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Exploring both the practical realities and the exciting alternate realities that can be unleashed through cloud driven transformation and cloud native living and working.
Each episode, our hosts Dave, Sjoukje & Rob talk to Cloud leaders and practitioners to understand how previously untapped business value can be released, how to deal with the challenges and risks that come with bold ventures and how does human experience factor into all of this?
They cover Intelligent Industry, Customer Experience, Sustainability, AI, Data and Insight, Cyber, Cost, Leadership, Talent and, of course, Tech.
Together, Dave, Sjoukje & Rob have over 80 years of cloud and transformation experience and act as our guides though a new reality each week.
Well, it feels like it's gonna get better before it gets worse, isn't it? That makes Well, shoot. I'm gonna edit points. Welcome to Cloud Realities. A conversation show exploring the practical and exciting alternate realities that can be unleashed through cloud driven transformation.
Speaker 1:I'm Dave Chapman.
Speaker 2:I'm Shao Khazal.
Speaker 3:And I'm Rob Kernighan. And this week,
Speaker 1:we're gonna return to one of the big subjects of our time, which is sustainability, tech's role in sustainability, and the bigger picture around how data is used and how you get to the truth and how the truth actually might be a little scarier than it should be before you get going on the right journey. But before that, went into the office the other day, and I couldn't see Rob because his desk was covered in plants, like potted plants, cactuses, and he was sort of hidden behind the wall of it. And and I went up to him. I'm like, Rob, you all right? And he's like, yes, yes, David.
Speaker 1:I'm just I'm just working on just getting some accurate metrics around my carbon footprint and just trying to trying to bring that down. And I'm like, good for you, Rob. What else is confusing you this week?
Speaker 3:I didn't know where that one was gonna go, Dave, actually. I quite like that, the the the cactus angle.
Speaker 1:You gotta start somewhere, Rob.
Speaker 3:You gotta start somewhere, small things build into Exactly. Giant mountains. Exactly. This week, I've mainly been confused by digital litter.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, also also right in the in that sort of space. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I know. But there's 3 angles to digital, literally. I don't think we've got a handle on
Speaker 4:it first. So in
Speaker 3:the olden days, you get a lot of people together and you'd all look very stern and you take a photo and that was a very accurate representation and we would cherish said photo and we would stick it in an album. And now, smartphones in your pockets, everybody's taking photos everywhere. They're not controlling them. They might upload to some random cloud that they probably don't pay attention to. And what happens to it?
Speaker 3:So do our memories get deleted? Yeah. Are we about to lose a great body of wealth of understanding and history? The second angle is that we're just filming stuff that we shouldn't. So the fireworks display angle.
Speaker 3:How many people have taken a video of a fireworks display? And then honestly tell me, did you ever watch that video again of people going, oh, ah, hey. Right? And then the third angle is there's all this and and and that's obviously got a a a c o two impact sustainability because that's a 100 meg video that's never gonna get used by anybody in the future, yet it's sat on some server somewhere spinning a disk wheel or whatever. And then the final part is everything's getting post processed by AI.
Speaker 3:And I I know it's just the tweaks around the edges, but as that becomes more prolific on your smartphone, is that gonna actually start to influence our memories where it might, you know, change the picture so much that key artifacts are removed? And I don't think as a as a consumer or a person, we've got a good grip of managing digital litter from a sustainability point of view, from a stop recording stuff you're never gonna watch and kill the planet and the sort of just let AI run away with it. And so I'm wondering where we're gonna go.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's it's connected to so many bad behaviors on those devices, isn't it? So for every great new phone you get and for every well intended video of a fireworks display, there is then a trail of consequences behind that. I don't think we've come to terms with. And those consequences not only are in the way that you point out, which is like the carbon footprint of a Brazilian firework displays or the bigger concern around human history being deleted. Because actually we haven't created emotional connections to, you know, the the like the 20 photographs of my childhood.
Speaker 1:Like my childhood is almost completely undocumented photographically.
Speaker 3:There's the violin going off in the background again, Dave, for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, my children's childhoods are almost minutely documented. Yet, I don't know what to do with it. There's so much of it.
Speaker 3:I don't know how to access it. Yeah. Now what's the key event photo buried in the other 100 you took?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah? With the Right. At least with your 20 that's documented you as a kid, it's easy to understand that as a thing to control
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:Manage in an album somewhere.
Speaker 1:Now you could say that AI has got a role to play in some of what you're talking about in terms of making that accessible, popping up, you know, my my phone pops up a nice picture every time I've kind of take it off standby. And and I'm like, oh, I remember that photo. And that's that's quite a nice thing. But I think it's the consequences, isn't it? That the consequences of the clutter and probably its carbon effect.
Speaker 1:If it didn't have the carbon effect, I would probably be arguing that it is what it is and we'll work our way through that. But I think the carbon effect of it I think is is undeniable at this stage.
Speaker 3:And then, the sort of digital rights after we shuffle off this mortal coil, who gets their hands on it to make sure it's secured and your family have the memories of what was and what's gone. And I don't think we control that either now. And there's been a lot of conversation in society about signing over your digital accounts Right. Right.
Speaker 4:As
Speaker 3:part of the, you know, that that sort of will process. But again, we haven't got to grips with society and hear lots of people trying to get into, loved ones' digital accounts when they've passed away, but they can't. And the tech company's saying no, and there's this privacy part about it, which is also extremely important. So it just it it it doesn't feel like we've got our our, a good grip of what's going on.
Speaker 1:No. It feels it feels like like you do in many other things in in your life, like your savings accounts and and things like that that you have to sign like a trustee thing where you your descendants can can take control of your, assets when they need to. Digit digital assets, I think, should form the same thing. Maybe when you when you're signing up to, you know, whatever cloud it is or whatever Facebook it is that you should put a second on there. That's your, you know, partner or whoever that might be.
Speaker 3:We'll see what happens. We will
Speaker 1:see what happens. And, actually, to sort of dig into some of the themes of that, I'm delighted to say we have Mark Butcher joining us on today's show. He's the founder of POSITIVE and works very heavily in the green ops space. Mark, thank you for joining us today. Do you wanna introduce yourself and say a word about POSITIVE?
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it. And, look, as you said, I'm the founder of POSITIVE, and we focus in a number of areas, but actually one of them has become all dominating in in the last couple of years.
Speaker 4:So it's it's GreenOps, SpinOps, and DevOps. But with the rise of of kind of IT's awareness of its footprint, suddenly GreenOps has become the all encompassing part of our life, and we're spending most of our time now on, you know, delivering advisory services, helping people kind of wrestle with that really difficult task of understanding what sustainability means to their digital services and, more importantly, what they can actually do about it with a bit of honesty and transparency.
Speaker 1:So, Mark, let's get cracking with where we are in terms of looking at emissions. So, it seems to me that there's going to be a long lag time in terms of emissions actually coming down. So even if we take, like, a lot of action now, you're not going to see that directly coming up in emissions data, are you? How long do you think that lag time is, and what does that look like for you?
Speaker 4:That's that's kind of a really interesting question because one of the things we seem to be stubbornly refusing to admit to ourselves is net zero kind of in IT may not be possible. And what I mean by that is every organization is trying to digitize more, they're trying to transform more, they're trying to invest more money in things like AI, machine learning, new shiny things. And what that means is that when you're investing more, you're buying more, you're building more, you're delivering more, the baseline that you kind of did is only going to go up one way. So I think I mean, my personal view is we shouldn't really necessarily be looking at hard reductions targets. We should be looking at efficiency targets, which is how do we how do we do the right thing with everything that we're building and delivering?
Speaker 4:How do we make the right decisions and make everything as carbon efficient or as water efficient as we possibly can? Every large enterprise, as it's now going to start actually reporting more emissions type data, it's going to be finding the challenge that the numbers are going to be reporting on a per unit on a total basis are going to go up.
Speaker 1:Is that just because there's more awareness? So you've sort of you've got to get the whole problem out before you can start to deal with a problem
Speaker 4:solving. It definitely is more awareness, and that that is more awareness at all levels as well. So it's more awareness at the consumer level, so the large enterprise buying lots of things. There's also more awareness at the vendor level and the provider level because the problem we've got is when I talk about the unit of consumption is most of the carbon metrics people have had for the last few years, they've kind of been a little bit of nonsense. We're not really calculating things accurately.
Speaker 4:We're not really including everything. And and the more we understand, the more we include. And the more we include, the more the units we report go up. So the problem that means is that no matter how kind of your vendor, so pick any server vendor, any storage vendor, any cloud vendor, they're all buying things and building things, and they're now including more of their emissions in their calculations because they understand what they have to include. So that means that, like, last year, they might have thought a unit was like 500 kilograms, but now it's a 1000 kilograms.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 4:So they're now reporting that and rolling it upwards, and that, and they're calculating things like the emissions from power consumption more accurately rather than just making them up as they go along. So, so with more accurate data comes the pain of bigger numbers. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the challenge I think CTOs and CIOs are gonna have is the inconvenient truth.
Speaker 4:That's really what it is, is reporting bigger, badder numbers. And how how do you post that bad news?
Speaker 1:At the beginning of that, you talked about the fact that you also doubt that sort of tech or IT can ever get to, I think you said net 0 or carbon free. I think I wanna unpack that a little bit. So, first of all, maybe give us your definitions of carbon free and net zero. And then let's talk about the IT supply chain and why you think it's gonna be very difficult to get to, you know, kind of very low zero measures.
Speaker 4:Net 0 for most people is simply they've eliminated as much of their carbon as they possibly can from the production and delivery sort of use phase and embodied phase of their products and services. And normally that gets down to the 10% residual. It's normally that boundary that people tend to get to. And then you fall into kind of the carbon neutral thing because people always conflate kind of carbon neutrality and net zero, and they are 2 entirely different things. And that's the problem when you start conflating and people because the general average person assumes that net zero means I'm using renewable energy.
Speaker 4:And it doesn't at all. And that kind of falls under the boundary, kind of the carbon you try to be. And even if you're even if you're buying renewable energy, that doesn't mean you're using renewable energy. What you actually use is a blend of whatever falls out the plug in the location in which you're operating your services from. So it sounds great you're buying it, but it doesn't mean you're using it.
Speaker 4:You have to take account of the actual blend of the carbon intensity of the location in which you're operating from. And that's why we're now seeing all this legislation coming in and governance coming in, which has started to try and force people to to be that little bit more transparent and clear so that because we we have been doing so much game playing, and that actually comes back into my major malfunction, of which I have many, with things like things like, there's nothing left. That's just mean. No. No.
Speaker 4:No.
Speaker 1:We're all That
Speaker 3:was mean, Dave, actually,
Speaker 4:the way
Speaker 3:you chuckled there. He was, you know, that that was the time for a supportive, helpful, uplifting comment about how Mark's helping the world be better.
Speaker 1:No. It was more of a it resonates with me because I feel like that most days. Chuckle.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it's but and and it's it's what we get into that whole that whole kind of net zero thing is what we then people end up doing is because they have this obsessive target that they can't reduce it, they end up gaming it. And gaming it means you end up hiding things, and you you put more effort into pretending you're doing something than you are into actually doing the thing. That's true. Because people want because because leaders want the good news.
Speaker 4:And so one of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to large enterprise users all the time is please go to your leaders now and explain that IT emissions are going to be going up. So give them the bad news now because you've got then the next year or so for them to stop screaming and trying.
Speaker 1:So when you track back down a value chain of IT, what is it about it that you think is gonna be so difficult to get to either net zero or neutral? Because, of course, there's a lot of rhetoric in the industry about all of the providers getting their emissions down, getting their footprints down. So why is it not just a matter of time for the elements of the supply chain to connect together in a way that it then provides an either a net zero or a close to neutral position?
Speaker 4:It mostly comes from corporate transparency, politics, and the economic driver to make profit. Ah, like most like it
Speaker 1:is Like most like
Speaker 4:most like it. Exactly. Yeah. Because if you look at it, the the truthfulness is that we all talk about the circular economy. Every large vendor and large manufacturer posts utter nonsense about what they're doing to adopt the circular economy and how they're driving it and what they're doing to to improve it.
Speaker 4:And the truth is, when you get down to it, we're still ripping the raw materials out the ground in really unsustainable ways.
Speaker 3:And and it's that we are wrapped around the axle of capitalism that requires ever increasing productivity and production to sustain the system based against debt. And you go, nobody's come up with a better system. Nobody's actually in control, and we have to live with the reality that the system we live in, that has worked for us until we realized it was wrecking the planet. Yep. How do we transition to the alternative and do it without killing the financial system and causing countries to go off track and stuff?
Speaker 3:And I think there's that realization that the system we live in is built on consumption, and we are now struggling that consumption is killing the environment. And I think there's just a big, big, big problem. How do we deal with that one?
Speaker 4:Well, the the hardest thing is what this needs is people to come together and actually accept the change they're gonna have to put in. And there are things they could do much faster. So if I go back to that circular economy thing, it's the really harsh truth is it's a lot of it is nonsense, because they say, recycling, reuse, repurpose. We're extracting the raw raw materials again, but then you look at how they're extracting them. So you look at things, so take your average.
Speaker 4:So the adoption of the circular economy in large enterprises has actually dropped in the last couple of years, and it hasn't increased despite what they say at all, and that's disheartening. But even when you then look at how the materials are being reclaimed, so they're reuse and repurposing, great, that happens. Not happening enough. But then when you get to the end of it where things aren't don't have a purposeful use and they need to get to get the raw materials back, do you know what we're doing? We're we're putting them on boats.
Speaker 4:We're shipping them to places like Antwerp, and we're burning them in blast furnaces at 4,000 degrees to smelt it, to get the raw materials back out with huge amounts of chemicals where they're leaching into the water table, poisoning the kids in the local area. How does that sound like a sustainable thing to be doing? And, but there are technologies that have now come through with companies doing really, really innovative things. Companies in the UK doing brilliant things, actually, where where they're using technologies called things like bioleaching, where they're using nonhazardous chemicals at low temperature to extract as much of the raw materials. It's a concept called urban mining.
Speaker 4:That's actually true circular economy because then what they do is they take those raw materials that they extract back, and they pump them back into the supply chain to get create that closed loop supply chain.
Speaker 3:Is that realization that the global will or the ability of the global system to come together to fix the problems that we discussed is too slow and unlikely to achieve its outcome. There is that angle that says, there's gonna be a big role to play in technology and changes like you've just discussed that are going to fix it. So, you know, the faith has to be, you can't believe the global system will work because it's too slow. Therefore, we have to try and do the things that you talk about, which is the innovation in the process to to correct it and make it work effectively.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So the where this really comes down to is it's it's a bit of a cheesy phrase, but it's that butterfly effect. Because the one challenge I have is that when I go and talk to a lot of people, everyone always says the same thing, but what I do, I'm just one person, I'm just one company, I'm just one group of companies. My actions are irrelevant. And and I'll say something like, you know, well, the UK, we're only x percent of global emissions.
Speaker 4:You know, China's the bad guy. They need to do everything. Yeah. Yeah. But if everyone says the same thing, then nothing happens.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 4:Actions at every level, actions have consequences. And within the boundaries of IT
Speaker 1:Yes. I was I was actually gonna bring us back to the boundaries of IT for a second and talk about how we can proactively from, you know, from an IT practitioner point of view, how do we get after this problem? I see a lot of crossover chat between FinOps and GreenOps and where the cost is a proxy for sustainability. So just as an intro to then the practical measures we can take around this today, what's your thoughts on cost as a proxy?
Speaker 4:My first thought is you're deliberately trying to trigger me today. So cost cost us
Speaker 1:He's good at it, isn't he?
Speaker 3:He does it to me every day.
Speaker 1:I mean, Rob's rant against capitalism isn't the trigger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And it was a very difficult difficult question to ask to Mark,
Speaker 1:Rob.
Speaker 4:That that was a
Speaker 1:macro question of the week award to Rob.
Speaker 4:So that's one that's one that recently really actually did set me off when so the, the Amazon CTO stood on sorry. The AWS CTO stood on the stage and stood up and said, we think cost is a proxy for sustainability, and it's, like, it's not. In no way is it at all in the slightest. How can you use so if I take, for example, I'm buying 2, so, 2 different server types. Yeah.
Speaker 4:1 so both cost me a dollar per unit. Yeah? 1 of them, gigantic and sustainable server build running at really hideously low, you know, low power, really efficient in a low carbon zone. That could have a total emissions in reality of like 1 gram. You compare it with the same dollar server in a really high carbon intensity zone built in a really inefficient way, which can have an emissions factor of 10,000 kilograms.
Speaker 4:Yeah. How is that same dollar converted back into the same metric of sustainability? Cost as a proxy is just an excuse for not having data. It's not having meaningful data. You can't align the 2 in a meaningful manner.
Speaker 4:But conversely saying that, GreenOps and FinOps do align where if you spend less, you generally reduce your emissions, but it's not a proxy for a calculation. You can't align those 2 things because the biggest challenge people have in FinOps is they want meaningful data. They want data they will trust, and they will not make decisions with garbage data. And when you can't align it so for example, going back to my my my example of the so if you want to optimize your services from the context of carbon as well as the concept of cost, you can't use that cost as a proxy to make a different decision because all you're doing, you're looking at going, well, is that the right decision? If I change from x x build model to y build model, if I go serverless to monolithic, more monolithic to serverless, I switch from r5xls to c5, what will that impact that have?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, look, your cost's gone down by 50%. Well, have my emissions gone down? Probably not.
Speaker 1:So what in your mind then, how would you contrast FinOps and GreenOps? Is it effectively the same team broadly doing the same thing and just reporting in 2 different channels? Or is there something sort of fundamentally different between the 2? And actually, what might happen over time is those two things might get pulled apart as functions because actually their purpose is different even though some of the underlying mechanism might be the same.
Speaker 4:They overlap really nicely, and they actually are a really well aligned kind of group to work as as one. It's just a different KPI and a different metric. So the interesting thing that we've done recently so it's just been published. We did a survey with Climate Action Tech, and we got 2,680 responses, and we asked the honest question because I've been suspicious of that for some time, most of my career, which is we all talk about, you know, cost efficiencies and budget cuts and optimizing spend, and and everyone always assumes that we care about money. I think it's time to be honest again that as individuals and organizations, we don't care about money.
Speaker 4:When our bosses scream at us to, you know, we need to save budget, we need to save money, and everyone nods and smiles and then goes out of the room and carries on doing exactly what they're doing and doesn't change a thing. But if we truly cared about money, we wouldn't have the industry of FinOps in the first place. We wouldn't have cost optimization as being a driver because we'd already be doing it by the nature that we cared about the amount of money we were spending. And so we did the survey to find out actually the truth of it is, do people care more about cost as a KPI or carbon as a KPI? And we found really interestingly that of the 2,680 responses, less than 16% said cost, 50% said carbon.
Speaker 4:So what that shows is there's a real motivator to use a different form of KPI. So if you give so so if you can show because in Finox, you give people the KPIs and the targets, say, yeah, we need to optimize x by y to do this, you know, effective savings rates, optimization rates, all that kind of stuff. And what we found was if you switch it to give someone carbon as the metric unit in a metric in a manner they understand, they suddenly actually get personally involved in wanting to drive the change because they care about the thing.
Speaker 1:What were the demographics in that, Mark? Did you see any shifts in that as you went from, say, Gen x through to Millennial through to Gen zed?
Speaker 4:So the one thing we didn't house with the was the age, but we do know from working with people, that's a really interesting thing as well, is we're seeing, ironically, the upper end of the spectrum really interested in this. And definitely the the the Gen z's absolutely massively interested in in this. And it's that bit in the middle where there's still a lot of skepticism about it. But what we did see was more geographic differences, and we saw role based differences as well. So the geographic one was exactly kind of as you'd expect.
Speaker 4:Europe as a focus was was significantly further ahead in terms of actually caring about it and already doing something about it. Because, again, the interesting thing we found was that 60% of people who responded said their organizations already are or are intending to map their their their digital carbon footprint from cloud services. But then when you got to the US, that dropped from 60% down to, I think, the figure was 29.8%, I think, something like that, in that ballpark.
Speaker 3:And when you look at, like, the legislation coming in on reporting on your full supply chain and stuff, I think that's becoming an EU regulation shortly. What's the what what do you think the factor is about the social morality of it and, like, the Gen z really caring about it and their future and legislation driving the requirement for companies to to report on it, understand it, and improve their process. Do you think that's equal balance working well, or do you think there's an imbalance and one is leading the other? What's your view there?
Speaker 4:I think they're operating very, very independently of each other right now, but they're a necessary evil. So, so, the truth is in most most corporations won't do anything unless they really have to, unless they happen to have a leader who implicitly actually cares rather than pretending they care. But even then, it's a struggle. But if they have to do it for the reason of legislation, then suddenly that becomes, like, a motivating driver. And also businesses are getting a lot of pressure from shareholders, from investors.
Speaker 4:And the other big thing that we found, this is really interesting, is a lot of big old enterprise organizations are struggling to recruit the next generation of tech talent. So they're they're starting to find their fishing from very small pools. So they can't get the people they want to do AI, ML, insert whatever new techy shiny thing they want to do. And they're finding, actually, those people are going to the organizations who's they think whose their morals and ethics are aligned with them. So what they're finding is if they actually focus on sustainability and use that as a differentiator, they're now able to recruit those people back in.
Speaker 4:So from a diversity perspective, it's actually helping them drive what they develop and how they develop in a much more meaningful manner because they can get the people they want now.
Speaker 1:Very good. So if we then focus on what then you would advise organizations that have got significant cloud footprints? Or even actually if they've if they're only just starting their journey or, maybe more trickiness, but even not in the cloud. What's the reasonable response here, do you think? What does good practice look like today in the world of green ops?
Speaker 1:And how does that differentiate from what's going on in the world of Fin ops? And we've talked about Fin ops a fair bit on the show this season. And even when you've got cost as a driver, which is more, as you say, it's kind of the more usual situation in enterprises today. Frankly, not that many of us are yet doing even FinOps that well. So So what does what does GreenOps good practice look like, and how do we get into it in a more material way?
Speaker 4:That's a big question.
Speaker 1:Is it as big as, Rob's the capitalist system is ruining the world question?
Speaker 3:It is. It is. We just have to wake up and understand.
Speaker 4:One run down. One run down, Brit. So Yeah. So where where this comes from is green ops is a rapidly developing practice, and the bit the the biggest challenge people are having is we're all operating in silos. So if you look at the breadth of IT, the one thing that I always encourage is stop thinking about this as your cloud services and your cloud team doing it and your data center team doing it and your infrastructure team doing it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. What you need to look is your entire IT ecosystem and work out where the problems are you're trying to solve. Because until you create that, like, that whole of IT baseline, you don't know whether you're just fiddling with the wrong area. You need to work out basically to see what levers can you pull to make a different decision. And the other bit is really, really critical is stop pretending you're always going to try and be sustainable, because you won't.
Speaker 4:It's about how do you move sustainability to become a non functional requirement. So how do you get it to sit alongside your other pressures? Because you've got things like risk, governance, security, which will take priority a lot of the time, And it's about understanding that your actions have consequences. And so you can so when you look back so so just say you have to make security led decisions that massively increase your emissions. And at the end of the year you report them and someone starts shouting about why this has gone wrong, why did we do it, who did it, what, you can just go, well, because of x, y happened, And then the business can decide whether they're willing to adjust and change, which is what comes back to my point about it being an organizational it's a transformation of an operating model more than just being a technology component part.
Speaker 4:And then what you need to be doing, go to Greenox layer, is calculating everything in a consistent methodology so you know you can compare apples with apples. Because most people, they've come up and they go, well, how do we know whether it's better and more sustainable to put it in our data center versus putting it in the cloud? How do we know whether it's better to be in the cloud in Dublin versus the cloud in Amsterdam? How do we know? And the answer is that's very hard right now.
Speaker 4:So you need the granular data and you need to understand that data is not perfect as well.
Speaker 1:If I'm asking a supplier to provide me with a solution and I'm asking that supplier to provide me with views on its green credentials or its sustainability. What does good look like for you? Because often you see quite a bit of this stuff tucked away in the corporate social responsibility section where, you know, you make some, you know, relatively low impact commitments on things. But what does a really good sustainable embedded from the start solution look like to you?
Speaker 4:So you need to break it into 2 areas. So and this is one of the problems is that so procurement are the front end of getting sort of sustainability data for organizations, because they are the the people who are out there negotiating the contracts play because there's no better time to get metrics than when you're negotiating something with someone. That's when they're most willing and most weak to give you what you need in the right level of detail. The problem right now is most organizations are asking for what I would call corporate level sustainability data, and that's the fluff of nonsense that you were just talking about. So it's the shiny brochure that makes loads of vague promises about things they're not really actually doing with numbers that actually aren't inclusive and don't, you know, and are very, very vague, but sound good.
Speaker 4:So procurement teams get everything, oh, I can weigh that. That's that's 3 and a half stone for that one versus 2 and a half stone for that one. Therefore, they're more sustainable. And besides, they had pictures of happy, smiling children in theirs, and it made me feel good. That's that's very different to having accurate product level metrics.
Speaker 4:So what you need to do is actually do a bit of both, which is to validate your supplier, how are they doing and what are they doing, and are they morally and ethically aligned with you, so are they doing the right things, including the breadth of ESG, not just sustainability. And then and then it's about the product level metrics, and that's where it's very detail focused. So what you need is that consistent approach to be asking for the vendors. Now do you have a life cycle assess assessment for your individual product? Do you have an environmental product declaration?
Speaker 4:Do you have a breakdown of your emissions factors? Can you provide them to me in a consistent and a standardized manner? Because IT buys a lot of stuff and it's about how you get that data from someone in a consistent and standard way so that you know whether it's kind of good or bad. And this isn't about always castigating and beating up the vendor for being bad for not giving you the data. It's actually about knowing in your supply chain how you rate those vendors and and which ones you need to work with to use your weight as the consumer to drive change.
Speaker 3:Because that
Speaker 4:bit we talked about at the beginning, which is no one no one's gonna change unless everyone pushes in the same direction. So it's the, you know, big consumers need to push on the vendors. The big vendors need to push on their supply chain to get better data. Because everyone's asking the same thing and going, we just need better data that we trust. Right.
Speaker 4:Because even, you know, because if we go to a vendor, the vendors are the same. They're no different to the big the big bank buying this stuff. The vendor's just buying different things. They're buying the materials construction, the chipboard. So they go into their supply chain and say, can I have availability metrics?
Speaker 4:Can I have EPDs? Can I have LCA? We're all fighting that same thing.
Speaker 1:Let's maybe bring our conversation today to a bit of close by going full circle and talking about the thing that we talked about at the beginning, which was emissions are likely to go up. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. So what does good reporting look like to you? So if you're advising a chief executive of an organization on what they should do to push for accurate reporting in their business ecosystem. Is that a separate dashboard that looks like, hey, here's my green dashboard or is it embedded, or is it a mix of the 2?
Speaker 1:What what are your thoughts on best practice there?
Speaker 4:You've done it again. You triggered me again by mentioning dashboards. So, don't
Speaker 3:That's 3 for 3 now, Dave. Well done.
Speaker 4:There's a there's a real tendency to in IT, we love tools and we love dashboards. And I'm fairly well known now for the must have is please stop buying tools you're not gonna use. You don't need another dashboard tool at all. No one needs another tool. So all that happens is there's loads of vendors shilling, like, sustainability dashboards for consolidating it, and they all look they look beautiful.
Speaker 4:I I mean, I love looking at them, and you you obviously gotta look at this. Look at these data points you can get and the analysis you can get and the decisions I can make. Well, it's going to be wonderful. And you you get them, and and first question I always ask is, okay, well, what do I do? And they go, oh, well, you just need to connect your data.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Oh, god. Well, okay. So you're saying all you've done is you've got a visualization layer where I need to supply all the data again. Oh, no.
Speaker 4:Well, you can use our proxies. Okay. What are your proxies? Well, we use a spend base oh, right. Okay.
Speaker 4:So it's nonsense information then. It's a very intelligent allocation model. I'm not criticizing their going to the large corporations and what you need is granular metrics. You need a data lake, effectively sustainability data. Granular metrics, location based data based upon your actual usage and your actual consumption.
Speaker 4:And the next big thing that is the bit that everyone misses every single time is be clear about what are you going to do with this information. So how are you going to use this information to drive a different decision? And you have to split this into 2 things. There's the information for ESG reporting. So in other words, the metrics you're gonna push uphill.
Speaker 4:So our emissions are, yay, dig, broken into categories that your ESG team want you to report. Brilliant. You've got that off your back and that's sorted, and everyone's happy. Then the other thing is how do you turn that into useful information that you can use within the boundaries of IT? And that requires a totally different system of thinking.
Speaker 4:So that is actually then how do you get that data, not into a dashboard that no one's going to look at. Yeah? Because no people will look at it for, say, 3 months, and they get bored and go away like they always do.
Speaker 2:Rob will look at
Speaker 4:it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'd bring it out at dinner parties and go, hey. Have you seen the latest analysis I've done yet?
Speaker 4:Look at my bar chart. Oh,
Speaker 3:to where?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Let's go on dinner parties. So it's so so it's actually how do you get it how do you get this data on your your existing systems of record? So because you all enterprises are blessed with bundles of tools that they use for every area. You you got you know, insert the acronyms.
Speaker 4:You got your FinOps tool, your TBM tool, your CMDB, your d sim. How do you get all this data into the systems where your users already live? And how do you get that data into a format which they understand and can use? They get a metric that isn't just like a this artificial concept for them of scope 1, 2, and 3, where they go, is that good? Because they always ask the same thing.
Speaker 4:This number, is it a good number or a bad number? Okay. Well, it's a number. Okay. So then it's actually how do you allocate it?
Speaker 4:Because no one cares that the emissions of a server or a storage array or a cloud unit at all. The business doesn't care about that. They don't even care about the VM at all. But a VM is built of consumption units from servers, networks, which load balances, firewalls, storage, data center, you name it, loads of stuff. It's how you roll it up.
Speaker 4:So the bit of the business is I I'd like to do is get that data lake and create your allocation model to understand actually how do you get to a point of going which application is using which service and what are the emissions of it? How do you get business intelligence? Because actually, the beauty with sustainability data is how do you roll it uphill to make a different decision so that you can give it to your development team and that development team can go, oh, okay. So if we shifted from this language to this language, x would have, oh, that would drive that down. If we if we switch from London to Dublin to all of Amsterdam, what will happen?
Speaker 4:Oh, God. Okay. We do that. What happens if we switch off our development environments that we're not using overnight? Oh, we we get a 70% reduction in emissions, do we?
Speaker 4:Oh, brilliant. What what does that mean? Well, that's 10,000 trees saved. Then people are suddenly tied to this, and but the key point is getting that into their system of records that was in their face. Don't expect them to go and log into a thing they don't care about and try and search through and go, oh, okay.
Speaker 4:What am I saying? I'm seeing a chart. It's big. Well, don't mean anything to me. My bit's only small.
Speaker 4:What does it matter if I change a thing? Going back to my original point, the cultural change. And you only drive change by giving people data in the system they want to use.
Speaker 1:What you've been looking at this week, Shao?
Speaker 2:So each week I do some research on related ideas and transformation and tech, and this week I thought we should take a look at the new era of fin ups and green ups from cloud cost to sustainability to business value. So the focus on green up green ops is expanding, building on the foundation of FinOps. Cloud investments remain crucial with a shift towards a holistic cloud ops strategy involving migration, operations, optimization, and which also includes FinOps and green ops for sustainability. So the goals companies should have are to build on intelligence and AI for quicker insights, have efficiency improvements, cost reductions, and look at carbon footprint minimization. So a question.
Speaker 2:Are these the correct goals to become more sustainable and increase business value, or are there important goals missing here?
Speaker 3:I think from the conversation we've just had, the cultural point is really key. So we can measure, you know, things we can understand and track and capture. But to get an improvement, what do we measure about behavior and change in the organization and the culture? That's a much harder thing to understand what you have to do. And I don't know, Mark, from your perspective, if you go in and you have any view on how you shift the dial in that area, but it's something that many struggle with to understand that there's this big pivot you need to do to say, you've got all this data.
Speaker 3:How are you actually gonna use it effectively? And I think that was one of your core points. Just to build on
Speaker 1:that a sec, Rob, before you come in, Mark. It seems to me that that a lot of the things that we generally talk about have got some aspect of cultural change attached to them. Even if you're, you know, in inverted comms doing the digital transformation or cloud transformation element of this, it comes with a very hefty aspect of cultural change to really realize the the upward benefits of that. So the more we talk about this stuff and and and this one being more critical probably arguably than the others, particularly from a, you know, kind of a lives of our children point of view. It comes back to cultural change.
Speaker 1:It constantly comes back to the humans in the middle of it doing the right thing. Yet change programs and programs that are supposed to be addressing this stuff constantly under address it, or they see it as something, well, we'll drop an email to everybody about the change and then that'll broadly do it, won't it? So just cultural change generally, it seems to me, feels like a more important element more important than ever, I think, is probably true.
Speaker 4:Yep. And so the biggest thing is culture change has to start at the top. And so everyone has to be accountable, not just the teams below. And there's a tendency for leaders to want everyone else to take the pain and not them. So everyone needs the targets.
Speaker 4:Everyone needs the KPIs, and everyone needs ones that are contextual.
Speaker 1:That's been Rob's approach, Mark. That's been Rob's approach for for 20 years now.
Speaker 4:Dodge the It's paid downhill.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Somebody else could deal with that paper. Right?
Speaker 1:Let me know when you've changed.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're all gonna be different. Now go and change. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Do that thing faster. I don't know what it is. Just do it faster,
Speaker 1:but cheaper.
Speaker 4:Faster and better. Yeah. And so when it comes down to it, everyone needs align align targets, but they need to have a target that's contextual to their role. And that this is my point about building it into the culture. Nothing changes unless you actually build it into your operating model and everyone understands how it's aligned and the target and they have a KPI, and most importantly, you've actually given them the time and the budget to make the change.
Speaker 4:And it's about understanding as well that actions have consequences. So it's not just always trying to make the sustainable decision, but going right, okay, this time we can't, and everyone understanding that who made that decision, who is accountable. So if you take if you take a really simplistic example of saying, I'm gonna deploy an AWS Virginia versus AWS Suite. And you go to the boss saying, right, we'll get we can do this because the application's no load latency. We're just gonna do it.
Speaker 4:Brilliant. Okay. Go ahead. Brilliant. The emissions in Sweden are 80% lower.
Speaker 4:Good. I mean, the cost is 50% higher. I'm like, the what?
Speaker 1:So okay. I thought you said 50%.
Speaker 4:Yes. Yeah. Because yeah. How about no? And and then so you then but then that's about that person who's now accountable for that position.
Speaker 4:So when you get to the end of the year, why has x happened? You could say, well, because we need to allocate more budget, or we need to transform how we built the service, or we need to make a different decision. You can't have both, and it's about being honest and transparent. But it's yeah. So blame doesn't have to stop right at the bottom.
Speaker 4:The blame has to stop at the person who made that actual decision is accountable. And to do that, they need the data so that you can understand why and what happened.
Speaker 1:Well, the the other aspect that resonated with me in our conversation and actually is pertinent to what, Shouk said there is the vanity metric aspect of this. And the ease at which organizations are just actually trying to get metrics for metrics sake rather than delving into sort of the depths of the change that's really required. And you can, you know, again, this isn't unique to this area, is it? This area just has more of a sharp edge than most.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's the inconvenient truth,
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Which comes back that and that comes back to my point about you have to be willing to go back to the business and go, the number's gonna go up because of this. And if and if your business goes, well, that's not good enough, okay. Well, in that case, then, you know that AI platform you wanted, well well, what's it? Should we take that one off the list?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Is that okay? Oh, and and, you know, the data center, we can should we take that off? Should we should we stop doing that? Well, no. You can't do that.
Speaker 4:Okay. Well, you can't do more and reduce it simultaneously. You have to understand. And that and and also the other issue, the bit the gigantic elephant in the room that we are not talking about in IT is no one is measuring software related emissions. So the software that you buy, so the, you know, your Microsoft licensing, your application licensing, anything like that, we're all obsessed with the hardware.
Speaker 4:We're not actually looking about because if you look at the average IT spend and budget, about 40% is software. And but we're not counting that. We're not including that. We're not thinking about that. And then the software license the software companies, they're they're lurking in the background being mysteriously very, very quiet about the subject.
Speaker 4:And I know because I do audits with lots of vendors. We have the same conversation with the software vendors all the time. We go, can you share with us your emissions metrics? They go, or what?
Speaker 1:You got it
Speaker 3:now, hey? What's over there? It's a squirrel. Look at that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Alright. Just buy more licenses. Shut up. Renew.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I think the the there there really should be competitive advantage, I think, in stating that stuff, in this day and age. I actually wasn't aware of that of that fact. I thought everybody at this point were were at least on it from bandwagon point of view, if not on it from a, you know, good for the earth point of view?
Speaker 4:No. Because a lot of them are just making it up as they go along, particularly the numbers as well. And, I mean, and again, one one vendor, I will will not name them because they would definitely sue me, is, last week in the morning
Speaker 1:not sue then.
Speaker 4:I know, exactly. Yeah. They they claim they claimed in the meeting that no customer globally anywhere is asking them for this data. And and the and the problem with that statement was I'd been in 6 different audits with that same vendor asking them for this data. Interesting.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But there maybe is an underlying point, which is organizations, maybe until they have an audit from somebody like your good self, they're not thinking to ask those questions because it's a new muscle that most organizations are building, I think.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And and it does come back to that same point that I made about investing in the people and giving them the freedom. It's actually not because the people in these organizations are doing a bad thing. It's just that it's typically only a couple of individuals. It's a very even in multibillion dollar organizations, it's normally a very, very small team who are focused on building the metrics and providing the data.
Speaker 4:So it's actually a lack of investment more than a people wanting to do the wrong thing. They only give what they've got.
Speaker 3:I think though the lovely idea that's just popped into my head is you're sat there and the business say, well, that's not good enough. CO 2 impact can't go up, And you go, well, let's just turn off that finance package and here's an abacus and you can do your financial reporting on that and here's a slate to to report it on and you can send that. Yeah. It's that dark realization that says, we're stuck with this. We need to deal with it in a different way.
Speaker 3:You can't just say, no. It's got to go down. Well, how
Speaker 4:is the case. I I and that's what's leading to a lot of the game playing that happens because already, we're seeing the narrative happen of organizations saying, yes, but look at how sustainable our applications and services are for our consumer. We're helping our consumer to reduce their emissions by doing this thing. So we are offsetting it by reducing this thing over here, are you? Yeah.
Speaker 4:But that you're still doing it gigantically inefficiently over here. You doing that thing over there is
Speaker 3:not We don't talk about that. Yes. We don't talk about that bit over there. We only talk about the fun bit over there, isn't it?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It yeah. Because it feels good over there. They can go, oh, yeah. Our AI centric platform has optimized things, and our customers now are doing things 20 times as fast and blah blah blah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but you've you've you've burnt the planet over here to do that, though.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can
Speaker 4:you can you stop, please? We're not
Speaker 1:gonna get to the bottom of it today, are we? I think the big takeaway for me, though, is to look at this stuff pragmatically and realistically even if there's bad news attached to the initial kind of pull together of data around that. But, Mark, thank you so much for spending some time and giving us your insights right from the call face of of how to deal with this situation. So thanks a lot for that.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:And now we end every episode of this podcast by asking our guests what they're excited about doing next. And that could be, something in your personal life, like you've got a great restaurant booked at the weekend or something in your professional world. Mark, what are you excited about doing next?
Speaker 4:It's actually in my professional world. I've got a couple of there's a couple of things I'm doing at the moment which I'm really excited about because they're monumentally difficult to be trying to achieve. So one of the things that that I'm trying to create is a is a federation across GreenOps that that brings together all the abstract parts from across the whole of IT. Because, again, it's my my point about needing consistency is I'm trying to bring together all these disparate groups that exist everywhere doing great things. So all the foundations you see already, who have working groups on sustainability and related things, and we're all struggling with the same thing, which is lack of resource, lack of time, and lack of money.
Speaker 4:And I'm trying to get these, a lot, a loosely aligned federation to bring the groups together, which is they carry on doing what they're doing, but we're we're all able to share and access the learnings from other areas. Very nice.
Speaker 1:So how far through are you?
Speaker 4:The software, We're about halfway through getting to the point of actually, you know, trying to launch in the next few months, and it's the herding of the cats phase right now. Right. So we're trying to get everyone from the from the phase of, we we've said yes. We're definitely gonna do it to that giant leap of actually wanting to do it because there's a lot of kind of politics that goes with this and a lot of accidentally treading on toes, but for me, it's for the greater good. So it's the concept of saying something like, how could we have, like, one common set of sustainability standards that could be pulled from that would actually be used by data centers, infrastructure, end user devices, cloud, the whole shooting match?
Speaker 4:And then how do we use that to drive change?
Speaker 1:Are you gonna try and take on this notion of actually getting to truth, like a baseline of truth rather than vanity?
Speaker 4:Yes. Yeah. The the idea is is be being transparent because the bit that you said that kind of that fall in there was about the bad news bit. I think we need to stop thinking about this as being bad news when you put you're posting bigger numbers. It's not news.
Speaker 4:It's just a thing.
Speaker 1:It's just news.
Speaker 4:It's the consequences of what you're doing. And if you had a if you if you instead of having a bad user saying our number's gone up massively, you went, we're we're operating at 99.7% carbon efficiency. That is an awesome thing for your business because you can't make your business more efficient within the boundaries of your what you're willing to do. The only alternative option you'd say is the only thing further we could do now is to agree we're gonna have less revenue and deliver less services. So it's it's it's different thinking.
Speaker 4:It's shift your thinking. Don't think of it as being a bad news thing. Because that's what we put we post the number, that's bad, the number's gone up. It's not. It's just a thing.
Speaker 4:It's just a number. It's how efficient is it.
Speaker 2:So a huge thanks to our guest this week. Marc, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks also to our sound and editing wizards, Ben and Louis, our unsustainable producer, Marcel and, of course, to all of our listeners. We're on Linkedin and X. Dave Chapman, Rob Kernan and Shao Kiseu.
Speaker 2:Feel free to follow or connect with us and please get in touch if you have any comments or ideas for the show. And, of course, if you haven't already done that, rate and subscribe to our podcast. See you in another reality next week.