I’m in the Lone Star State again, this time in San Antonio where I’m speaking at RedPrairie’s RedShift 2009 Conference. I gave a sneak peak of my talk-”Is ‘Green’ Good for Business During a Recession?”-in a recent posting, so I’m not going to steal anymore of my thunder. But in keeping with the “We Are Smarter Than Me” concept that I highlighted yesterday, I plan to kick off my presentation by asking the audience what they think. Any bets on what they’ll say?
I hate travelling, but the one bright spot is getting USA Today delivered to my room every morning. When I was in Dallas last week, this article caught my attention: “Going green can cost too much green.” The first sentence of the article: “Going green isn’t easy, especially during a recession.”
The article highlights how government agencies across the country are pulling back or eliminating programs that use or fund renewable energy projects. Durango, Colorado, for example, has stopped using wind power for its government buildings. It has gone back to using electricity from coal-burning plants, which is saving the city $45,000 (wind power is about 42 percent more expensive than coal power). According to City Manager Ron LeBlanc, “It’s very hard for us to lay off an employee to justify green power. Those are the tradeoffs you have to face.” Can you imagine getting laid off by a windmill?
‘Green’ is synonymous with tradeoffs. It’s one of the “Inconvenient Truths of ‘Green’ Supply Chain Management” that I wrote about back in February 2008.
A bright spot in this move to a ‘green’ economy is the software industry. As I highlighted last month, the prospect of cap-and-trade legislation is serving as a stimulus bill for the IT industry, with new software start-ups emerging in the so-called carbon information management space (see “Managing Carbon: A Green Opportunity for IT“). Yesterday, SAP announced it was acquiring Clear Standards, “a privately held innovator of enterprise carbon management solutions [that] helps organizations accurately measure, optimize and report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental impacts across internal operations.”
I don’t know much about Clear Standards, but the fact they’re a software-as-a-service provider is encouraging. As I wrote about recently, supply chain carbon management is really a network problem. So, from a technology perspective, the best solution is arguably a software-as-a-service model, where trading partners share emissions data and other relevant information via a central network, instead of everyone creating one-to-one links with each other and government agencies. I’m not sure if Clear Standards or SAP share this same vision, but I think it’s the right one. I’ll let you know what I learn when I get briefed.
In the meantime, I need to get ready for the conference, and I just heard a thud outside my door, which means my newspaper has arrived.
