I love my New Scientist.  I have written a number of times about what I get out of the exposure it gives me to the wider scientific marketplace.  After all I am not afraid to admit that I am saddled with an enthusiastic curiosity and crippled by a distinct lack of understanding.  So you can imagine my excitement when I found in this week's edition, a double page feature entitled "Can we stop the internet destroying our planet?"  Selfishly, I was excited because it was a subject area that I know something about so I was reading it with educated eyes and could understand and even comment in my own way on the content.  Broadly the debate is not a new one and covers the rise of power consumption due to the growth of in demand for processing power and data storage facilities.  Data Centres around the world store scarily large amounts of information and obviously this will increase.  My understanding is further tweaked because one of our clients, Logicalis on their blog, the IT Sanctuary, have an ongoing dialogue about Green IT, data centres and virtualisation.

Logicalis, and others like them, take the approach the almost regardless of the data type, they will find efficiencies within any data centre.  They do this by ensuring the very "clever" servers don't host only a single tiny application or that processing power is shared around a single box or across a number.  That is sound proposition, but it dawned on me that what we talk about with regard to the right communications platform for the right communication has a very important part to play.  

Compliance within a commercial organisation is a serious consideration when it comes to storing data.  Today, there are initiatives a plenty to try to distinguish between compliance (things that need storing) and non compliant (things that don't) data.  Look at what Lehmann Brother did with email classification.  By asking each person to classify an email before it gets sent allowed them to remove "chatter" from the email platform.  

So we think about it this way.  Say you run email (who doesn't)...why would it not have a positive impact on your storage environment and therefore your green credentials if you were to run a blog, wiki and instant messenger alongside it?  Wouldn't the blog reduce the volume of emails by allowing the CEO to post his thoughts in a single place on the web that people to look at, rather than sending the state of the union address to "ALL COMPANY"?  Wouldn't a wiki reduce email volumes by hosting an ideas in a single place thus removing the need for an email thread to be increasingly distributed around a growing interest group within a company?  (We have seen a client email chain with 10 people on it that generated 56 individual emails that ended up with the comment ..."shouldn't we have done this on the wiki?").  Wouldn't IM just be a better place to "chat"?

The challenge...ultimately it's the behaviour. How do you get people to adopt the right behaviours?  Technology is part of the answer and we think we are getting better at the rest...

Oh and if you are worried about 4 information source instead of just the over burdened email inbox, we discuss that at our seminars.  Looking forward to seeing you there.

As for the sprouts - Christmas 07 has passed and in a Dickensian themed reawakening I was visitied by the spirit of Christmas "Childrens Style" brought to me by my 3 year old who now gets it and so do it again.  And I was visited by the spirit of Christmas Nosh who forcably reminded me that the sprout deserves a seat at the Top Table in Veg World...

Comments

There are currently 2 comments about this blog.

Edward Charvet, 6 months ago

Completely accept that, Simon. In a previous life my employer bought an organisation which unbelievably had an "empty" tier 3 data centre and it was the investment banks who were clamouring to fill it very quickly. That said, the Lehmans example highlights to me that it was compliance that drove the classification initiative and the by product was efficiency around storage. I would be very surprised if the conversations did not run along the lines of " if we catagorise stuff for compliance purposes we will have a better idea what we are storing and therefore we can get ride of the stuff we don't have to keep". Who can deny that Sprouts can give bouts of Thundering Pants as my son puts it. But it does not change the fact that I gained significant gastronomic satisfaction from the little green fellas this year... roll on Christmas 2008 ( the secret is to deny yourself for the other 364 days)

Simon Carswell, 6 months ago

Ed, eating sprouts, thanks to the methane produced, probably causes more global warming than emailing :-) More seriously, yes, one of the benefits of moving away from email and onto wikis and blogs could be a reduction in data storage related energy use, as you say. I suggest it's probably still a low priority for most investment banks compared with, for example, records compliance, however.

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