Category Archives: Sustainability

The New Virtual Enterprises Building Blocks

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2021

I have to say I loved reading this from the IBM Institute for Business Value. It provides a greater fit with much of what I was struggling to articulate in a recent post “Missing the building blocks of ecosystem design in the Energy Roadmap by IEA“; I can relate to what the IBM report conveys as the future way to organize and undertake business or to bring together all the parts of the Energy System roadmap suggested in the recent IEA report.

The report “The Virtual Enterprise – The Cognitive Enterprise in a virtual world.” gives a new view to managing in both virtual worlds and enterprises. I do recommend reading it.

To quote Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services: Continue reading →

Sustainable Value Creation

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Sustainability has become a hot topic in the corporate board rooms across the globe in the past year. The World Economic Forum held a virtual forum for business leaders to determine a set of Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – universal, comparable disclosures that focused on people, planet, prosperity and governance on which companies can report, regardless of industry or region. This was held in January 2020 with a direct result of a consultant paper “Toward Common Metrics and Consistent Reporting of Sustainable Value Creation being produced and discussed going forward.

This consultative work continued with a White paper in September 2021, “Measuring Stakeholder Capitalism Towards Common Metrics and Consistent Reporting of Sustainable Value Creation. 

Recently, this had a following on with a beneficial further white paper in March 2021 called “A Leapfrog Moment for China in ESG Reporting“, which provides all involved or interested in Sustainability to refer to. I will be coming back to this particular report at another time. What caught my attention was singling out China and how many of their leading organizations are undertaking sustainability into their corporate goals, plans and operations.

Within these three documents, you gain a handy set of insights to build a sustainable pathway. Continue reading →

How Open Is Open? Check it out.

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The broad use of ‘open’ does seem to have very different interpretations, especially when it comes to platforms or cloud-ready architecture.

Two examples for me in my research recently, needed some “airing” as the openness (excuse the pun) gives me a higher level of comfort. I wish others would state what openness really means in their offerings.

The two I have been drawn to are Aras and their open architecture platform for PLM and the other is Bosch with their IoT platform.

Let me take quotes from both to underpin that real clarity I believe the client would want before they go into a partnership. Today so much is banded about upon “lock-in” when you commit to platforms, it sort of scares of many potential clients wanting to have platform solutions, from making that investment. Trust and confidence in what you are actually signing up for, is needed to be fully transparent. Goes to say but is it?

In my view only having one platform provider is not the right path, it is a range of providers, selected because they can cater to your jobs and needs, not you having to fit into their architecture but it is this openness that significantly needs to be looked at closely. Continue reading →