Can Technical Writers stay relevant in a Mobile-First world?

Leading Internet analysts now recommend adopting a Mobile-First development policy. Responsive Design (RD) is the principle that enables Web-based applications to deliver a meaningful user experience to any screen size. RD has made significant inroads into B2C (customer-facing) Internet content, and many content writers are creating effective interactions. But with business applications going mobile, the fundamentals of technical writing are changing. Are we as technical writers and information developers preparing for these changes? Or, a better question: Are we leading them?

Some points to consider:

• Mobile business applications are not brochure ware, or even e-commerce. Look up “B2B mobile” and that’s all you’ll find. Are there other search terms I should be using?
• Mobile-First forces clients to make the kind of prioritizing decisions they often find difficult. Will clearer priorities result in better content overall, not just in the mobile space?
•  As the applications we’ve documented in the past migrate to mobile devices, there’s no longer room on the screen for the kind of side-by-side help and instructional content we used to create. When a user gets stuck in a mobile application, how do they get unstuck?
• Will the video tutorial replace the help page? What if the signal is too poor for video? (I’ve run into that problem already, with an iPhone 3GS.) Do you swap in an audio narrative with still images? Do you pop up an error message with a nicer-worded  version of “Sorry, sucker”? Or, as I’ve encountered, do you just let the technology take over, locking the image and ending the module without warning?

What do you think? 

Are any technical writers you know creating technical content with Mobile First in mind? 

Are you infiltrating the Mobile First scrums and asking the right questions?

iPad as Brain Extender

It’s the invasion of the one-handed brain-extender that fits in a (big) pocket.

Nate Clevenger wrote a book that I think you’ll find valuable, if you’re considering implementing iPads in an enterprise. You *can* take it with you.

The iPad’s been making big waves for in-hand mobile apps. It’s probably the closest thing we’ve gotten yet to a “brain extension.” The iPad has enough processing power and screen size to see content and context on the same screen, while being small enough to use in one hand, then slip into the pocket of a lab coat, a suit jacket, or a work apron.

To quote Nate's blurb:

I wrote the book as a guide for how business and IT must collaborate to develop a mobile strategy to properly take advantage of this transformative technology. It includes sections on strategy, architecture, design, development and deployment. If you’re interested, you can learn more at www.iPadintheEnterprise.com.

Green IT down a little globally, Fujitsu study finds

Fujitsu has released its annual Global ICT Sustainability Report. With rankings sliding, it could be subtitled "The Sustainability of Sustainability." Although no respondents got a perfect score of 100, many got an A+ or A, with one US wholesaler scoring 97. The average, regrettably, was closer to a D-.

You can read Leslie Guevarra's take on the report here. I't's actually a good summary, so rather than re-do that, I've just noted below some things that jumped out at me.

Right off the bat, the report’s overview positions ICT (that's what the rest of the world calls IT) as a critical leader in sustainability:  “ICT Sustainability is a vast cross functional subject and has a critical leadership role in enabling sustainable business practices across all sectors.” Although I wholeheartedly agree with this opinion, I would have preferred to see support for it in the survey results.

The key to best practice in ICT Sustainability? “High scorers have control of their ICT power consumption, they measure their performance consistently, and they get all parts of the business involved.” I don’t know about your family, but my mother, bless her, would have howled if we wasted electricity the way many organizations do. The major obstacle to significant cuts in ICT energy consumption is that most ICT managers, still, don’t ever see their own energy bill. Energy management systems, clearly an ICT/IT function, can have a huge impact on everybody's energy consumption,  not just IT's.

Some other key observations:

• ICT consumes enough energy to be responsible for 3% of humanity’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, up from 2% in past years.
• ICT can account for up to 75% of all GHG emissions in organizations that rely heavily on ICT, such as banks, government, and other administrative industries. In the West, these tend to be large organizations with sophisticated ICT infrastructures. These fared better than average in the survey.
• The survey used the industry-standard Capability Maturity Model (CMM) methodology to quantify responses. CMM rankings range from 0 (no action or awareness) to 5 (optimized, or best practice).

Green IT works both ways. Not surprisingly, an organization that get everybody committed also applies IT to help its whole ecosystem become greener, from suppliers, partners, and industries to customers.This is represented in the "ICT as a Low-Carbon Enabler" portion of the survey. While this category covers a wide range of ICT-enabled activities, and therefore addresses much of ICT's value to its stakeholders, it had limited impact on the outcomes of this survey.

The survey demonstrated how tightly the visibility of the ICT power bill correlates to ICT sustainability (ITSx). Although this is shown in the figures, some puzzling contrasts appear. For example, US respondents were at the top of the power awareness spectrum, and Australian firms at the bottom.  But in overall ranking, the two are just one position apart, with the US in 3^rd and Australia in 4^th.  

"Green Fatigue" was speculated as contributing to a significant drop in Australia’s End User Engagement category, from 62.3 to 51.8. The survey gave no context for this supposition. It could also be tied to the abysmal visibility of the country’s ICT power bills, the report said. This decline may be reversed by a stringent e-waste bill passed recently in the legislature, and moves toward implementing carbon pricing. The US, by contrast, has neither at a federal level. 

Inclusion of a nation in the survey was based on level of response. On that basis, the countries included were Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, UK and the USA. Responses from all others were aggregated as "Rest of the World." 

"Upper management tying electric bill to CIO performance," Green IT Guy says

If that's true, it's certainly about time. I'd love to see a list where this is happening. I haven't heard it from any IT managers I've asked in the past year.

Read the full article at http://thegreenitguy.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/making-the-case-for-green-it/. 

Some other key points:

• If I can walk into any organization and cut their energy usage, carbon output, and IT expense in half, I don’t see how that could be considered green washing or marketing hype.
• Energy reductions standards are moving from voluntary to mandatory.  
• Large investors are starting to pay attention to sustainability indexes.  
• IT departments that once considered Green IT a niche now see it as vital to their business.
• "Green IT 1.0" initiatives such as data center consolidation have gone main stream. Pioneering companies and government agencies, such as UPS and the City of Palo Alto, have moved on to "Green IT 2.0"-- using IT to make everything else Greener.

See more of what the Green IT Guy, Terell Jones, has to say at http://thegreenitguy.wordpress.com/. 

Where did Green IT go?

Green IT has run out of steam, for now, because too many people have failed to make the conceptual leap from cost savings to sustainability. Some time ago, I and others moved on to emphasizing Green IT 2.0*, in which IT makes everything else more sustainable. But, people mostly aren’t seeing the connection. The worst is the guy at a recent VMWare event who’s proud of all the money he’s saving by virtualizing his data center, and still thinks climate change is a hoax.

No, scratch that story. I made it up. I'm sure that kind of dichotomy exists out there, but I don’t have any actual evidence. I probably should just start asking around. 

Picture Saturday Night Live pointing their camera at a random person in the audience, and the caption saying “Cut 1200 tons of carbon a year by virtualizing her datacenter, still thinks Global Warming is a hoax.”  

This is shaping up like a stand-up routine.

Here's a related dichotomy:

Many big info-driven corporations, like IBM, Microsoft, Starbucks, Proctor and Gamble, Toyota, and even Wal-Mart are grasping the need to become more sustainable, and the inherent risks in not doing so. So why are they so silent around the noisy Congressional climate change denialists, and the business leaders that support them?  

* I think Forrester Research coined that term.

Sustainability without KM is like Engineering without Math: KM supports green initiatives worldwide

Sustainability without Knowledge Management is like Engineering without Mathematics. Could it be more simple?

Drastically reducing its energy consumption is absolutely vital to any enterprise that expects to survive in a fuel-constrained future. And, doing that depends totally on capturing, organizing, making sense of, and applying a far vaster array of environmental and operational details than ever before.

Read the KMWorld article that inspired this essay.

THIS IS KM. If you're uncomfortable using that term, get the heck over it. Without acceptance of the term Knowledge Management, and a firm grasp of the principles that constitute it, your environmental initiatives will be more likely to fail. It would be like trying to do Engineering without accepting totally the discipline that is Mathematics.

Unfortunately, the "Green KM" discussion almost always starts by chasing away its most significant audience, the general business community. It does this by first addressing sustainability in the classic KM domains of imaging and document management.

In this sense, it’s just like the argument for Green IT, which always seems to start out self-referentially-- how it makes IT itself more sustainable-- before moving on to what IT can do to make everything else more sustainable.

In both cases, as in any conversation that opens with "me-me-me," the audience is lost before it even became an audience.

In the same issue, see also Following a Greener Path: Data centers, power distribution companies and construction firms all try to conserve energy.

Do we embrace Green IT 2.0, or will the planet spit us out like a watermelon seed?

I've been pushing the idea that Green IT 2.0, Forrester's term for using IT to green everything else, will make Green IT 1.0, making IT itself more sustainable, look like a rounding error.

Actually, that's what Cisco founder John Chambers once said comparing e-learning to email. I hope this prediction's more accurate than that one.

Effective use of information, whether we call it IT, or KM, or whatever, is the key to making it possible for humans to survive on this planet. Nature will do fine; losing a hundred thousand species is chump change to Her. But unlike all those other species, we get to choose whether we're one that stays or goes.

Like I said, Nature doesn't care whether we take it or leave it. Humans mean about as much to nature as a million brain cells matter to an all-night binge-er.

Do more, better sustainability ideas come from Imagination, or Experience?

People can come up with more uses for technology than IT can imagine. That's the crux of idea #2 in an Information Week article about Randy Mott, recently departed CIO of Hewlett-Packard.

From the article: "To really understand a technology's potential, IT needs to put it in end users' hands." From Mott, in 2003: "It's tough to imagine fast enough. You have to experience it to imagine what's possible."

I believe this applies doubly to using technology to enhance sustainability. People who care about the planet are intrinsically motivated to excel where their work involves enhancing sustainability. The experience of imaginative, engaged people creates more solutions than imagination alone.

Most technology that reduces waste or saves energy, for example, also reduces costs. That's good for the company. Enhancing sustainability is good for the planet, which matters to the employees who made it happen. This combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation should, at least in theory, get workers super-engaged in making sustainability efforts work.

But of course, this line of thinking in itself contradicts my key point, in that it has risen completely from my imagination, and not from experience.

So, let's put some substance into it. If you've been engaged in sustainability efforts at your company, does your experience bear out my premise?

Wikileaks:painful but necessary

Wilikeaks is a painful, but necessary step forward. Eventually, the walls must come down. It's a natural process in human evolution, for us as individuals and societies to grow more able to face and deal with our own reality, not lash out when it's revealed to others against our will.

The most harm, we are told, has been to our relations with harsh undemocratic regimes. With their trust in our confidentiality diminished, they will be less likely to share with us things that they know make them look bad, and that they shouldn't be doing in the first place, such as being deceitfully cozy with their non-democratic allies.

In the short run, revealing such truths may work against our foreign interests. In the long run, it's a big step forward for human evolution.

The World View on IT Greening the Enterprise

How does the rest of the world view Green IT?

I want to draw your attention to a wonderfully concise (just 3 pages) summary of ICT's current and potential contributions to sustainability. ICT, by the way, is what the rest of the world calls IT. It more accurately represents Information and Communications Technologies, or ICT, as one package.

Trudy Heller, CEO of Executive Education for the Environment, offers an encouraging view of worldwide efforts to both make IT greener, and use IT to make everything else more environmentally sustainable. Dr. Heller wrote the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) chapter for the recently released Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability.

Although the article is not available online, I'm hopeful Trudy will either make the content available in some other venue, or work with me to summarize it here. Stay tuned.

Forrester: A CEO who's clueless on Green IT may not get IT either

Forrester Research's Doug Washburn asks, Does your CEO care about Green IT?

Survey results suggest that more than half of CEOs surveyed globally rate sustainability as "very important" to their firms' futures, and that green-driven firms have been 16% more profitable over the past 3 years.

Here's Washburn's kick in the butt: "While your CEO might care about green, they may not necessarily care about IT."

Wow! That's a big leap. It's based on Forrester's finding that only 16% of firms globally even mention green IT in their annual reports. So, they see Greening as a high priority, but don't see IT as a key path to achieving it.

This spells a big "uh-oh" for CIOs. Green IT is a big visibility-maker and money-saver. You're not doing it just for IT's sake, you're doing it to demonstrate what you can do-- for other parts of your firm, as well as for current customers and those you don't have yet.

Seize the day, and read the article, at http://www.zdnet.com/blog/forrester/does-your-ceo-care-about-green-it/459.
And to find the path Doug laid out for Green IT 2.0 a year and a half ago, visit http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/rise_of_green_enterprise_primer_for_it/q/id/48085/t/2. (BTW, to get more than an excerpt costs $499. It is Forrester, after all.)

Share your Green IT secrets, and don't stop there

Heather Clancy, in her ZD-Net.com Greener Pastures column, encourages IT folks to share their best stuff for the Uptime Institute's 2011 Green Enterprise Awards.

While it's called a Green Enterprise award, alas it is still just Green IT 1.0: Making IT Greener. Remember, that's just the appetizer. The main course is Green IT 2.0: IT Making Everything Else Greener.

Of course, IT should make itself Greener. Besides the environmental benefits, all those cost savings make it a total no-brainer. It's also rather self-absorbed and self-limiting to stop there.

The far greater impact comes when IT brings its tools, data, and systems thinking to the immense task of making whole enterprises, even whole industries, regions, and international systems, Greener. And, it greatly increases the CIO's strategic value to one's own enterprise.

Why stop at your own doorstep, when there's a world to benefit?

Precious metals used in LEED certifications

Are the platinum, gold, and silver in the LEED certifications conflict-free and sustainably mined?

Hmm? ;)

Triple Bottom Line conference hosted by Drexel and the World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia

By David Calloway, Green IT Digest © 2010

What do Boeing, Campbell’s Soup and Dow Chemical (formerly Rohm and Haas) have in common? That is, besides being large companies and longstanding, major forces in this regon’s economy?

All three are internationally recognized leaders in sustainability. Yes, really. And no, I'm not kidding. Representatives of these firms and others shared some success stories at a recent conference co-sponsored by Drexel University’s Lebow College of Business and the World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia (WTCGP). The program also featured speakers from sustainability guarantors B Lab and the City’s Office of Sustainability.

The Triple Bottom Line represents the three beneficiaries of a sustainable enterprise: People, Planet, and Profit. Applying well-known and accepted metrics, it provides a way to measure an organization’s environmental impact along with its financial return. And, as we know in all areas of business, what we can measure, we can improve.

This program, subtitled Implementing Sustainable Business Practices, bridged several purposes for its sponsors. Drexel hosted the program on behalf of the MBA students visiting from the school’s graduate center in Sacramento, CA.

The WTCGP was promoting the region’s strengths in sustainability, while increasing exposure to international opportunities for both students and the region’s businesses. This seminar was part of WTCGP’s new “Job Creation through Export Development” program funded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration. The program is designed to advance the global competitiveness of the many Pennsylvania and New Jersey companies in leading industry sectors, such as renewable energy and environment. Find the WTCGP at http://www.wtcphila.org/.

Drexel’s Sacramento business students, in Philadelphia to complete a course in Sustainable Business, learned about local Green buildings and businesses. They visited two Green buildings, the Comcast Center and Tasty Baking’s new Navy Yard bakery, which is moving toward zero-waste status.

“It was eye-opening for the students”, said Donna Ferrari, Drexel’s Director of Special Projects. “Many came with the impression that companies are just giving lip service to sustainability. But the conference speakers told how addressing sustainability issues head-on will help them survive.” Drexel's LeBow College of Business is at http://www.lebow.drexel.edu/.

The WTCGP used the forum to showcase Campbell’s, Boeing, and Dow. These firms are central to the region’s economy, working to create a triple bottom line, and fully engaged internationally. These three attributes, all visible and measurable, make them models that more companies in the region could emulate, with the help of the WTCGP, of course.

An ongoing partnership in international business allows Drexel students to combine their international residencies with the WTCGP’s trade missions through their “Export for Scholars” program. Students research off-shore markets, international partnerships, and overcoming cultural and other barriers. Observing international trade meetings gives them valuable hands-on experience.

The conference included a Green Expo where vendors presented a range of products and services to help businesses and consumers to be more effective in terms of the environment, and of their bottom lines.

The word of the day was metrics: If you don’t measure it, you won’t do it. Every presentation was dotted with dashboards, flooded with figures, and replete with reports about carbon reduced, good intentions realized, and strategies implemented. It’s clear that, at least in these companies, the drive toward sustainability is for real, and it’s working.

The speakers shared their firms’ strategies and experiences, as they’ve worked to improve the environmental performance of themselves, and their impact, and that of their partners, customers, and industries. The speakers and their talks are summarized in the following paragraphs.

- Katherine Gajewski, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability. After getting a late start, Philadelphia is working to advance the 5 E’s: Energy, Environment, Equity (as in equality, not capital, although that was mentioned, too), Economy, and Engagement. Despite ongoing financial challenges, Philadelphia and several other progressive cities across the nation are succeeding in areas where the federal and many state governments are being hamstrung by lobbyists and legislative paralysis. For more on the city’s progress, visit http://www.greenworksphila.org/.

- David P. Stangis, Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility, Campbell Soup Company. If there’s any company in a position to influence the health and landfills of the world, it’s the ubiquitous Campbell Soup. A big company full of everyday products, Campbell’s program focuses on everyday actions that add up to fulfilling the big vision, a full-court commitment to Nourishment, naturally: Nourishing Employees, Consumers, Neighbors, and Planet. The program is described in detail at www.campbellsoupcompany.com/csr/.

- Katherine T. Hunt, Ph.D., Director, External Science and Technology, The Dow Chemical Company. After Dr. Hunt’s explained Dow’s purchase of Philadelphia’s Rohm and Haas, it makes more sense to me. Dow’s been a feedstock-driven business, and wants to be more market-driven. Research leader Rohm and Haas makes more money producing less stuff, which also makes sense environmentally. Dow wants to be more like that. So buying R&H is helping Dow become both more profitable, and more sustainable. That’s a real win-win outcome. Find the chemistry at www.dow.com/commitments/.

- Hardik Savalia, Associate, B Lab. For a publicly-held corporation to officially pursue the Triple Bottom Line—People, Planet, Profit—is currently illegal, except in Maryland or Vermont.
That’s right. The fiduciary responsibility of a firm to maximize profit is the only leg of this three-legged stool that has any legal standing in the other 48 states. B Lab, based in Berwyn, PA, is working to change that, by creating a new kind of legal entity: the B Corporation. B stands for Benefit, because it benefits not just shareholders, but stakeholders—the whole environment in which the corporation operates. Today, B Lab certifies mostly small, privately-held firms. As the B Corp takes hold in a growing number of states, investor demand will drive ever larger enterprises to seek and earn B Corp status. Learn all about it at www.bcorporation.net/.

- Edward (Ned) Ferguson, Director of Environment and Energy, Boeing. Did you know the GPS you use to reach your destination is not officially available to a commercial pilot? GPS-based air space modernization will reduce fuel consumed in flights up to 30%. It will also make flying faster, safer, and more reliable, as well as save flight controllers a lot of grey hairs. While today’s jets are 70% more fuel-efficient (and 30% quieter) than the original 707, airplane makers still have a long way to go to reduce aviation’s impact on global warming, and to save the airlines from continuing financial losses. To address both, Boeing is committing 75% of their R&D budget to improving the environmental performance of their jets. In addition to making planes that use less fuel, Boeing is working to grow fuels that create less carbon. Grow fuels? Yes, they’re creating bio-fuels using non-food sources to reduce the petroleum in their fuel, and thus the carbon in their exhaust. These fuels will come on-line in two to three years, and be used until more effective, algae-based fuels become available in six to eight years. These will make huge reductions in both carbon, and fuel cost. Reducing the amount of fuel consumed, and largely eliminating petroleum as a fuel, will make the airlines more environmentally and financially sustainable. Find more at www.boeing.com/newairplane/environment.