Agile Development Blog

Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down to breakfast with David Douglas, co-author of Citizen Engineer, and Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers without Boarders.  It was great to get them both to meet and discuss the need for global, citizen engineers in this increasingly complex and interconnected world.  If you are an engineer and you have not seen or read David and Greg Papadopoulos’  handbook for socially responsible engineering, then you are missing a great picture of the future of engineering driven by purpose and the question “why?”.

To put it simply as possible, Citizen Engineers are the connection point between science and society – between pure knowledge and how it is used.  Citizen Engineers are techno-responsible, environmentally responsible, economically responsible, socially responsible participants in the engineering community.

- Citizen Engineer

I happened to catch Bernard on the way to speak to the National Academy of Engineering on “Engineering Sustainability in the Face of Natural Hazards.”  This brought us to the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.  If you buy the tenents of the Citizen Engineer, then an engineer would be the spokesperson for BP in a situation like this.  In that role, the Citizen Engineer would talk about the situation and help educate the public on the implications of technology of deep water drilling.  At breakfast, this conversation gained a bunch of energy and stimulated me to explore this idea more completely.

Based on my experience and ideas contained in the Citizen Engineer, I believe we need to create more Citizen Engineers. If this happens, we can jump quickly past the island of blame and towards faster learning and more constructive solutions. By moving to a more visible, open and collaborative discourse, we can work together to address these global and complex difficulties.  So, my new favorite phrase is, “What would the Citizen Engineer do?”

In a world of increasing complexity, accidents happen.  This accident is a tragedy with 11 dead and 17 injured in an explosion that created the worst oil spill in the history of the United States.  Let’s start the clock over on these events and explore what a Citizen Engineer would do.

Managing the Gulf Coast Oil Spill, the Citizen Engineer way

It is April 20, just after the blow out. The Citizen Engineer, holding the title Chief Engineer at the company, was notified immediately by email, text and phone.  Right away, she started a number of things in parallel. First, her office took control and governance of the situation and began acting as the general contractor for the accident. There were four fronts to work on:

NASA photo taken May 24 - from web site http://2010gulfoilspill.com/

• Root cause of explosion and rig stability
• Continuing leaks
• Spill clean-up at sea
• Spill clean-up on land

This Chief Engineer’s office placed lead engineers on all these fronts, but to illustrate the point of our story, we will focus only on efforts to stop the continuing leaks.

In the first 24 hours, her team classified the accident as a complex situation, beyond the solution scope of past accidents. It was classified as complex due to the depth of water, pressure, size and number of leaks and the state of the well including the stuck drilling rods.  It was clear that relief wells would be the correct long-term fix, but they were months away.  As a result, her team quickly realized that this complex situation required them to learn as fast as possible from as wide group of people and as many experiments as possible. Simply reaching to internal or known experts of past solutions in shallower, more straight-forward situations would be fine in a complicated situation, but the pre-conceived solutions could actually hurt in this situation. After meeting her response team on-site, she launched the following parallel efforts:

1. Opened communications to the world via Internet to communicate video and known conditions of the accident including live underwater video feeds, movies of experiments and well configurations.
2. Called for counter-measures ideas and technologies from the petroleum engineering community with special requests to Norway and Brazil, the two leading countries with deep water well expertise.
3. Set a daily cadence for coordinating status and learning inside her team.
4. Pulled well experts from their partners, Halliburton and Transocean to staff her disaster response team.
5. Procured the submarines and well capping equipment for these depths.
6. Developed a model of the underwater site to make communication about the situation more clear.
7. Authorized the drilling of relief wells for long-term containment.

By opening communication of the situation to the world and inviting engineering help via the Internet, her team encouraged a crowdsourcing and expert sourcing approach to the problem.  As a result, they quickly received estimates on the amount of oil leaking from scientists who were familiar with measuring flows simply based on the video feeds.  Having understood the large magnitude of this flow, the response team was able to garner more dollars to expedite experiments based on simple, back-of-the-napkin estimates of costs due to fines and clean-up that would accumulate each day the well leaked.

Simultaneously, the web site was collecting potential countermeasures from petroleum as well as civil and aeronautical engineers from around the world.  These countermeasures were filtered by the web team and small groups of response team engineers were doing quick research, experiments and models to boil up the most feasible and effective ones. A web-based social media voting and comment system was allowing outside engineers to validate their thinking.  As the most effective countermeasures emerged, the team started to describe experiments necessary to learn how to evaluate the valid sets of potential solutions. Using their growing resources, the response team launched multiple experiments using models and simulations to accelerate their Orient-Observe-Decide-Act loops. Based on what they understood, they took a set-based approach to running these experimental solutions under the sea.

At the end of the first 24-hour cycle, they were clear on the first three underwater efforts.  These efforts were quick, easy and non-destructive to other efforts. Within the next three days, their first experiments did not attempt to slow the leak, but they learn much more about the actual situation of the undersea drill rig, the actual leak size and mix of gas and oil. This data allowed them to update their models and again narrow their choices, as well as feed the root cause and leak containment teams some valuable facts. They were learning and now major equipment was starting to arrive at the site.  They chose to work on the quickest solutions that had the highest estimated effectiveness and least likelihood to ruin the well site for further efforts. All of these models, experiments, and solutions sets were published on the web site in real-time.  The web site formed the basis for governmental and public communication updates as well kept the worldwide crowd of paid and volunteer engineers in the loop.

This learning-first approach led to some quick wins that started to slow the leaks only 10 days after the accident and fully contained it 14 days later.  There was now an estimated 200,000 barrels in the water.  Her attentions turned to other teams. One had the long-term, relief well underway with an estimate of 2 more months to completely contain the band-aided well from other leaks. The results of the response teams efforts kept the total spill size to less than the 250,000 barrels spilled by the Valdez in 1989 and less than the 7 million barrels spilled during Katrina. The Chief Engineer’s teams had used all the best thinking and resources from around the world to narrow to a short-term fixes very quickly.

To conceptually “pay back” the world of volunteers and future deep sea oil teams, the problem sheets, experiment results and retrospective meeting notes are all freely available on the corporate web site.  This site and content are open and shared with the world in an open source manner.  These notes provide data for future Chief Engineering teams to reference during future accidents.  They also provide an engineering case study and market data for equipment suppliers to the petroleum industry to help make these kind of efforts safer in the future. They know that by working fast and leveraging all the world’s resources, they directly attacked the highest economical, ecological and social risk quickly.

Are you a Citizen Engineer?

Things are changing, as we are rightfully blurring the lines between economic, social and environmental responsibility.  Everyone is having to become more responsible to the triple bottom line.  In this new world, the Citizen Engineer needs to be responsible to technology, ecology, society and economics.  In many cases, the Citizen Engineer must acknowledge the difference between problems and difficulties. Problems have answers, but for the difficulties we can do nothing but try to address it in our increasingly large-scale, interconnected and complex world.

Who knows if this approach would lead to a smaller spill in the future, but it would certainly lead to faster learning in the next set of accidents.

How does your engineering team behave during your organization’s accidents?

Ryan Martens is a civil engineer, founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

We compiled our carbon footprint data for 2009, and the CO2 per 100 paying users continues to decline.  In 2008, we emitted about 8.2 tons of CO2  per 100 users.  In 2009, that number dropped to about 7.8 tons of CO2 per 100 users. (We include building utilities, employee commuting, air travel, IT, hosted operations and SaaS vendors in our total carbon calculation)

Unfortunately, the total tons for our business and tons per employees continues to increase as we are growing in both employees, offices and people that travel on airplanes.  In 2009, we expanded the use of virtualization (VMWare), HD videoconferencing (Lifesize), desktop videoconferencing (both Google and Skype) and located more of our sales and field services employees into their territories.

As we look to 2010, we are beginning to work with our landlord to do longer term planning with regard to solar options for our Boulder facility.  We are also making major upgrades to our hosted operations and testing/staging platforms to support our growth and the growing mission critical nature of our application.  I expect our total CO2 to increase, our CO2 per employee to flatten and CO2 per 100 users to continue to decline as users, employees, airline miles and servers all go up in 2010.

Some of the e-waste collected at our recycling fair

To end on bright note, we ran our electronic recycling fair again.  This year 8 pallets of CRT, TV, computers, servers and amplifiers left our offices and homes headed again for local recycling at Luminous Recycling in Denver.  Total weight of the 8 pallets was 3,984 pounds. This year we did it around St. Patrick’s day and held a Biggest-Loser-style competition in our game room with green beer on tap.  Though the race was tight between one of our engineers, an accountant and our CFO, I am proud to announce that engineering team of Mike and Susan won the competition this year with over 450 pounds of e-waste diverted to local recycling.

To read more about our carbon footprint, you can read my post and comments from 2009.

On March 19th, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend 1 day of the  Engineer’s Without Boarders (EWB) National conference.  EWB is an international organization founded in 2002 by Bernard Amadei, my Engineering Geology Professor from the University of Colorado.  EWB-USA has 250 Chapter organization, 12,000 members and 350 ongoing projects; it uses college students and professional engineers to address engineering problems in developing nations.  (Take a look at their Projects section of their web site to search and see some of the great work done by these great volunteers, Chapters and Sponsors.)

In addition to browsing projects, talking with students and sponsors, I was able to catch Bryan Willson from Colorado State University give the Plenary talk.  It was very inspiring blend of my favorite topics; great engineering, sustainability, global change, social entrepreneurship and agility.  His group at CSU has built a number of social enterprises to help commercialize solutions for the large-scale global change.

These three areas of commercialization include:

1. 2-Stroke Retrofit is a fuel injector kit that reduces CO2 in two cycle engines by 90% and increase mileage by 35% for the 100 million engines in the developing world alone
2. Clean Cookstoves are solid fuel cookstoves that can reduces CO2 by 75% and increase efficiency by 35% for 600 million solid fuel, including wood, dung and coal, stoves in India, China and Africa
3. SolixBioFuels – A system for growing and turning algae into bio-fuels that is 7 times more effective than open ponds.

All three of these stories provide proof that commercial mechanisms, social entrepreneurship and Agile Product development can change the way our global society runs.  His team created these innovations by seeing the large-scale systems, collaborating across boundaries and creating something new, not just trying to solve a problem in the current broken system. Finally, his call to action for all the EWB members was to be the eyes, and ears on the street with regard to these solutions in the developing world.  For folks in the Agile Community, you can think of the EWB engineers as the proxy to the customers.  It is not that Mark’s team does not have a test lab, work in small batch cycles or reach into the field to see their products in action, but at the scale of 100’s of millions and scope of these global issues you need all the feedback you can get.   What a great partnership!

I encourage you to explore the EWB, SolixBioFuel and Envirofit webs sites.  I would especially like to thank Cathy, the current Director of EWB-USA, and Bernard for inviting me to attend this amazing conference.  I look forward to future collaborations.

In my last post I discussed the awesome workshop I attended called Leading and Learning for Sustainability and why I think it was so beneficial.  It changed me.  This post is about how it changed me.

While at the workshop, I learned from deep reflection that I get things done by example.  I also learned that I like to work with my team and my customers.   In other words, my strategy for leadership is “walking the talk” and sharing it.  (It only took me a year of blogging to figure out why I blog and to whom I am writing.  I feel my best posts are the ones written to my team and customers that are based on my own personal experiences.)

As a result, I have learned to articulate my strategic roadmap toward sustainability and restorative economies in these steps:

1. Get Rally and our customers effective at Flow, Service and Lean in software and product development
2. Get myself and my family to a zero carbon footprint lifestyle
3. Mature the software & hardware development practices as a highly valuable, joyful, respectful and humane profession
4. Get Rally to a zero carbon footprint
5. Get our High Technology industry to a 80% carbon reduction in total footprint
6. Grow High Technology as a leading sustainable industry and critical enabler of green technologies and as an 80% carbon reduction in other industries

Step 1. Back in 2002 when I was working on the initial concepts for Rally, it was Paul Hawkin’s Natural Capitalism book that really shaped my long-term vision for Rally. We basically committed to to bring service and flow, and lean to the high technology industry. I would declare our first 6 years as a success. We have succeeded at introducing the concepts of Flow, Lean and Service into the software and hardware development industries.  In addition, we have made many of the worldwide leaders in this space very successful by realizing the benefits of enterprise agile software development.

New Baby Goats this Spring

Framed Greenhouse on Barn

Step 2. We have been incrementally investing in solar-based solutions to make our personal life more sustainable.  It was PV’s, hybrids, chickens, goats, an e-bike and now this year a new in-ground greenhouse.  A solar hot-water and pre-heater is up next in 2010. (Hopefully, I will even get a cool Tendril home monitor from one of our customers for Chirstmas!.)  I think our home life will be over 80% of the way to zero carbon footprint by 2011 with the final addition of electric vehicles.

As a well paid worker in the executive in the High Technology field, I figure it is my role to help these new green technologies move down the marginal cost curves.  In addition to actually doing something about this problem, I am learning about living in close-loop, sustainable value chains. (I will tell you there is something very grounding and joyful about starting the day by feeding animals who provide for you.  Even on a day like today that was -1 F outside.)

Step 3. Through our 1% volunteering model, folks at Rally have been involved as members, volunteers, speakers, sponsors and board roles at the Scrum Alliance, Agile Alliance, Agile Product Leadership Network and the Project Management Institute.  Our work in growing this industry is just beginning.  In 2009, we hit our 1% goal with 2,800 hours of volunteer time and won the Best Company to work for in Colorado and a top 10 ranking from Outside magazine. In early 2010, we hope to announce a number of clear steps at helping to grow our industry though more educational partnerships in Agile and Lean.

Step 4. In 2006, we started a green team with the help of Boulder’s Be Climate Smart audit team.  In the last three years, we have continued to benchmark our climate impact as well as the community impact of our volunteering hours.  We know that our SaaS application currently puts 8 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year for every 100 users. More importantly, we know where that carbon comes from and we are conscious of the impact and thus the opportunities to curb this for Rally and our industry.

Step 5- 6.  These steps will come as we share our experiences based on our own relentless pursuits of steps 1-4.  Right now I learn a bunch from work shared by Interface carpet’s mission zero, Google.org’s RE<C and as a member of NRDC’s E2 program.

It was as a direct result of this workshop that I learned enough to articulate my choices, what to conserve, what to let go of, my leadership approach, who I need to do this with and ways to bridge the creative tension between my personal vision and reality. It was a very powerful workshop.

In closing, I would like to share two of my favorite quotes:

• Edward Deming: “The prime requirement for achievement of any aim including quality is joy in work.”

• Humberto Maturana: “Emotion is the bedrock of all that we do and love is the only emotion that expands intelligence.”

Thank you again Peter Senge, Sherry Immediato, Darcy Winslow and all the other great folks who attended the SOL workshop on Leading and Learning for Sustainability in DC.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a trail runner,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Climate Change due to the increase of carbon from human activity is a “Global problem,” thus it has a couple of unique attributes compared with other world problems:

It affects everyone

You can act on it anywhere

I choose to act on this problem at home and at work.  As part of this action,  Tim and I chose to attend the Society of Organizational Learning’s (SoL) workshop based on Peter Senge’s book Necessary Revolution.

This three-day workshop leveraged long-time SoL content on leadership and mastery into the context of the global climate change.  It was a fantastic workshop that I highly recommend – as it has changed me and my mental models.

Tim, our CEO, Peter and myself at the end of day three

Living in Boulder Colorado with tons of the worlds best climate scientist and a University that helps you Lean More About Climate, I am familiar with much of the science behind climate change.  But, in this workshop we got to take our understanding up to the larger system level through system archetypes, multi-player games and simulations.

On the third day, we played with and did mock negotiations using the climate change system simulators that were built for negotiating teams going to Copenhagen in the next two weeks.   The systems dynamics models baked into the C-Lean simulator are made more apparent in the Seed Simulator on Carbon flows. (It is a simple bath tub model of how carbon flows through the natural system.)

For your information, the answer to the simulation puzzle of putting climate change in check and keeping average global temperature from rising more that 2 degrees involves three things:

1. have all countries in the world (un-developed, developing and developed) reduce there carbon output by 80% from 2005 levels by 2030
2. stop deforestation efforts
3. maximize reforestation efforts

To do this, the world will have to cross the threshold to a new game;  an infinite game of win/win behaviors that measures success based on ecological restoration and social well-being.  Finite game behaviors coming from zero-sum game thinking and patterns of shifting the burden and escalation will have to stop.  I like to think of this an maturation of our species from wildly growing adolescents to young adults.

Peter’s 5th Discipline Fieldbook and The Dance with Change, come with tons of exercises, tools and guest lectures that are all helpful at understanding organizational learning and systems thinking. However, as Peter said in the workshop, understanding the concepts are easy, but practicing them can be much harder.

Part of the success of this public workshop was working with these concepts in a context of a global problem that we all share.  We got to work on ourselves and a shared global issue.   And as a result, we seemed to all have limitless energy and worked from 8:30 AM to 7 PM each day.

I encourage you to visit these sites, they give climate change a face and a shorter feedback loop.  Both of these benefits can lead you and your teams to better understand and more easily act on this Global issue.

Thank you Tim, Peter, Sherry, Darci and all the other great folks who attended our workshop in DC.  I have my joy and I will share it and my personal learning’s from this event in my next post.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is a telemark skier,  founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

As part of our goal to have a zero carbon footprint by 2020, we calculate our total carbon footprint each year including building facilities, travel, commuting, IT and waste.  As we get more accurate every year, we are adding in the impact of using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to that calculation. I have been unable to find a benchmark of other SaaS companies carbon footprints, so I am putting out a call for SaaS companies to share their footprint per user.

Rally’s benchmark – 8 tons of CO2 per year for every 100 users

At Rally, we have been growing steadily (227% in 2005-2007, 242% in 2007-2009) at the same time working hard to limit our carbon footprint.  Unfortunately, as a company grows, its carbon footprint often grows with it.

We have been able to keep carbon per 100 users flat at 8 tons per year for the last two years – the same amount produced by a single person flying from New York to Deli, India round trip 4 times. In addition, we estimate that our SaaS customers are avoiding an additional 1 ton per year of CO2 as compared to running an application in a robust manner in their own data center.

What is your SaaS carbon footprint per 100 users?

Lacking any other information, I used our figure – 8 tons per 100 users per year – to calculate our carbon use per 100 SaaS seats for each of our SaaS suppliers including: Google Enterprise Apps, Salesforce Unlimited, NetSuite, Big Machines, Eloqua, Xactly, and Open Air.  I assume our numbers are conservative because we are not the scale of the Google or Salesforce, and we count airline miles and employee commute in our footprint.  Can any other SaaS providers tell me your carbon per 100 users to increase the accuracy of our calculations?

Like Salesforce, we buy renewable energy credits from NativeEnergy to offset the carbon of hosted operations.  This is a very small portion of our overall carbon footprint -  about 7 tons per quarter.  However, it does a couple of things for us: 1) It supports our SaaS service being carbon neutral since 2008,  2) It keeps us learning about carbon credits at a national and local level, and 3) most importantly, it keeps us focused on our goal of zero carbon by 2020.

Do you want to partner?

In addition to our efforts to battle climate change in our industry, we are also working hard in social responsibility by following the 1% model started by Marc Benioff and Suzanne DiBianca at SalesforceFoundation.org.  Last year, we hit our 1% target of volunteer time with over 2,500 hours helping 90 charities.  This year, we are in search for a strategic non-profit partner to help us focus our corporate social responsibility efforts and volunteer time in one of three areas:

1. Reducing the environmental burden from the IT industry (carbon, e-waste, toxins, take-back efforts)
2. Decreasing the digital divide in society (universal access to the Internet)
3. Increasing the level and engagement in corporate social responsibility behaviors

If your non-profit believes it can leverage the 3000+ volunteer hours from a company in Colorado, North Carolina and the UK to help on one of these efforts, please contact us.  We are looking for a true partner who wants to start developing a relationship in 2009.

The importance of sustainability at Rally

Our efforts are based on trying to stand on the shoulders of Ray Anderson from Interface. See Ray’s Fortune interview on pushing through on sustainability in light of the current economic crisis that is radically affecting his commercial carpet business.  Since then, Google’s efforts and Salesforce’s efforts in the SaaS IT space have kept us moving forward.

We look forward to driving zero footprint data centers, increasing remote collaboration technology and having a zero footprint campus in the next decade. We are preparing a sustainability report for 2008, following the Global Reporting Initiative format.  It is not a small project, but it was the clear next step for our sustainability efforts that started in earnest in 2007.  Our goal is to release it by July 1st so stay tuned.

ADDED After Publishing and based on comments:

A better video of Ray Anderson is his speech at TED in 2009, it gives more background, and more data.  – Thanks to David Koontz

Graphic below to provide clear breakdown on sources of Carbon in our business – 6/17/09

On our recent webinar “Demystifying Cloud, The Next Generation Architecture” we had a number of thoughtful and tough questions related to security, intellectual property and risks. We provided answers to these questions in the recording, but I found the recent SD Times article “Cloud Providers Answer Tough Questions” an even better source. In this article, a number of experts on specific platforms from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce as well as Rally’s own Zach Nies answer questions about security, lock-in and IP.

Henry Ford didn't foresee the impact of the first car - do we foresee the true impact of the Cloud?

Daryl Plummer from Gartner also did a great job recently describing the real point of cloud computing as he reviews Russ Daniels recent Forbes article. Russ says:

“In my view, the ability to facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship in this new model is one of the most promising ways to ignite the next wave of economic growth. We can no more see the full impact of the cloud than Henry Ford foresaw the impact of his desire to produce more cars in less time.”

As a result of SD Times’ tough questions and our desire to “ignite the next wave of economic growth,” we decided to talk in our next webinar with Global Logic and IBM about how to go to the cloud and mitigate risk along the way. As with any pilot, the goal is to enter wisely, learn fast and then move forward.  Given the iterative and incremental method of Agile is best suited for this fast-learning approach, we will title our next talk “Going to the Cloud – the Agile Way.”

We are structuring the content now, but I would love to hear your ideas, questions or feedback on this topic. I will also post a registration link for the webinar as soon as I have it.

Thesis: Taking a learning-first approach to your cloud efforts can help you avoid the risks of vendor lock-in, IP security and a spectacular failure

Proposed Agenda:

1. Review the innovation, benefits and risks
2. Typical approach – Choosing early, over selling, dramatic big bang
3. The Agile/Lean approach – Set-based, scientific and learning-based
4. Case study
5. Close

The Dream of the Cloud by Enrica Bressan

What is your dream for the cloud? 

Is it a blob that will cause you to lose all control, including your job?

Or, is it an amazing innovation that will save your company from this world-wide recession?

Or the it's The Blob - Buy the classic @ Turner by clicking image

On April 15th, I will be fortunate enough to join Sachin Saxena from Global Logic and Mac Devine, the AIM SaaS/Cloud CTO at IBM,  for a webinar to attempt to answer these questions (learn more and register here).  They are both experts in internet technology and hold deep knowledge (along with beautiful slides) on the topic of cloud computing.  Their goal is to help you understand the massive energy, time and computer savings made possible by the many cloud options.

Specifically,  they will define the cloud, its opportunities and roadblocks. They both plan to highlight case studies, and my role will be as a customer and extensive user of cloud solutions.  This is much the same role that I played at the New Jersey CIO summit in February.  (If you can’t wait for the webinar – don’t miss Troy Angrignon’s opinion post at Sandhill.com about the implications on cloud computing on software firms.)

At Rally, we are very comfortable with the application of these technologies.  As a 160 person SaaS firm provider, we have been in the early market for many of these technologies.  It was fun for us to benefit from the fast move to free of hypervisor/virtualization portion of this wave. Listen to Mike Cote’s podcast on the topic at RedMonk. He has been covering the Cloud/virtualization for years as an open source analyst.

As a result, I believe that 100% of the companies who attend this webinar will leverage these technologies in 2009 in a strategy to reduce risk and cut costs.  But what are the other rationales for the cloud?  What are your stories?  I think cloud/SaaS, Agile development and web 2.0 customer communities are an even bigger story, but one that will take longer to develop than the use of public/private clouds and virtualization technology.

Next up on this topic will be the actual energy savings reports from our virtualization and power management efforts lead by our internal green team.

This Friday, February 27th, I will be speaking on a panel at the New Jersey Technology Council’s 2009 CIO Conference called “Moving to a Virtual World” ( www.njtc.org). The panel is on Cloud Computing and it is a mixed collection of vendors and CIO’s talking about the rapid arrival, the clear benefits and struggles of adopting Cloud Computing.

At Rally, we have gained some firsthand knowledge of these technologies, platforms and applications as we try to find the most energy efficient, stable and cost effective solutions for us and our customers.  As a small fast growing technology company, we are an ideal customer for Cloud Computing and I am sitting on this panel as a user, supplier and leader on software development for the cloud.  (We use Amazon EC2, VMWare ESX, Salesforce and seven App-Exchange Apps, Google Apps Premier to run our business and manage our own multi-tenant SaaS/PaaS application in the cloud.)

In preparation for the panel, I was brushing up on some of the latest news and views on this topic.

Here are the worthwhile Cloud Computing links that I used to prepare my talking points:

• Cloud Computing – you have to start on Wikipedia to make sure your definition is grounded
• What is Cloud Computing - a wonderful video of a variety of folks from the Web 2.0 Expo
• Above the Clouds – is a new blog site, whitepaper and video from Cal Berkley Professors on Cloud Computing
• Cloud an Outsourcing Option in Troubled Times – CIO Insight article on using cloud services instead of more traditional IT outsourcing options (both development and operations)
• “What the hell is Cloud Computing?” - Larry Ellison rails on the whole idea as over-blown (see many YouTube videos)

(more…)

The various sizes of and shapes of Ecospheres

As you may know, I am very passionate about the concepts of sustainability.  For my birthday this year, my thoughtful wife and son gave me a living example of sustainability that sits on my desk and reminds me to work on this topic everyday.  It is called an EcoSphere and I got it from EcoProducts Home Store here in Boulder (they are folks who also provide all of our compostables that help us approach zero waste here at Rally – they are a great Boulder success story).

The Ecosphere is a completely closed world and is self-sustainable. It was developed by two NASA scientists (the late Dr. Joe Hanson and the late Dr. Clair Folsome) trying to create models for long-term space flight.  In it you will find algae, shrimp and bacteria living in a closed cycle with sun light as energy. (Learn more about EcoSphere’s sustainable model on their site.)

At $125 for a small sphere they are a bit pricey, but they are fun to watch, people always notice the shrimp moving around on my desk.  After attending Thomas Friedman’s talk on “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” I realize they are just another part of my “work in progress” to living sustainably in the U.S.  These do not feed me like my chickens and goats, but they also do not eat like my dogs and cats.

Here is mine on my desk - cool eh?

Definitely the most common question is:  “Are those sea monkeys?“  According to the web site, they live 2 to 7 years with really no maintenance and NO they are not sea monkey branded brine shrimp.

This EcoSphere keeps me focused on the long road of continuous improvement needed to make our industry a zero carbon footprint or sustainable industry.  We are currently on the road to be a larger emitter of CO2 than the airline industry by 2020.

We have to find the innovations in infrastructure, the methods and tools to reverse this.  My of view of how to reverse this behavior is through the emerging software value cycle that is made possible by SaaS/Clouds, Agile development and Web 2.0 customer communities.  You can read my thoughts on these topics or hear a MassTech webinar.

I have about 15 of these guys in my Eco-sphere.

I believe that with the change to Lean thinking – from products to services and with virtual connections to customers – we can learn to quickly adapt and adopt to new sustainable products and behaviors.

We need a value chain in the IT industry that is closed loop and sustainable, not open loop like the Story of Stuff.

I encourage you to take a moment and consider getting one of these model worlds for yourself or your best friends.  It will keep you on the road to smarter, leaner and greener.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is an avid outdoorsman, founding board member of the EFCO, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Further Reading:

• Let’s stop splitting hairs – We need to get to zero carbon output to really make a difference
• Leadership in Sustainability – Blog Talk Radio Interview