Dynamic Work : green IT

BT Workstyle

brucelynn — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:30:42 GMT

Speaking of partners, whitepapers and workstyles, BT has published a sterling case study on its own Flexible Working web site called ‘Sustainability through Flexible working - BT Workstyle’.

“Happier BT people are enjoying a better work life balance. BT home workers are taking 63 per cent less sick leave than their office-based colleagues. The retention rate following maternity leave stands at 99 percent compared with a UK average of 47 percent, saving BT an additional €7.4 million a year. In terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) BT is avoiding the purchase of approximately 12 million litres of fuel per year, resulting in 54,000 tonnes less CO2 being generated in the UK. Teleconferencing has eliminated the annual need for over 300,000 face-to-face meetings, leading to savings of over €38.6 million a year. This has also removed the need for over 1.5 million return journeys – saving BT people the equivalent of 1,800 years commuting – with further environmental benefits.”

Anyone still wondering about the business benefits of flexible working? The rest of the BT Insights page is full of white papers, other cases, presentations, brochures for reference.

Electricity Saviour

brucelynn — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:59:11 GMT

At the heart of most Green IT initiatives is saving of electricity. These objectives are noble and helpful to the larger economic and ecological issues of global warming and resource conservation. With the current infrastructure, electricity consumption often equates to proportionate carbon emission. In some places, like central London, the power grid is so maxed out that companies cannot even obtain more electricity if they wanted and that creates a unique business imperative to conserve those volts which can be delivered.

But electricity is not the problem in the larger context or in the long term. In fact, in most respects is will be one of the critical saviours to our remedy of (a) climate issues brought on by carbon emission, and (b) hydrocarbon (petroleum and natural gas) dependence and increasing scarcity. You see, the thing is, mankind knows how to make clean and renewable electricity in many ways. Nuclear (clean from a carbon sense if that is the imperative), hydro, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal. All of these can produce serious amounts of electricity. We recently discussed on one of Microsoft’s internal forums the proposition that the Death Valley desert covered in solar cells could power the entire USA current electric consumption. And it does not take any major leap of innovation like fusion or other pipedreams of technological discoveries that are going to come along and save us from our profligacy.

Most of the challenges are logistical and engineering oriented. Electricity has significant challenges with regards to distribution and storage. Especially imagine the monumental undertaking of transforming the infrastructure for the largely petroleum-based transportation to be largely electric and for the largely petroleum and natural gas based heating (eg. household and cooking) to be largely electric. While they are not dismissible, they are manageable with investment and ingenuity.

Technorati Tags: green IT, electricity, renewable

Preserving the World's Assets

brucelynn — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:01:00 GMT

A number of megatrends are all converging to drive this move out of concentrated workplaces towards more distributed work. All of these drivers are centred on preserving key and increasingly precious assets to the global economy.

Energy Assets: Peak Oil – Concern is growing to new levels about world oil supply. While eternal optimism abounds in the world’s ability to out innovate and out discover the depletion of existing sources, recent evidence is that the new finds are smaller and fewer, the existing supplies are less accessible and less productive (eg. more energy input is required extract and refine). The commodity of oil is not just a unique energy source in its combination of power and safe transportability, but it is also a critical substance in plastics, construction materials and range of everyday substances and its increasing scarcity represents a major pinch point to global economic health.

Ecology Assets: Climate Change – If the economic costs of oil-supply and demand don’t hit us in the wallet, then the environmental costs of greenhouse gas emissions will hit us there and elsewhere. Not much comment needed on the profile and intensity of this issue. But in terms of what we can do about it one of the most prominent sources of emissions is automobile commuting. 54% of US petroleum used is consumed by automobiles and in commuting to work, the average number of passengers-per-vehicle is 1.1.

Social Assets: Dual Income Social Pressures – One of the most significant contributors to post-war growth in the Western world has been new entrants to the labour force, especially women. While this infusion of economic muscle has been a boon to the second half of the twentieth century, the social consequences of this mass rise of two income families combined with longer and longer commuting to places of work (fewer people live and work in the same city or town), means less parental time to manage the household and intensifying demands to juggle work and home life responsibilities.

Intellectual Assets: Rise of Knowledge Work – Assuming we have enough power to continue running the machines we have invented and propagated to handle brute force and routine tasks, the value-add work that human beings do gravitates increasingly to creative pursuits employing intellectual capital. Increasingly people are recognizing the intellectual waste from sitting in a car and the upsides of each person finding places and environments most suited to their own individual inspiration (a library, a quiet den, a retreat, a café, etc.). MSNBC recently reported (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20829879) people lose on average 1 week per year ‘sitting in traffic…and it is getting worse’ costing the USA $78 billion.

What to call it...

brucelynn — Sat, 17 May 2008 15:32:00 GMT

Welcome to the 'Dynamic Work' blog set up to explore the issues and opportunities around increasingly flexible workplaces driven by the confluence of business needs and technological empowerment.

But beings as a I work in marketing, the first thing we need to do is the 't-shirt'. It ain't a campaign without a t-shirt and it an a crusade without a buzzword.

In all seriousness, the label here 'Dynamic Work' is woolly enough. And the thinking in this area is meant to cover a number issues and even disciplines. Terms like 'mobile working' really just describe one part or dimension.

To illustrate the challenge the descriptive challenge, I offer some leading contenders...

Flexible Working - Probably comes the closest to the spirit, but seems to focus primarily on work issues, while think both work and home areas are affected.
Distributed Work - Possibly the most semantically elegant term, especially with the parallel between distribution of work content and lifestyle paralleling a similar ‘n-tier’ distribution of increasingly componentised compute processing (Service Oriented Architecture applied to human affairs). But it’s a bit long winded and dry. Which brings us to...
Service Oriented Workforce - A more direct play on ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ buzzword which is all the rage in IT circles these days for the same sort of flexibility within systems that the new ways of work offer to the workforce.
Mobile Working - A term prevalent in Microsoft given our mobile device offerings, but really just confined one dimension.
Moofing - A buzzword the Windows Mobile guys coined to ‘verb-alise’ the mobile workstyle. Its etymology comes from the acronym for ‘Mobile Out Of Facility.’ Funky term, but limited focus.
New World of Work – Microsoft's term more generically term referring to a range of workplace impacts on ‘digital nervous systems’ emerging in business.
Digaspora: My own neologism combining ‘digital’ with ‘diaspora’ (‘any group that has been dispersed outside its traditional homeland’). Cute, but incomplete and a bit overly clever.
WorkLife 2.0 - Smacks of hip and trendy techno buzzword to parallel ‘Web 2.0’ which is the bold technology term of imminent shifts into new ways of distributing computing power across the Internet.