Sustainability Blog Posts

Sustainability is one of Catalyst Resources primary areas of practice (along with Financial Services and Biotech/Healthcare.) We design rich internet interfaces, SaaS applications, mobile apps and instrument control UI for environmental and energy optimization solutions - a.k.a. sustainability.

Organizations increasingly recognize that sustainability will be critical to the future success of their business. But moving to sustainability can be disruptive and managers are likely to confront organizational rigidities as they try to implement initiatives. It is therefore essential to identify and expose the core values that sustainability offers to the user and to the organization.

"Doing the right thing for the planet" is laudable, but from a business perspective there needs to be other monetary, social and legal drivers to motivate action. Addressing these drivers is what will make sustainability initiatives succeed over the long term.

What are the some of the drivers behind organizational sustainability initiatives?

Each organization will have a unique set of business factors that drive their sustainability initiatives. When we design applications and application UI, much of our early work is to understand and design to expose these key drivers. We then anchor functionality reflecting these drivers, right in the primary RIA workspace. This makes the sustainability application (typically SaaS) inherently engaging and tuned for the real work.

Listed here are several of the common drivers we have identified with our clients that are undertaking sustainability initiatives:

• Financial ROI
  • Decreasing expenditures by improving energy efficiency and recycling materials
  • Increasing supply chain efficiency & connectedness (e.g. fewer sources, integration and collaboration with suppliers, shippers, partners)
  • Using location intelligence (GIS) for things like vehicle re-routing to reduce gas consumption, or optimizing locations for warehouse/distribution centers
  • Using more efficient transport modes/vehicles, use video/tele-conferencing when appropriate
  • Reducing packaging
  • Green procurement and near sourcing
• Government compliance / impending tighter regulation
• Decreasing risk
• Improving investor relations and pricing sustainability into long-term valuations
• Increase brand value as a market leader and innovator
• Attract customers/consumers who care about going green
• Achieving corporate responsibility agenda
• Environmental stewardship (people really do care!)

Most organizations identify and respond to multiple drivers. Our job at Catalyst to make it efficient and engaging for managers or teams to assess the risks/costs of resource consumption related to these drivers, identify sustainability initiatives and allocate capital, collect and manage data, manage the execution and track the progress of sustainability capital projects, run ROI/cost-benefit analyses and provide the required internal and external reporting.

This year Catalyst has seen a significant shift in areas of practice and the kinds of applications and interfaces we are engaged to develop. Part of this reflects changes in our own areas of interest, in particular, our work to support and develop sustainability initiatives. But I believe the shifts area reflective a larger move in the industry itself.

Compared to the last several years we have seen dramatic growth in the demand for application design services in sustainability and health care. There has also been continued growth in specific delivery styles of applications, such as SaaS and RIAs.  Desktop apps growth is relatively stable and flat, except in the area of health care, where this is an uptick in growth.  None of this is too surprising.

More interesting has been a rapid surge in interest for mobile application and gesture based interface design, as well as an increase in the requests for instrument control interfaces (perhaps reflecting the growth in embedded processors and remote monitoring).

For my own conceptual understanding of these trends I created color-coded matrix that shows the high growth areas relative to the lower growth areas.  It presents a heatmap-style view of application design trends with red representing hot areas and blue representing cool areas.

As I've written before, I have become very active in the area of energy and environmental optimization - aka sustainability. I've been collaborating with several individuals, VCs and tech firms in Silicon Valley, working to define and lead sustainability efforts.

My interest in sustainability is multi-faceted, reflecting my own diverse range of interests:

• As an Environmentalist: Developing solutions to our energy and resource needs that does not adversely affect the future of the planet and of my children is of paramount importance.
• As a Technophile: The hardware/software developments behind sustainability are some of the most technically interesting and socially relevant developments going on today.
• As a Businessman: As an entrepreneur, I recognize the enormous business opportunity offered by sustainability development and implementation. Eco-efficiency and creating low carbon-products is already a multi-billion dollar industry and will only continue to grow and expand.
• As a SaaS Application Designer: It is clear to me, that software to monitor, manage and monetize energy and resource use, whether at the consumer/individual level or at the corporate level will be provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The design of these applications - everything from signup to functionality to billing to support to visual branding to reporting - all aspects of the entire customer life cycle, will be critical to success.
• As a User Experience Designer: As someone with a keen interest in how to design user experiences that both motivate and facilitate user performance, sustainability presents an exciting challenge. Sustainability solutions that require user interaction including carbon accounting, tracking and capital investments, will be applied only in so far as they are meaningful, intuitive to use, and synergize with existing conceptual models and business processes.

While there are certainly more perspectives I can list, suffice it to say that I have many motivations driving me to take a lead in the field of sustainability.

The Rubric of Sustainability

One of the challenges when discussing sustainability, has been to find a concise way to describe and organize the diversity of services and the potential $$s that fall under the rubric of sustainability.

I've come up with a simple framework for classifying various sustainability efforts and services - a kind of Sustainability System of Record:

1. Production - Technologies devoted to creating carbon-neutral energy or reducing greenhouse gas emissions and waste production.
2. Distribution - Technologies devoted to distributing energy and resources efficiently from production source to consumption source.
3. Optimization - A broad category describing the initiatives an orgainzation or individual takes to optimize the energy and resources consumed and expended.
4. Output - The results of applying the optimization efforts.

Below I have an off-the-top-of-my-head list of what kinds of products and services fall into each category. I will be expanding and refining this list further in the next few blog posts. In addition to classifying more of the market services, I also want to try to add in estimates for investment dollars, companies involved, and even identify where there is a need for software solutions and user experience design.

As you can see, this is really just a quick first pass, but I am hoping through reader comments and feedback to be able to refine this into a useful resource.

Like everyone, I want to believe that cutting-edge Cleantech will provide the solution to most or all of our environmental and energy problems.  Whether it’s wind, solar,  geothermal, algae-produced biofuels, laser-powered nuclear fusion, or something even more exotic, most efforts to move the world to a low-carbon, low-resource economy view the sustainability challenge in technological terms.  Much of the dollars are flowing this way as well.

But I am increasingly skeptical.  Notwithstanding the closing scene of 1985’s “Back to the Future,” in which Doc Brown returns from the future and refuels his time-traveling DeLorean with a banana peel, beer can and other garbage, for us in the present, a universal power source that consumes our waste and garbage and turns it into clean energy to power our electrical grid and transportation needs, simply does not exist.

Moreover, even with technological breakthroughs,  Cleantech will struggle to compete head-on against incumbents in established markets. It will take time to take root and become widespread outside of niche environments. But time is one luxury we are lacking if we are going to mitigate climate change.

Sustainability as a parallel track to Cleantech

So I see the need for a parallel sustainability track focused on using software and hardware to optimize and manage existing energy and waste/resource management technology. This may not be as “glamorous” as the Cleantech vision of cheap, inexhaustible, carbon-neutral power, but it is likely far more efficacious in the short term, and completely transferable to any new tech in the long term.

As I’ve written previously, companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production in order to:  lower costs across internal operations and their supply chain; meet regulations; and document their sustainability efforts to an increasingly aware consumer.  This requires investment in and development of web applications (specifically SaaS solutions) in order to track, manage, and determine ROI of energy/resource optimization actions.

Innovating the user experience of sustainability

In contrast to Cleantech, the challenge to successfully implementing SaaS-based sustainability solutions is less about designing new technology and more about designing new ways to motivate behavior.  For sustainability SaaS to succeed we need to innovate with user experience. The basic functionality of monitoring and tracking resource use does not really change, but the meaning of the application and the way the user interacts with the application, must be unique and valuable.

Examples of user experience changing the meaning of the mundane abound.  15 years ago, organic food was associated with co-ops and lower incomes.  Along came Whole Foods which changed the experience of shopping organic. The basic product stayed the same, but the meaning and value of the product changed.

The iPod is, of course, a classic example of user experience changing meaning. The iPod was not just an MP3 storage device, it offered a seamless experience for finding, buying, organizing, sharing and listening to music through an intuitive, rich interface.

Design Sustainability SaaS RIAs to be more than record management

As we design SaaS sustainability applications, we need to design the same shift in meaning.  We need to identify propositions so compelling that the customers/business could not have possibly asked for them (user-centered design be damned). This kind of innovation is “push” not “pull” and is based on compelling vision, Rich Internet Application (RIA) design, and the ability to seek inspiration outside of current application.

I had planned to get away without having to write a predictions blog this year, but my topic for this week's blog, turns out to also be a prediction.

I've been meeting with many VC firms, investors, and industry leaders in the Valley and it is readily apparent to me that sustainability is a topic on everyone's mind and and a business opportunity on which many startups and established players will focus over the next 5-10 years.

The motivations are very compelling:

• Energy and commodity costs will continue to increase and companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production to lower costs across internal operations and the connected supply chain. (As one colleague put it: "The days of cutting costs via off-shoring are coming to an end. Resource optimization is the future for achieving cost savings").
• Environmental regulation will certainly increase and companies will need to document, track and report their compliance for emissions and waste reductions (as well as potentially monetize their reduced carbon emissions)
• Consumers are becoming aware of and requesting information on corporate sustainability efforts. Brand value will depend on providing transparency into sustainability initiatives.

Sustainability applications will be SaaS

Clearly, companies (both large and small) are already on the move to decrease large expenditures on in-house projects and software installations with a fifth of all enterprises planning to have no internal IT assets by 2012. Instead the move is to cloud computing and SaaS - with no software to install or maintain or upgrade.

So it is a no-brainer to predict that on-premise solutions for sustainability will be rare. Instead businesses (and consumers) will be looking for SaaS solutions that can be easily accessed by employees from desktops, laptops or smartphones.

Since SaaS is inherently "connected in the cloud", a sustainability service can be effectively designed across organizational boundaries, incorporating the entire extended enterprise - partners, suppliers and customers.

Success depends on much time people devote to use

The other no-brainer is that user experience will make or break these SaaS applications. They key to making sustainability applications work, is how compelling and easy they are for users to enter information, how well they are on-boarded, and how easy it is track the impact (visually including mapping, as well as numerically). The user interface should be designed around a clear conceptual model, high value scenarios with desktop levels of performance using RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

I'll write more about the sustainability topic in the future, but if you were wondering what the application design crystal ball holds for 2010 (and beyond), think SaaS-based energy and environmental optimization software with a compelling cross-device user interface.