Bettina Tratz-Ryan
Research VP
14 years with Gartner
17 years in IT industry
Bettina Tratz-Ryan is a research vice president in Gartner Research, leading the research agenda for environmental sustainabity that is developing recommendations for technology and service vendors and software providers worldwide. Read Full Bio
by Bettina Tratz-Ryan | December 2, 2011 | Comments Off
So, there is yet another meeting of global leaders discussing global climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Cop 17, in Durban, South Africa, is expected to deliver the successor of the Kyoto Agreement, binding countries to commitments to reduce the impact of climate change. The challenges are gargantuan!!! We are talking here about a consensus that could… no, let me drive my point here: will impact our civilization and our social and economic well being… And though this sounds like we’re taking the moral high ground, let me quantify this issue in an IT and business value context for you. Driven by the dramatic after-effects of natural disasters, i.e. tsunamis in Japan, or the flooding in Thailand, such events have presented a huge business risk in the globalized business environment. Forge this with the ever increasing prices of energy and materials, your resource planning, as part of the operational cost assessment, needs to become not only an essential part of your KPIs, but need to be defined in your key risk indicators as well. Peter Sondergaard had concluded during Gartner’s ITExpo in Orlando in October 2011, (http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/symposium-keynotes/index.jsp) that risk management in the business context is the foundation of risk-adjusted value management. So going back to Cop 17, what is our business context here? And what is the business value?
The latest releases of the GHG emissions show that developing countries, with emerging market and economic growth, increased their emissions substantially. According to our research, (http://www.gartner.com/resId=1860415 ) emerging markets will represent nearly 31% of the global ICT spending for 2011. So, there is an opportunity for further investment in technologies and infrastructures that allows those regions to grow while applying sustainable business principles. This is of the utmost importance when you consider the limitations of an electricity grid, and the availability caps challenging “high energy-using enterprise structures” such as datacenters (http://www.gartner.com/resId=1853516). I have reason to believe that, either sooner or later, they will be “leapfrogging” technologies and business processes to their “cutting edge”. Could the Green Climate Fund be used to promote those future investors/investments into a new generation of business values that is “sustainably responsible”?
One fact remains clear: we are already living through the onset of global climate change and we need to pursue these matters, as governments, businesses, organizations, and citizens of the planet Earth, not only because it is the responsible thing to do, but also because we need to reduce our exposure to potential economic and demographic losses and higher costs. There is a strategic business value component when gene-splicing resource efficiency (Green IT) and environmental metrics into your corporate and operational DNA. However, sustainability, as part of a strategic business alignment, has to percolate through the “executive coffee urn” (management) and should be dispensed into “organizational coffee cups” (business lines)… And your name, your brand, your reputation??? The impact of “Generation Y”, who are growing up with a natural understanding of green issues, as consumers, users, investors, customers, partners or employees, they will hold your organization to it.
So while the members of COP17 meeting are debating about transparency and inclusion criteria for funding the Green Climate Fund and the scope of activities, our business risk exposure through climate change is going to increase.
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by Bettina Tratz-Ryan | November 17, 2011 | 1 Comment
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Smarter Cities event hosted by IBM in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. My first experience was a visit to Rio’s Operations Center, built by the city and IBM as part of the city’s urbanization strategy to integrate 30 different agencies that manage the city and citizen’s services. IBM has built the first stage of the operations center as an infrastructure platform with the information management capabilities available. Each city has the ability to integrate those capabilities around their specific requirements of process alignment and data integrity. By building this center for Rio, IBM is moving its previously fully customized delivery of the smart city framework into a platform and service solutions model.
The operations center is focused in its core to provide a comprehensive emergency response system, implement crime prevention, detect and handle utility outages and traffic issues, resulting in safety and revitalization of different sections of the city. What I saw was equivalent to Mission Control Center NASA, a large wall full of different control screens, with feeds from over 400 video cameras and other sensors, as well as a map, with infrastructure outages and remediation activities. Operators from the different agencies were monitoring the screens, and based on the different scenarios, applied the appropriate standard operating procedures that determine activities and processes between the different agencies. What was really amazing though was the fact that, at this point, none of the operators really worked with the full capability of the integrated processes and data flows that proactively share and consolidate information between the agencies. Still, the center worked like clockwork.
After talking to the people and getting an understanding how the feeds of data and information from different databases and simulation schemes such as weather, topological changes and traffic are being analyzed, it was clear that the process of aligning and standardizing syntax and information logic across the agencies will not happen overnight. The operations center has been working for more than 10 months now, and the ability to have all of those subsystems under one roof and collaboratively working on traffic jams, electricity outages, weather challenges, etc., actually becomes an A+ success factor in Rio’s urban city operations. Bringing agencies under one roof and develop standard operations procedures sounds initially so trivial but represents a real game changer for many cities, considering that different public and private entities have always worked with different premises in their “day to day” activities or in their crisis resolutions. For Rio, the cooperation model has enabled the city to deal with their worst case scenario: heavy rainfalls that will threaten Favellas with mudslides. The center has now the ability to warn residents, through text messages and sirens, of the pending dangers and evacuations can be ordered almost immediately. Fixing electricity and street light outages is improving crime rate statistics in a decreasingly way.
Even though the data cannot be integrated through all the systems, as every system takes time to identify a common syntax in all of the information, the action items that are triggered through the information displayed on the large monitor screens are. So the ”man pool” in the center provides the human interface to all the different organizations. Bringing change and the opportunity through knowledge and information about the city is being brought very close to the citizens as well. Through social media, websites and a single public service phone number, touchpoints to city administration, utilities and transport moves closer to the citizens of Rio. They can partake in the transformation of their city by determining through different city application inclusion programs and competitions …what they expect from the new and more sustainable city! With the Soccer World Cup and Olympic Games approaching, this represents a great opportunity to leverage their ideas and get support for public investments and change management. The city is already successfully demonstrating the “usefulness” of its spending in the operations center on a daily basis. All the reporters and the news media broadcast live from the center, and can provide “up to the minute” weather and traffic information, school and special event information, anticipated outages and so on. The citizens see exactly what the mayor sees, giving the people the feeling that they are an equal partner in making the city a “smarter” environment.
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by Brian Hellauer | February 16, 2011 | 1 Comment
Welcome to Gartner Blog Network. Stay tuned for more developments in the Gartner Blog Network!
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