As sea levels rise, is the tide turning on telecoms conferences?

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Analysts like myself can certainly clock up the air miles in the course of our careers, although over the past four years I’ve personally worked really hard to reduce the amount of travel I’ve undertaken. To begin with I was doing this surreptitiously as I confess the main catalyst was not so much environmental factors as not wanting to be away from my kids quite so much.

What I found was that it really wasn’t necessary to do so many trips: I could easily substitute teleconferencing for many journeys. And while I sometimes felt as though I’d been exiled by the ‘in crowd’ – how many times do you have to say that you’re not going to be at this year’s Mobile World Congress? – many colleagues started confessing that they really didn’t think attending so many events was necessary or an efficient use of their time. I found that my productivity went up considerably due to being less weary from constant travelling combined with less downtown and more productive use of the journeys I did make.

BT lowers carbon footprint through homeworking and teleconferencing

My view was shored up by some work I did with BT in 2007. I interviewed their Head of Climate Change, Donna Young, who gave me the lowdown on what BT was doing to lower its carbon footprint. Great story. But it also made me feel a lot better about my travel-avoidance when Donna explained how BT was using broadband technology to transform its working practices. “Quite simply it’s changed the face of how we work,” she said. “Let me give you an example, two or three years ago I was travelling to face-to-face meetings every day; now I do a lot less of these and a lot more audioconferencing. We also now have over 12,500 homeworkers in BT and 70% of our employees work at home at least some of the time. A conservative estimate is that as a result of our initiatives we’re saving 54,000 tonnes of CO2 each year from using conferencing and collaboration services.”

Despite being treated like a ‘born again’ hippy by some of my colleagues, Donna’s words gave me the confidence to ‘fess up about my drive to reduce my travel and to actually feel good about it rather than guilty. It made me question each and every journey I made far more than I had done in the past.

Questioning the need to travel to international meetings

One event I still made space for in my calendar, however, was Amdocs InTouch. Amdocs runs this annually with the aim of keeping customers, analysts and partners up-to-date. The meet also provides a networking event for BSS/OSS professionals like myself. Every year Amdocs hosts this in a new city – last year we were in Berlin and next year in Athens. But when I discovered this year’s event was in Montreal I felt distinctly uneasy about the 12,000 kilometres it would add to my annual mileage figures. But Amdocs is a pretty significant vendor which I really need to keep track of, so I reasoned that I’d just have to be even more vigilant in pruning back the miles elsewhere.

What Amdocs did

What I found interesting, however, was that the very first presentation we had at InTouch was from the amiable Charles Born, who proudly told us that Amdocs had worked really hard this year to reduce the impact of the conference through carbon offsetting and other initiatives. “Bringing our customers together to network and learn about Amdocs’ customer experience systems and how their peers are using them is important and valuable,” said Charles. “But with climate change demanding ever more urgent action, and with Amdocs’ relationships spanning a global community, we recognized the need to protect the environment when gathering people together. Green initiatives like carbon offsetting are part of both our corporate social responsibility and our own differentiating customer experience. I’m proud that we can continue the InTouch tradition in a way that positively impacts the planet, and that’s as fundamental and far-reaching as the air that we breathe.”

Sounded good, so how did Amdocs propose to lessen the impact of all those telecoms execs flying to Montreal from all over the globe? It turned out Amdocs had joined forces with the CarbonNeutral Company with the aim Born said of turning the event “into one customers could feel good about attending”. InTouch 2008 was in fact Amdocs’ first-ever certified CarbonNeutral event and the Amdocs folks seemed really enthused by the whole process.

Carbon offsetting - making the link with the projects

A carbon neutral status was achieved by calculating emissions associated with energy consumption, travel, hotel stays and waste. For every one metric ton of carbon dioxide, Amdocs funded the conservation of an equivalent one metric ton of CO2 through two projects it had selected. These projects were chosen according to Born because “they divert energy to renewable resources now, while promoting technologies that will protect the environment in the future”.

The first initiative Amdocs invested in is the Quzhai Waste Heat Recovery Project, which captures and utilizes waste heat at a cement production facility in the Hebei province of China. Cement production generates a considerable amount of waste heat, which is usually vented into the atmosphere. At this plant up to 35% of the heat produced was being wasted. This waste heat is now being used to generate electricity for use onsite, displacing electricity generated by fossil fuel power stations and between 2006 and 2008 this will reduce emissions by an estimated 50,000 metric tons of CO2.

The second project is the Sterksel Biogas Project. Biogas combined heat-and-power plants are being built at five farms in the Netherlands to reduce methane emissions from animal waste. Methane is captured and used to displace fossil fuels and heat local buildings, and it is estimated that the project will generate emission reductions of around 35,000 metric tons of CO2 annually.
Other initiatives in place at InTouch were seen by some of my American colleagues as going a little too far – for example, providing tap water instead of bottled water or canned drinks caused a few grumbles from the dedicated cola drinkers amongst us. But you have to give them credit for trying.

Improving energy efficiency of applications

I can certainly point out plenty of places that Amdocs can continue to improve their efforts. What I’d really like to see, for example, is a concerted attempt to reduce the electricity consumption of their applications year on year, and to work with their customers – most of whom are large energy-hungry telcos like BT – to continue to reduce emissions. I’d also like evidence that they are substituting teleconferencing for air travel when the spotlight is not on them, although we have to be realistic that this is a considerable challenge for a global company like Amdocs.

The cynic in me also feels compelled to point out that a pretty clued up company like Amdocs isn’t deaf to the increasingly loud noises coming from its large telecoms customers’ desire to reduce their own carbon footprint. In many cases these operators are being pushed into action by their own customers and shareholders. However, on balance we have to conclude I think that this is a real step in the right direction by Amdocs.

What’s more, it got me thinking about conferencing in general. Is it really necessary for us all to move around the globe so very much? Is the business benefit of attending conferences so very great, and is there really no alternative?

The technology sector should be leading

From my own experience I would argue that we in the tech sector could reduce our travel significantly without compromising our businesses. The norms of business travel we accept today appear increasingly outdated especially in a sector that provides the substitutes and which is seen as being net beneficiaries of green working practices. As an industry we still have some way to go to put our own house in order. Flying from country to country attending expensive conferences is looking increasingly like a luxury we can’t afford. The challenge is for companies to find ways of achieving the same business goals while lessening or removing the impact. Both Amdocs and myself are on a journey to reduce the environmental impact of doing business – we may sometimes lose our way, we may go down green-looking lanes that subsequently turn out to be dead ends, but every journey long or short begins with those first tentative steps.

By: Teresa Cottam, Director of Research and Publications at Babworth Ltd and Associate Analyst with Innovation Observatory