I run an employee charity match program for BT in North America. It enables employees to make donations to charity and receive a partial match from the company. As well as the employee engagement benefits, it is a way of allowing employee stakeholders to determine the direction of some of the company’s giving – employees vote with their own dollars.

We work with an external vendor Truist to run our program. I will participating, together with Mark Shamley (President,ACCP) in a webinar that Truist is holding at 12.00pm ET on Tuesday June 16th looking at globalization of global giving programs. I will be speaking about the impact of Transatlantic cultural differences on all aspects of corporate responsibility and I believe Mark is going … Read the Full Post

In contrast with the in-depth report Recent Moves in Green Telecom I wrote about last week , a recent short and easy read by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) “Tackling Climate change – Information and communication technologies lead the way” provides a good overview of the breadth of the role ICTs can play in this space. It is a good primer for green IT.

The report of course includes the role ICTs can play in reducing overall carbon emissions, referring out to SMART 2020 as the basis for part of the paper. But the paper also brings prominence to aspects of the role of ICTs that are frequently missed. Using the Four Dimensions of Sustainability as a framework those aspects are;

Direct Impact – The … Read the Full Post

I have been neglectful my topic of the intersection between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and sustainability. Let me try and redress that balance a little with a couple of posts that I have been meaning to write.

I was recently (thanks Lynn !) sent a link to an in depth review by Tim Hills in Light Reading Europe Recent Moves in Green Telecom. We often focus on data centers because of the concentrated nature of their energy consumption, while overlooking networks because they are so much more dispersed in their energy consumption patterns. This paper gives a pretty comprehensive review of the various industry bodies and their related initiatives on improving the energy efficiency of the network and of the customer premise equipment … Read the Full Post

I try not to write corporate news on my blog too often, but I do want to identify that BT’s sustainability report came out last week.

The key headlines from the report are:

• a 43% reduction in CO2 equivalent emissions intensity from 1997 – good progress against our 80% reduction target by 2020
• 50% of waste from our UK operations is now recycled, with 17% less of total UK waste going to landfill sites than in 2008
• 50,000 tonnes of CO2 saved annually for our customers by improving the energy efficiency of our home-phone range
• the development of a sustainability framework embedded into our product development process and a low carbon opportunities map which has highlighted some real growth areas for … Read the Full Post

I am often asked why I take the time to blog. Overall I believe that blogging makes a positive contribution to corporate responsibility.

In large organizations the individual connection between the employee and the stakeholders can be lost. The internet is thought of as an equalizer for small voices to have an equal voice to larger ones. But the internet also has the capacity to serve as the personalizer, allowing executives in large organizations to share their views and be more connected as individuals with their stakeholders.

Here are some examples of executive blogs and communities that I find impressive:

· Melanie Holmes, VP of World of Work Solution, Manpower North America blogs about topics including gender gaps, giving back to the community and diversity… Read the Full Post