Let it Snow

Like most of the rest of Southern Britain, I woke up yesterday to the excitement of snow. Even as an aging adult, I still feel that frisson of excitement when I see snow falling and settling – and living in the woosey South of England, it’s the first proper snow I’ve seen for 10 years.

My kids were ecstatic, even before the news came through that their school was closed. We bundled on wellies & warm clothes and were out bundling snow at each other before breakfast. Happy days!

Now, I’d been due to be at our parent company’s Weybridge office for a series of meetings. All internal, but we were travelling because:
• We had staff from various parts of the country attending and it was reasonable central
• Sometimes it’s nice to see people face to face
• The Weybridge office has got a simply wonderful coffee machine.

With the snow, the prospect of the M25, A3, M3, ice, blizzards etc was not appealing so I did all four meetings as conference calls. My broadband line was working a treat (more that can be said for my mobile, which appeared not to enjoy the cold conditions), my VPN connected phone was working superbly, and from my desk in the study at home I could hear the sound of happy children playing and, in between the odd call, even sneaked into the garden to assist with snow man / woman / person of indeterminate gender building myself.

After a day of much documented happiness, I was left with two thoughts:
Firstly, curse this modern communication technology. 18 years ago (last time we had this much snow), I’d have been unable to get to work; conference bridges and VPNs didn’t exist and I’d have had a day of fun and a been a bit behind when the snow finally melted & I made it back to the office. Smash the spinning jenny!
My second, and perhaps less childish thought, was this: why has it taken an “extreme weather event” to make me leave the car on the drive and do the conference calls? I work from home a fair bit, usually if I have late or early meeting somewhere and it’s not worth coming into the office, but I came to thinking that I’m far too ready to get in the car. The advantages of my enforced day at home were:
• I had breakfast, lunch & supper with my family. Nice for them (I think...) and definitely nice for me.
• I got a shed-load done, without wasting time in a car
• I got to play in the snow
• I didn’t put my life at risk, unless you count receiving a volley of snowballs from a 5 year old
• I failed miserably to generate a load of CO2, particulates and other nasties into the atmosphere

The excellent Roger Jones of Avaya gave me some figures (he was presenting on Green IT at the launch of Azzurri’s Contact Centre Practice last week). The average car chucks out about 0.2kg of CO2 per kilometre. The seven people I was due to meet at Weybridge probably had average journeys of 50km each way. So that’s 700km all told – a whopping great 140 Kg of CO2.

It is important to travel to meet people from time to time. Just not every time.
Audio conferencing is pretty good – especially if you know the other people and (in the case of large meetings) have a strong chair. Tools like WebEx (we happen to use the excellent GoToMeeting from Citrix) mean that there’s something to focus on (my mind can wander – I am a man after all) – job done.

In the contact centre, the average commute is 8.7 miles (again, figures via Roger from the Call Centre Helper website) – even if 10% of us worked from home 1 day a week, it would make a terrific difference.

I’m back in the office now. It’s tipping it down with snow outside. My kids are still off school.

How I long for yesterday...

Green IT & The Contact Centre

Spent an interesting morning at the Green IT Expo conference in London (traveled by public transport - even getting the horribly early bus to save a drive to the station. Aren’t I good? The keynote speaker flew from the US. Figure that out...)

The buzz in the conference is all about the traditional candidates for the Green IT agenda - server virtualisation to reduce the number of machines required and their power consumption; the use of collaboration and conferencing applications to reduce the need to travel; the use of IT systems to reduce the amount of paper produced and the use of low-energy everything from desktop PCs to phones to air-con to coffee machines.

Contact centres are in some ways a bit of a green enigma. Their very existence enables a green way of doing business between an organisation and its customers: - less travelling to branches, less paperwork & forms - all the standard arguments for electronically mediated communication in place of more carbon-intensive traditional alternatives.

However, contact centres themselves are high energy users. Relying heavily on IT, the servers, telephony & LAN systems and buildings all represent some significant energy consumption.

What’s more, there are confusing choices about contact centre deployment. Is home working “greener” because you reduce the need to travel, or more energy intensive because of the need to heat 500 individual houses rather than one 500 seat contact centre? Do the green benefits of VoIP (remote working, multi-site operations etc) outweigh the increased power consumption of VoIP telephone equipment over its old-fashioned TDM forebears?

Of course, there are no simple answers - the justification will vary from situation to situation. But one thing is sure - the Green Agenda is not going to go away.

Currently a voluntary corporate activity, it will be the focus of legislation and regulation before long. What’s more, there will be “consumer-led” regulation where eco-conscious consumers will want to deal with organisations who can demonstrate a commitment to environmentally friendly operations as one of a swathe of Corporate Social Responsibility metrics. The ability to attract staff will be dependent on an organisations social credentials - including those to a green computing agenda.

The good news is that green IT should not actually be an investment - the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) arguments for reduced power consumption in data centres should be compelling enough - although there is always an argument about the replacement of existing infrastructure. Much of the carbon footprint of a server or a desktop PC is in its manufacture and the disposal of its predecessor, not just in the power it consumes during its working life. There is also more hot air than in the exhaust of a data centres air-con unit around the subject. Only last month, we were asked to attend an exhibition and distribute any product information on a USB key rather than on paper “to save the environment” (one shudders to think of the energy consumed in the manufacture of the USB key over the use of recycled post-card that can then be recycled again pointing at a URL!).

So, the Green IT Bandwagon has departed. Welcome aboard - and hold on tight. It’s going to be an interesting ride.