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The Ultimate Rally Road Race – the Race to IT Industry Sustainability

Dear Rally Customers, Employees, Suppliers and Partners,

Many issues in our current global economy highlight the drive to sustainability, but none looms larger than global warming. This issue is a snowball rolling downhill whose consequences are described in detail on a number of great sites on the Internet and also by some of the world’s best climate scientists who are located here in Boulder (for example, climatecrisis.org, the films “An Inconvenient Truth” and “11th Hour,” bioneers.org).

Based on research reports concerning our increasing accumulation of green house gases, it is mandatory that businesses get to zero carbon footprint by mid-century to enable a “soft landing” that reduces environmental catastrophes. As a result, we do not see this as a race to being green, we see it as race to a balanced waste model, or sustainability.

A Model for Sustainability

Ray Anderson at Interface carpet is one of the giants in sustainability. In 1994, Ray read Paul Hawken’s “Natural Capital” and became involved with the authors of “The Natural Step.” He charted his environmental journey through a book called “Mid-course Correction,” detailing his commitment to the idea of “mission zero.” This commitment is the goal that Interface is to be a completely sustainable and zero carbon footprint company by 2020. This is the first and only company that I have seen committed to this goal. Their web site on this topic has been a critical influence on our green team and me.

In the high technology or information technology industry, we have matured over the last 30 years to an assembly line model centered around getting products to the market. (Watch “The Story of Stuff” for more information.) This model for software is similar to how GM and Ford build cars; it can be characterized by large, linear, late and lavishly wasteful software. In addition, it produces a rapidly growing stream of toxic e-waste, soaring power usage and increasing social inequity. At Rally, we want to be part of the solution to this model by maturing beyond the Lean models made famous by Toyota and towards a sustainable service-led model of IT and high-tech. By figuring out the models and processes to make Rally sustainable, we believe we can help lead our industry to a sustainability that is centered around globally distributed development, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Agile/Lean principles and social networking innovations for Internet-based sales and support.

We have two main guiding objectives:

  1. Making Rally a Sustainable Company

    The first goal is to get our waste per employee benchmarked and compared to other companies and industries. The second goal is to drive the waste per employee at Rally down on a curve toward zero, like Interface. Our third goal is to leverage the right technical advances to accelerate our declining waste all the while sharing our stories, tools and path with our customers and industry.

  2. Making the IT Industry Sustainable

    Our first goal is to get the SaaS model of building, distributing, and selling software benchmarked against the old enterprise model of shipping software. Our second external goal is to start driving the waste per user of the Rally service down on curve toward zero. Our belief is that a high-tech industry driven by service can become one of the first truly sustainable industries. As a result, we should be in the right position to grow the size of our industry, while helping to develop the innovations necessary for other industries and consumers to become sustainable.

IT/High-Tech Industry 1.0 to 2.0

But wait a minute, I thought software was a green industry?

From the outside, the software industry appears greener because it has drastically reduced the amount of physical product that it ships. This is a good start, but to understand the impacts of the software industry, you have to agree that software would not exist without some form of silicon hardware. When you acknowledge our larger value chain, you can see five very specific issues that we create as part of the greater high-technology industry.

  • Software is part of determining the lifecycle of hardware and either contributing or slowing the growth of e-waste.
  • SaaS solutions and enterprise data centers are the fastest growing segment of power usage in the world at 24% growth year over year. Data center power usage now makes up over 1% of total power usage in the U.S. and nearly 1% of worldwide power usage.
  • There is a growing gap between upper and lower class in the world. This gap is accentuated by the use and non-use of computers and software.
  • Software, together with the entertainment industry, is creating virtual worlds so compelling that humans can check-out of society more easily than engaging in creating a sustainable society.
  • The high-tech industry and the software industry are very inefficient with only about 6% of our overall tasks being value-added work.

Yet, on the positive side, the software industry sits in a great spot to help enable a transition to a more sustainable economy based on Lean and closed-loop models for business that are more balanced with social equity and a more diverse ecology.

In the future, this page will expand into an entire micro-site like Interface’s to track our progress and share our tools. To help add to these pages, please post ideas and comments in our two discussion areas in Agile Commons:

Please join us in the ultimate road race to sustainability. We can’t do it without help from everyone.

Best results,
Ryan Martens
Founder and CTO, Rally Software

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