Sustainability in Your Technology Ecosystem

Go back to the third video in this series, Servitization, a Product as a Service Movement. 

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.  

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.