congo Conflict Minerals Act has a way to go before being adopted (as is or amended) it is a sign that far more scrutiny can be expected into the ICT industry supply chain in the future. Such scrutiny no doubt introduces complexity in both adherence by manufacturers, as well as in the level of consideration a buyer might have to take in selecting a product and supplier. However scrutiny crucially enables informed decision making, which is never a bad thing. Meanwhile, take another look at your mobile phone, there’s more inside it than just your contacts list and a battery that never lasts long enough.

Originally written for eWeek Europe:
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/comment/sustainable-supply-and-the-trouble-with-tantalum-850?page=1

In the lead up to this week’s ICT 2020 conference, the EU Commission has called upon the Information and Communications technology (ICT) sector to “lead the way” on dealing with climate change by “by setting itself concrete targets (for greenhouse reductions)”.

The Commission quite rightly identifies some important ways that ICT can contribute to achieving a low carbon economy, from smart metering of electricity to the increased use of IT in the construction, building management and transportation sectors. But the Commission is misguided in its call for ICT to “lead the way” and has made the grave mistake of misidentifying which part of the dog is controlling the wagging of the tail.

It’s important to remember that ICT serves the business, and not the other way around. This is true even in companies that make strategic use of ICT. ICT departments prioritise according to business imperatives, and while there might be some degree of deferment to ICT when scheduling business initiatives (for instance timing the launch of a new sales initiative based on the capability of IT to deliver the new web based sales infrastructure), technologists will always be part of a service function to departments like finance, marketing, sales and supply chain operations.

To say that ICT can lead the way forward on climate change is to misdiagnose the problem and in doing so to avoid the necessary strategic change required in the way that organisations operate overall. It seems that ICT is perceived as the magic method by which the relationship between economic growth and energy usage will be decoupled. A few simple examples will suffice to demonstrate that the EU’s call for ICT leadership is flawed.

Firstly, there is the question of efficiency. Both the IPCC and the IEA have calculated that efficiency efforts will deliver significant returns with regard to cutting energy usage, and therefore reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Not coincidentally, ICT vendors and ICT buyers are pushing hard on products and projects that claim to be more efficient than last year’s way of doing things.

So a data centre may well be redesigned with a consideration to cooling, rack placement, aisle layout and so on, and servers may be virtualised to ensure higher utilisation loads on the newly chosen “energy efficient” hardware. The ICT department may even take on some new workloads like supporting high-end video-conferencing as an alternative to staff business travel.

Meanwhile, even while in recession survival mode many business strategies call for continued and unbridled overall growth and increased market share. So having achieved a highly efficient operating level, ICT will simply be asked to deliver even further computing services to support that growth. More business demand ultimately equals more computing, albeit delivered more efficiently then before.

Eventually the push for expanded service delivery capacity will exceed the ability of efficiency efforts to reduce energy usage, and overall energy usage will rise again. Efficiency in the absence of a business level cap on overall emissions is often an encouragement to further growth.

Secondly, it is worth remembering that ICT is estimated to account for a mere 2 percent of overall global emissions with the other 98 percent coming from all the other things that businesses and individuals do. Indeed the EU Commission states “The use of ICT across all sectors of the economy and society can reduce the remaining 98 percent of European emissions.” Clearly the ratio between ICT’s emissions and “everything else” is going to vary when the same breakdown is applied at the level of a single organisation. In some organisations ICT may account for 20 percent and in some next to zero.

Regardless of the actual amount however, there is generally a clear link between some aspects of the actual business’s operations and the processing that ICT performs. Applications “map” to business functions if you will.

The bulk of the emissions savings will come from shutting down or tuning those business functions, not by addressing the ICT that supports them. Sure, ICT may measure, meter, manage and provide guiding intelligence to the business on how those various functions may be improved, but ultimately it will be a business decision whether or not the business functions are left as-is or are changed. If the business decides a function will continue, then ICT will simply be asked to get on with delivering the application environment in a cheap and efficient manner.

Finally, the emissions of greenhouse gases are being internalised into a company’s balance sheet via the proxy of real currency (meaning you’ll have to pay for it), via cap and trade and carbon taxation schemes like the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment. This will introduce a sliding scale of charges related to total emissions resulting from business activity.

It will be a business decision how such charges will be allowed to influence operational strategy, not an ICT one. Sales, Finance, the executive management team and the Board will ultimately decide, and the CIOs will do what they need to provide the required set of services.

This isn’t at all to say that ICT won’t play a strong role in achieving a low carbon economic model. Indeed, there will be additional opportunities and challenges ahead for the ICT industry as a whole and for individual CIOs to grapple with. The mantle of strategic leadership lies elsewhere however – dealing with climate change and formulating a successful path forward for the company is a challenge that must be spearheaded at corporate executive level.

With all due respect to the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Mrs Viviane Reding: ICT isn’t the right place for leadership if we are to solve this problem correctly.

Originally published in eWeek Europe:
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/comment/get-real-reding-ict-can-t-save-the-world–427