The Alcatel-Lucent blog has a recent video with Ben Verwaayen
He's speaking about ICT as an enabler for eco-sustainability.
Watch it now!
Ben is absolutely right. As Sean White and I wrote in our 1995 book on this subject, "The Total Quality Corporation(St. Martin's) the motive force of wealth creation throughout history is the progressive substitution of ever cheaper information for other resources like land, labor, and capital.Once information becomes cheap enough, as it has in the last half century, ICT takes center stage in the greening of products and processes of all types. Take industrial waste. By increasing yields, ICT cuts waste and, very often, lowers costs, thus reversing traditional cost-quality trade offs. This is a win-win for green and still is not as well understood as it should be. When industrialists and politicians talk of green being too expensive to do, one has to ask if they know what they are talking about.One of the biggest challenges is a change of mind set. I recently stopped a $200 million factory expansion by pointing out to the factory manager that ICT to improve yields would cost a fraction of the cost of the expansion and produce needed volumes at significantly lower cost. Building on existing thinking rarely helps when the cost of information is in a free fall.
