By Jonathan Crow

In continuing my series wrapping up our Intalio User Conference 2008 today’s article will focus on Doug Neal, Research Fellow at the Leading Edge Forum – Executive Programme of CSC. His session charted new courses for BPM - New Aspirations for BPM – Green and Global. (Other presentations from the conference are available on our forum.)

Before I get to the notes on the session itself I wanted to discuss an article I found today on InfoWorld. It was actually a study that Rackspace did of its user base on IT and the Green issue. The article found that “a large number of IT shops aren’t willing to sacrifice performance even if it would help the environment, according to a new survey.” The problem with this is that the survey and perceptions of the IT folks included in the survey are calculated as if in a vacuum. As Doug points out in his presentation (and is noted somewhat in the article) there are many benefits to going Green that do affect the bottom line - energy savings, marketing benefits, sustainability. The article points to an apparent conflict between green and the bottom line where there are in fact a lot of synergies.

James Taylor also posted an article on Ismael’s talk over at his blog - Smart (enough) Systems. And Mauricio added his comments (in Portuguese)

Here are some points Doug made during his talk:

• Doug went down memory lane, to his beginnings in BPM in 2001.
• Before BPM solutions were baked in concrete, no flexibility.
• BPMS lead to a change in the way we manage all the aspects of our business - people, systems, organizations.
• Intalio BPMS designed for Federated Deployment - seamless access of various services independently provided throughout the enterprise.
• Without Federated Deployment, you lose the ability to measure across the business.
• Without significant measurement, there is no way to improve efficiencies to become greener or go global (collaboration and social network monitoring) .
• Rising prices, concerns, and regulations are driving technology greener.
• IT usage of energy far outweighs energy used in production of IT.
• However, Moore’s law has an environmental downside. Things that have short life cycles require more energy in production, have high toxins, and are bad for landfills. IT driving the short life cycle products.
• Lots of room for improvement - energy lost: as heat, during transmission, only 22-30% reaches point of use.
• Greenwashing by corporations has been found out and put them on the defensive.
• Measurement is key to providing intelligence in time to do something about it.
• Lots of great examples of measurements used in companies to reduce carbon footprint.
• Technology used as alternatives to travel.
• He predicted a carbon footprint label on product something akin to the nutritional labels now used on food.
• Projects for: Green IT, Green Supply Chain, Social Network Monitoring, Identification and Authentication all benefit from Federated Deployment, BPM, and ability to track across the enterprise.

If you saw the presentation I would love to hear what you got out of it. If you have any notes on any of the other sessions feel free to send them to me crow [at] intalio [dot] com and I will include them in future posts.

Other articles in this series:

1. IUC 2008 Sessions: Janelle Hill - Linking Bussiness and IT
2. IUC 2008 Sessions: Ismael Ghalimi - Intalio State of the Union
3. IUC 2008 Sessions: Doug Neal - New Aspirations for BPM – Green and Global

July 1st, 2008