Technology Intelligence Group

The Environmental Cost of Electronic Collaboration

An ex-Cisco colleague of mine called earlier this week to talk about his concern that distance collaboration technologies were not as ecologically friendly as they could be. His concern was that by constantly increasing the fidelity of technologies over time to approximate in-person interactions, that the end-point and infrastructure equipment required would increase emissions beyond what was necessary to complete the task. One quote of his stuck with me...."For a staff meeting, you don't need immersive telepresence and all the cost and environmental impact. You just need a phone call."

Not to be a neo-Luddite about collaboration, but he has a point.  You don't always need the highest-fidelity technology available to you, you need the appropriate one for the task at hand.  With Internet electricity use near or over 100 terawatt hours in 2009, and the high electricity consumption of new endpoint devices, there should be a 'pause' before we mandate holographic immersive virtual reality conversations with our co-workers about every little thing.

This was a threshold concept for me, having traditionally been an advocate of using the highest-fidelity collaboration technology available for each interaction.  What I hadn't synthesized was my environmentally-friendly views with these collaboration tools, as I had been so focused on eliminating physical travel, that the cost of emissions from electronic collaboration were lost in the noise.  I decided to look around at the research to see what if any the energy costs were. It turns out, there is a cost, and it is very real. 

Here are some hard numbers to put things in perspective:

The slippery value proposition- Virtual Spaces

Value Proposition. Return on Investment. Justification for Expenditure.

However you phrase it, there are skeptical people in every organization who want empirical, objective, hard evidence that any new initiative has a clear return on investment. In these harsh macro-economic times, this tendency towards risk-aversion is amplified to the detriment of new technology deployments that can save organizations much needed hard capital in the long term. The conundrum with RoI is that it is best defined after extensive deployments of a given technology, and their associated beneficiaries. When 100 or 1000 early adopters have installed a technology, used it extensively, and have had the leisure to write up a quantitative statement of benefit, the skeptics are happy and have covered their respective assets enough to green-light a project.  This would be fine if the organization wasn't attempting to gain a technological advantage or benefit from either making or saving money in the short term, because these well-defined RoI studies don't emerge until about 25-30% of the way through the maturity curve of a new technology. By the time you can definitively justify it, it's not new.

Looking at Virtual Spaces, there are luckily a number of RoI vectors, with both 'soft' and 'hard' numbers.  Lets walk through some of them briefly and the best sources for updated data: