Thoughts on Corporate America and Becoming Green

Figured I would share some thoughts on missed opportunities in becoming green that I have observed from not only my employer but those in the area...



Americans are very wasteful when it comes to food. Ever attend a meeting where food was provided but never thought to ask what happens to it after you are done? Some companies are thoughtful in that they may make an effort to donate it to a homeless shelter in the area, but this is problematic for a variety of reasons. Homeless shelters need to receive food on a consistent basis and not just at the whims of whenever some executive decides to hold a meeting and feed their people.

Is it a good thing to provide homeless people with food that has been sitting out of tables collecting bacteria for several hours especially when they probably don't have good healthcare and can't run to the doctor like me and you when they don't have insurance? A better alternative may be to consider composting instead of just throwing it away. Did you know that composted food makes for a great lawn fertilizer? Did you know that there are companies that specialize in picking up waste for this purpose and one or two may be in your area?



Anyone care to calculate the carbon footprint of Accenture, Deloitte or McKinsey? Isn't it amusing our most clients ignore the 2,000 gallons of jet fuel used by any individual consultant only to ask them to carpool when at the airport? Have you ever visited firms such as Pfizer, Merck, UTC and so on where they have what is labeled as consultants row where all the people who fly in usually only interact with each other and at best may see the client for say 15 minutes a week?

Facetime is important, but consider the value proposition of hiring a consultant to provide you with advice on making IT more efficient only to ignore the obvious value proposition that telecommuting provides. The ability to hire talent regardless of where they live on the planet is now a real possibility. If we truly believe that hiring the best and the brightest is key to sustained competitive advantage, then why are we letting little things such as location get in the way?

Telecommuting isn't just about access to better talent. When done correctly, it could reduce the amount of capital required for buildings, parking lots and other high burden fixed costs. While the vast majority of CIOs have been conned into the value proposition of outsourcing, they continue to leave money on the table when it comes to vibrant telecommuting programs.



Ever look at the parking lots of most major Fortune corporations? Even if you live only fifteen minutes away, it can sometimes take you twenty minutes to find a parking space and make it to your cubicle. While most corporations have formal initiatives around carpooling, they haven't thought about how to enable more informal ways to carpool.

Let's say you work on a campus that has three thousand people. How would you go about figuring out which employees say live within a three block radius of your home? Right now, this only works based on conversations that may or may not happen or in recognizing someone from the neighborhood.

Imagine a scenario where you could combine a feed from the HR system with a social networking platform. An employee could be presented with coworkers who live in their general area without showing actual addresses so that a conversation at least becomes a possibility. Note that enablement of this type of connection is not just usual for carpooling, but may help employees connect on other levels. One example may be that I may also learn that regardless of carpooling that a particular coworker may have kids the same age as mines and they attend the same schools. Maybe we don't carpool to work but do carpool for sports activities.

Anyway, hopefully folks that are reading this will take actions within their own context to help corporate America become more green and not simply exercise their right to remain silent...

Impediments to Keeping Top Talent...

Last week, I had the opportunity to do a stroll in the park with a good friend where we discussed how being in IT has changed over the years. He provided an interesting perspective on why many organizations fail at sustaining top talent that I haven't observed being discussed elsewhere...



We all understand the challenges of maintaining work/life balance for our employees, providing them with interesting work and competitive pay. We understand that culture plays an importance role and that it is vital that top talent have leadership they understand, respect and aspire to become like.

Many enterprises have superstars who are hiding in the wrong positions and not being appropriately leveraged. Sometimes this is a failing of leadershipmanagement to recognize talent but may be an even bigger failure on the fundamentals of human resource management outside the control of even those most senior executives.

Did you know that most managers are not managers of people? Nowadays, in a world of 360-degree feedback, perception is reality and other modern management practices, how much does any one manager have a say in the careers of their direct reports over someone who isn't even noted as having authority over an individual as defined by the HR system?

Most managers are not managers of people, but of positions! Observe the actions the next time your firm does a reorganization. You will note that it is more about musical chairs and who gets a seat than it is do with maintaining a higher level of talent within the organization.

Have you ever witnessed a scenario where say a star Java developer was displaced due to the reorganization while the organization retained an incompetent developer because they were not impacted by the reorganization? These are some of the symptoms of an organization where the practice of management of positions occurs over the management of people.

Imagine if you were a Java shop and you had top talent such as Joel Spolsky, Jon Skeet, James Gosling or Martin Fowler as employees. During the reorganization, would they be required to find their own positions in another part of the company or would someone step in having recognized them as top talent and ensure they didn't leave the organization?

How many reorganizations have you experienced in the last five years? Do you believe that shuffling the decks on the Titanic would have saved the ship? Many management studies indicate that it takes at least eighteen months before an organization can see the benefits of restructuring. Do you reorganize more frequently than eighteen months?

The challenge of hiring and retaining the best talent possible is at the core of success for many organizations yet few have realized that the challenge requires reinvent of the HR process where frequent reorganization is a symptom of something that is fundamentally broken...

Why aren't we seeing more adoption of open source in large enterprises?

Many analyst firms who provide insight into open source tend to gravitate towards talking about the lack of vibrant support models for open source. While there is some merit in this discussion, I think there are other considerations that are not stated...



First, lets talk about enterprise funding and the inversion model. The need to do a proof of concept (POC), pilot or other forms of trials is embedded within many enterprise cultures. The banner of risk favors closed source companies in that I have a lot more opportunity to see if things will work without making any financial commitment. An enterprise has the opportunity to call up any closed source vendor and ask them to do lots of work for free with the hint that they will get a payday in the future. Open source does not provide this type of leverage.

Looking at it through the lens of an Enterprise Architect who understands the importance of buy-in from my peers to developers, etc open source is also sometimes at a disadvantage. We all understand how much PowerPoint is used within a daily basis in many enterprises. If I had a $1 for every time PowerPoint was used, we could ensure that no one in Haiti would go hungry. Let's say I wanted to use non-commercial open source to do content management. I would have to spend lots of time constructing PowerPoint presentations and running around presenting it. At some level, people would grow tired of hearing from me and I would lose buy-in. Sometimes buy-in occurs when you hear it from someone new, the challenge of when consultants present the same information as employees. A better strategy is to leverage a vendor to do presentations on my behalf and to even encourage them to sponsor lunch and cookies.



Sometimes a person has clarity of strategy but may fail on execution. Nowadays, the vast majority of people who work in Information Technology know very little about Information Technology. If you are an enterprise architect but have never written a single line of code, how successful could you be in presenting Tomcat/Jetty/etc to a group of Java developers?

Wouldn't it be fascinating if there were empirical studies on how much executive coddling is required in order to make an enterprise purchase? Lets pretend I am the CIO of a Fortune 10 company and I call up Microsoft. How much attention would I get? If I then call up the lead for a small open source project would the reaction be the same? Open source thrives based on technical credibility while closed source thrives on abstract authority. Would James McGovern, the enterprise architect have more credibility to the leads of various open source projects centered around SAML or XACML or would James McGovern the executive...



The biggest challenge with open source has actually nothing to do with source code. The legal community has figured out which licenses are favorable and enterprise friendly and there are lots of great companies that provide support. What is missing from open source is the notion of free training and good documentation.

The local Microsoft office does a wonderful job of holding developer days where they teach software developers how to leverage the latest technology. They even feed the developers lots of pizza. Even if you don't care to use Microsoft technology, you can still attend these events free of charge and the cost to the enterprise is zero. There is no equivalent in the open source community.

More importantly, there are lots of great pieces of software within the open source community, but much of it lacks documentation. The general trend of outsourcing to other countries means that the enterprise is at increased risk now that they are leveraging resources that simply don't have as much experience in software development as those who came before them. Since Americans are starting to throw away their software development talents and not really doing knowledge transfer in this regard, the only hope is to be able to have someone learn from documentation.

Documentation doesn't just include what ships with a product, but also comes from third party sources such as book publishers. Microsoft and Oracle for example have their own book publishing entities where open source has to fight for the crumbs. In this regard, we run into a chicken-and-egg challenge where publishers won't publish documentation on open source until the open source community encourages people to spend money on documentation. The mindset of free has been its own worst enemy...