#31 - Estimating IT footprint: the ABB Motion case study with Fiona Leibundgut and Thomas Mosser
Update: 2024-01-30
Description
How do we tackle the Green IT blind spot?
🏞️ In many big corporations, IT is never number one, number two, even number three for GHG emission sources (and other environmental factors). But everyone working in the digital sustainability sector knows that, actually, little streams make big rivers with the digital sector accouting for around 4% of global emissions.
📏 In this episode we explore a very concrete case of measuring IT footprint in a massive corporation: ABB Motion with Thomas Mosser (ABB) and Fiona Leibundgut (SparkIT Consulting). How to kick start, how to leverage the Resilio tool which they chose, how to scale, etc. And the insights shared can be used in smaller organisations as well!
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
🏞️ In many big corporations, IT is never number one, number two, even number three for GHG emission sources (and other environmental factors). But everyone working in the digital sustainability sector knows that, actually, little streams make big rivers with the digital sector accouting for around 4% of global emissions.
📏 In this episode we explore a very concrete case of measuring IT footprint in a massive corporation: ABB Motion with Thomas Mosser (ABB) and Fiona Leibundgut (SparkIT Consulting). How to kick start, how to leverage the Resilio tool which they chose, how to scale, etc. And the insights shared can be used in smaller organisations as well!
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss our episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
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📣 Green IO next Conference is in Singapore on April 18th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket)
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Fiona's and Thomas’ sources and other references mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Gaël (00:08 )
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector, and beyond, to boost digital sustainability.
Today we're going to talk about a curse, the Green IT curse. Sorry, it sounds a bit dramatic, but that's actually the point, that IT especially, in large corporations, is very often a blind spot. And this is due to the fact that we are never number one. We don't pollute, we don't emit enough greenhouse gasses. Such a bad thing. But everyone working in the green IT sector and overall in the digital sustainability sector knows that, actually, little streams make big rivers. And I would say actually little streams of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution make massive rivers of greenhouse gas emissions. It is widely acknowledged that the environmental footprint or the greenhouse share of emissions by the IT sector overall, including devices, obviously, is around 4% of global emissions. This is as much as the global road freight.
Gaël (01:31 )
But as you can imagine, not every company owns big lorries or trucks, and not a single person has, except for a few exceptions, a delivery van in his or her garage, which is actually the case with IT. So this is why, actually, for the same weight, when it comes to a sector like IT, it's much, much harder to tackle its environmental footprint than road transport, for instance. Hence, my very dramatic approach talking about the green IT curse.
And to fight this curse today, I wanted to get my feet back on the ground. We had a wonderful episode with Max Blondeau in December 2023, where we explored technology and cosmology. Then last month, again, I explored digital marketing, which is a topic that I'm not familiar with.
Gaël (02:19 )
But today, I really wanted to talk about green IT, and how you deploy and start measuring how to reduce the environmental footprint of an IT system, but in a big corporation, where actually it will never be the number one, the number two, even the number three for emission sources, yet still has a lot of impact because of this ’little streams make great river approach’. To stay with the dramatic tone, I looked for, I would say, two vampire hunters, or at least two very experienced people in the IT sectors with a soft spot for sustainability.
I was also looking for a very tangible, very concrete case, and I managed to find both Fiona and Thomas, who worked on the measurement of the IT footprint of a massive industrial corporation called ABB. What is funny here is that we have quite a lot in common with both Thomas and Fiona. Thomas, he actually studied at the same time as me in the same city of Lyon, and now he works in Switzerland. He's a very experienced IT guy, a senior IT manager who leads operational effectiveness, compliance, etc at ABB. And Fiona has the same background as an IT manager. And that's very interesting to see all these common paths, I would say, towards sustainability, where you gather some experiences and knowledge in IT, and at some point you say, wait, I want to do something positive with sustainability. And Thomas obviously is the lead of this big, big project of IT footprint assessment at ABB. And Fiona, basically, she quit her previous functions and now, like me, focuses 100% on IT sustainability, which is really great. I love this approach that once you've gained enough experience you try and do something good in your own industry where you can have the most important leverage. So let's welcome Fiona Leibongut and Thomas Mosser to this very hands-on Green.io episode.
Thomas (04:11 )
Thank you, I'm glad to be with you today.
Fiona (04:15 )
Happy to be here. Thanks for having us.
Gaël (04:16 )
It's a pleasure. Before we deep dive on why, how, all the feedback you can provide to anyone working in a pretty big corporation and trying to implement some measurements or some evaluation, sorry, the Boa Vista folks, about your IT footprint, maybe Thomas, what is ABB and it's not a rock band?
Thomas (04:39 )
Yeah, thank you, Gaël, for asking it. A very good question. Well, ABB is most of all an industrial company. So we are actually technology leaders in electrification and automation. This is the credo. We do manufacture industrial products in the electric domain. So it goes from the motor, I think medium sized motors to a very large sized motor that would be wider than the room you're probably sitting in. We do manufacture robots as well. We do process automation, enabling factory end-to-end processes in some of our businesses. So we're having a broad range of electrification and automation related services. And I think beyond that, we're also trying to do this in a very sustainable way, and enable mostly business-to-business partners and customers. The business I'm operating in is actually Motion Business Area. So we have four business areas as part of ABB, and Motion is the one manufacturing motor and drive. This is where the whole Green IT story started.
Gaël (05:47 )
So you're a wonderful guest because I've got my transition all cooked up already by you. Why did you start focusing on Green IT strategy, the Green IT journey? I don't know the word you use at ABB…
Thomas (06:02 )
Well, we started with humility. So we started by calling it IT sustainability assessments. I think we need to spread a project beyond. And the why, well, it's a bit of a long story, because you don't get into it like in a snap. It actually takes some time, takes some change management understanding of the issue beyond. There's a couple of dimensions I'd like to touch on. One, obviously, is the broader organizational targets. ABB does have some sustainability targets for 2030, and that makes it very tangible at the group level, that we need to reduce the CO₂ footprint on the Scope 1 and 2, on the Scope 3 as well. So we have a broader mandate given by the organization targets, but I think it really takes a couple of passionate people and a broader understanding on the IT side on how sustainability is actually becoming crucial to make the needle move.
So this is what really got us into this green IT or sustainable IT journey. And it didn't start from one day to another. It really took a couple of years, actually, to get there. The very inception from my standpoint started with the Climate Fresk. So we started with a colleague deploying and promoting the Climate Fresk internally in 2020 at ABB. And what started from a very small climate-fresk call out in France, I think, then expanded, broadened, and really got into a very structured type of workshop event we called ‘Greener in Motion’ that has been deployed in many countries, in India, South America, US, Europe as well. And that really helped while educating people on climate change and the consequences, obviously. But from an IT standpoint, I've been facilitating a couple of sessions. And this helped me to identify some allies, some people actually concerned with the topic: ‘Oh, we're learning abou
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