Matt Loney's Blog
What it says on the box
Thursday 13 March 2008, 3:48 PM
Teleworking: Truly green or just naive?
I'm sat in the European Green IT Summit at the Sheraton Hotel in London, listening to a remarkable range of speakers and hearing people sat around me nodding heads in agreement. What has emerged as being abundantly clear during the day is that first, the ICT industry has a huge, huge part to play in enabling the economies of Western Europe and elsewhere to achieve economic growth while reducing the rate of carbon emissions. And second, that there is still a great deal of confusion over the most basic of green issues in ICT.
Cisco is here with Webex and their telepresence kit. And of course it's green; it lets us cut down on face-to-face meetings. This morning we heard Ann Caluwearts, president of corporate social responsibility for BT Global Service espousing the benefits of telepresence – BT has 14 percent of its workforce working from home, and believes that it make substantial savings both in terms of costs and carbon emissions by doing so. And let's make no mistake: BT, which I believe consumes some 0.7 percent of the UK eletricity supply (that is BT's own figure) and as such is the single consumer of electricity in the country, has a large number of programmes in place to reduce its carbon footprint and, naturally, energy bills (more on how it is achieving this in its datacentres to come).
Ann's enthusiasm for telepresence was infectious: she uses it for interviews, she travels less, and across the company some 850,000 meetings a year are conducted by telepresence. “People are convinced that face to face time is important, but it is not needed. Obviously you can't pass chocolates around but you may try to because it is so good now.”
And yet there were voices of dissent on a later panel. Frank Tudor, director of supplier relationship & performance management at the Department of Work and Pensions, who's suppliers are (I'm guessing) in the audience, was more sceptical. “I'm not convinced. I think it just shifts the carbon from the office to the home – it probably costs more in carbon to heat my home for eight hours a day than it does to travel to and be supported at work.”
If we can't agree on something such a fundamentally basic (and, you'd think, easy to calculate), what hope for the big questions that the ICT industry needs to answer, and on which more later...
PreviousComments on this post
"If we can't agree on something such a fundamentally basic (and, you'd think, easy to calculate), what hope for the big questions that the ICT industry needs to answer, and on which more later..."
Right on the money!
Julie
