Paul Gottsegen
Now when it comes to sustainability, green, the “E” of ESG, all the different labels… I know that solar panels were invented in 1954, even before you were born, Prashant, and the electric wind turbine was invented in 1887 in Scotland – before I was born. So, this has been around for a while in different forms.
We pretty much all care about the earth. So why is it? I'm curious why – when you only had three; I only gave you three things to choose for 2023 – and you chose green tech. What is happening now versus what has happened prior?
Prashant Kelker
What's happening now is at least two decades of progress on the tech part of green. If you look at the amount of the cost of generating power solar panels over the last 30 years, they have dropped by 90 percent. That's nine-zero percent. The same thing with wind power, which has dropped 70 – that’s seven zero – percent over the last three decades. Wind and solar have certainly got much, much cheaper. Now, it's just that they're unpredictable, because they rely on forces of nature.
Suddenly, it's not just about power generation, it's also about power storage, which is where something like batteries come in. You can start seeing how a topic like sustainability goes from being a goal to actually being an ecosystem of technology. Which is why our focus is, as I see, it's much more on what are the technology players coming up now. It could be a hardware, it could be a software, it could be electrical or mechanical.
What could be the solutions that are coming up and how do they come together to achieve the common goal?
The common goal could be selling green tech. Another common goal could be creating a circular economy. There's a lot of money to be made in recycling. We spoke about this example of batteries having three lives; who takes care of that life end-to-end? Who takes care of life three, in the three lives? What happens when batteries have to change boundaries? Could you buy a battery in the Netherlands and then recycle it in Germany?
Try doing that. It's not as easy as it seems.
So how do you design for circular economies, and what could be the brand-new sustainability services that come up? We expect some of your vendors to emerge who specialize in such things so – and you know about this, Paul – we are starting our own sustainability services. Our north star at the moment is focused on scope one and scope two, not so much scope three, to see: what are these new services that will be bought and sold?
This could also go in the direction of design for recycling green infrastructure. We don't expect any spending to stop in this area, which is why we're tracking it.
Paul Gottsegen
Around the design for recycling, I've heard the term cradle to cradle. I like that.
But you know, if you're a Global 2000 client and your main focus isn't so much to sell green tech services… but you know that there's a burst of small and large organizations out there. And meanwhile, there is pressure from shareholders, pressure from employees, to do all that you can for the cause. So, you know you need to engage with this ecosystem. How do you do it as a Global 2000 an organization? It must be overwhelming to figure out with all that's happening in green tech. How do you harness the power or pick and choose from a set of priorities to figure out how to how to develop the right path in 2023 for green tech?
Prashant Kelker
I think as a community, we need new muscles. We are so used to architecting and designing. I'm not sure these verbs are going to help us going forward. We need to be listening more. So instead of trying to think, “what should we architect?” and “what should we design?” we should start listening for conversations within our own industry value chains.
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If you're a retail firm, what's happening in third-party logistics, what's happening in the CPG area?
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If you are a healthcare payer firm, what's happening on the provider side, what's happening on the MedTech side, what's happening with bioscience and data science coming together, how does that shift my spend from diagnostics to pre-diagnostic?
You need to start looking at industry value chains. Some call it ecosystem, others call it industry value chains. And we need to start tracking and listening more. The minute you start tracking and listening more, you start seeing which conversations are happening in the market outside you, outside your office.
Some of these conversations might be happening without you. You just don't know about them.
So just listening and tracking the conversations would help you to say, “okay, what's actually happening?” Then you can change gears. You could say, “well, of these ten conversations, you know what, I want to influence what happens in this conversation.” “What's that conversation?” “I want to influence this. I want to track that. I want to engage here.”
We should move to a conversation play across industry value chains, and then we can always bring it back to architecting and design.
Now this comes with the with a downside, Paul. I think that because you're tracking conversations continuously, you can't plan for three years down the line. So, what does this do to three- or four-year programs? What does it do for large implementations?
That's where I think we should start going from capital “A” Agile to small “a” agile, thinking agile not in terms of doing Agile, but thinking agile in terms of funding and shipping continuous business outcomes. Tracking such conversations across industry value chains is going to move us towards a small “a” agile.
Continue to the next video to dive into our conclusion: Shipping Continuous Business Outcomes in 2023.
About the authors
Paul Gottsegen
Paul is President, ISG Client Experience, managing the firm’s marketing activity globally, including demand generation, branding and communications. He is a leader in the firm’s work to establish and maintain a leading position in AI and new technologies and to capitalize on the opportunities they present. From 2019 to 2023, Paul led the ISG Research business to great heights, and continues as Chair, ISG Research.
Paul was a classic product marketing leader for PC hardware for the first 20 years of his career, including launching the industry’s first network servers. He has since applied that product marketing experience to CMO roles in large services firms. While marketing is his “center of gravity,” he has led large sales organizations and has been a general manager with full P&L responsibility.
Prior to ISG, he was the Chief Marketing Officer for Mindtree and Infosys, completing end-to-end branding and marketing turnarounds. As Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at HP, Dell Inc., and Compaq earlier in his career, Paul led product marketing, revenue marketing and enterprise alliances for the network server businesses.
Paul is Board Chair of the Gastric Cancer Foundation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brandeis University and an MBA from The Wharton School.
Prashant Kelker
Prashant Kelker is President, ISG DACH, and Chief Strategy Officer. A globally recognized thought leader in AI and technology-led transformation, Prashant is shaping the firm’s strategic blueprint and bringing together all advisory capabilities to guide clients in the DACH region through the convergence of AI, digital technology and enterprise operating models.
Previously, as Partner, Americas Consulting, he led the effort to be the first sourcing advisory firm to establish a reference architecture for applied Generative AI with the 2023 ISG State of Applied Generative AI Market Report and played a key role in the development of our highly successful ISG NEXT operating model in 2020. Prashant joined ISG in 2012.
Before joining ISG, Prashant was a Technology Director at Accenture, where he won and established several new accounts and created digital offerings on mobility and predictive analytics. He earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and a BE in Electronics from Bangalore University in India.
