Sustainability in IT with Todd Weatherby

(Intro)

Welcome to another episode of Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT podcast brought to you by Device42. On this show we explore the ins and outs of modern IT management in the infinite expanse of its universe. Whether you’re an expert in the data center or cloud or just someone interested in the latest trends in IT technology, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT is your go-to source for all things IT. So buckle up and get ready to explore the ever-changing landscape of modern IT management. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Hello and welcome to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT, a podcast brought to you by Device42. I’m your host Michelle Dawn Mooney and today we’re talking about sustainability opportunities and challenges for 2023. We’ve got a great guest to bring on today. Cannot wait for you to meet him. Todd Weatherby is an independent consultant, also founder of Rafiki Advisors. Todd, I want to thank you for joining me today because it’s going to be a great conversation. 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Michelle, thanks for having me. I’m very much looking forward to the conversation. It’s great to be here and share my story and hopefully it’s useful to others and I’m sure I’ll make contacts and I’ll learn from them too. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Yeah, I’m sure you will. So let’s get into it. Before we do, actually, I want to take a pause and let people know a little bit more about Todd Weatherby, your background professionally and kind of what you’re doing now. 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Yeah, thanks, Michelle. I grew up in the Northeast of the United States. I went to school near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. First job in Washington, D.C. That was with Oracle Corporation. I was there almost eight years. That took us out to Seattle area where I moved over to Microsoft and was there for 16 plus years. And then I had an opportunity to join AWS in 2012, Amazon Web Services at Amazon in the Seattle area. And I just wrapped up 11 years there, Michelle. So that was a good fun set of runs there at Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon. I feel very lucky to have caught those waves. And now I’m turning the page to go explore new opportunities. I’m out as an independent consultant advisor, working with a variety of companies in a variety of areas. One of them is the sustainability area. It was sort of sparked in me in my last six months at AWS, where I had an opportunity to work full time as an executive sponsor for AWS’s sustainability efforts for 2023. And so I worked with a virtual team across the business. We built that plan. And I learned a whole bunch of things there, Michelle, that sort of inspired me as I go forward to continue to focus on this and continue to work with others in this space. And I’m looking forward to talking about that today. So I’m independent. I’m not a spokesperson of Amazon. I’m not going to be talking about internal things Amazon today. I’ll talk about some things I learned and some public things they’re doing. And I’m really proud to be associated with Amazon. But right now, operating independently, speaking independently today. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

So let’s dive in. When asked, what is sustainability? What mental models or frameworks do you find useful? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

You know, I got into it six months ago. So I was like a lot of people where I heard on the press and the press, I hear things like ESG reporting that’s used in a financial services industry, environmental, social and governance. And I sort of got a whiff of how that had what that had to do with measuring business performance in light of sustainability. But I didn’t fully understand that the details behind it. I heard a lot of the politics around it, the sensational headlines and so forth and controversy and whatever. It’s even in the news right now, Michelle, as you know, with the bank failures and so forth, a lot of people talking about it. But what I got into when I got underneath all that, I learned that there’s a lot of interesting science and technology and a lot of application of great innovations that are happening around the world to really improve the world we live in. I got down to the principles of it. And I like the principles because there are to argue with. It’s things like leave it better than you found it, consume less, produce more than you consume. It’s things like even the UN definition is pretty good. I’ve got it here in front of me. It says development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations. Those principles are pretty hard to argue with. And I had gotten into that with the team and really enjoyed learning about energy and water and other resources that make up the operations of a business today. And when we think of a variety of industries and then how IT folks support those industries, I just learned a ton that is super exciting. And I think when you get into it, get down to practical, tactical things, there’s so much opportunity to make improvement and make the world better and more sustainable for future generations. And it’s exciting in that way for me. There’s a simple framework that I’ve latched on to that comes from the greenhouse gas protocol. And that’s the scope one, scope two, scope three kind of framework. And that talks about your direct carbon emissions that you use, that you consume when you’re running your business, the indirect where you use power that was produced and what’s the carbon emissions related to the power you produced. And then there’s scope three, which is the value chain view of your emissions. So everything coming in through your supply chain and out through your distribution to your customer, what’s the carbon emissions related to that network of companies? And so when you get these mental models, you can start to get your arms around what does sustainability mean broadly and where can we see improvement? Where can we start? Where can we make improvement over time? So those are some of the things I learned and concepts that phrases that have been helpful to me as I got in. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Very interesting, Todd. So since your focus at AWS was customer facing, what would you say is the typical enterprise customer conversation on sustainability? And then how is that changing? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Yeah, you know, I said I worked at Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon and all that time I was in the enterprise space working with external customers of those companies. And recently AWS built and ran the professional services organization globally. So that was very focused on enterprises and in 42 countries. And so I got a good view around the world. And what’s happened is a year ago, business was starting to have to respond to regulatory and other stakeholder kind of things. But the IT side of our enterprise customers was still keeping up with what they need to do. They got a lot of challenges with security or cost or other things that IT teams rightly have to focus on. And they weren’t digging in or weren’t asking us for help with the sustainability questions. But that’s changed over the last year. They started to say, OK, AWS, if we’re going to move our data in and store it in data and content and store it in the cloud, or if we’re going to do our compute processing, our databases, our networking in the cloud, how sustainable is the cloud? The inside or what we said was sustainability of the cloud. How sustainable is that? That was the question we had to answer. And then the other one was what can enterprises do using the cloud when they put things in the cloud applications and software to improve their business using the cloud? And so that those two sustainability of the cloud and sustainability of things they put in the cloud starts to be the conversation. And then how fast can they go? Where, where do they stand today? Are they good? Are they bad? Are they do they have easy things they can do? Or is it all going to take a long time? What’s the cost of improvement? And so those conversations have really started to heat up now that IT has had to respond to their business stakeholders, business stakeholders responding to regulators and external customers. And so it’s really starting to fire up. The challenge, of course, is that the measurements are all new. And so it really becomes what data are we looking at? How do we collect more data? How do we make sure it’s credible? How do we make sure it’s accurate, complete? And then how do we apply that data to iteration and improvement? So that’s that’s changing a lot now. We’re used to we used to just hear it in the business side. And now we’re also hearing it on IT. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

So Todd, let me ask you this cost because everything revolves around money. So how do you connect that when it comes to sustainability and the customer? And of course, everybody’s looking at that price line. What do you do there? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Yeah, you’re right. Especially I said in this last year, the sustainability conversations coming up, but of course, the market conditions changing, everybody’s really focused on cost. And some are saying, well, I can’t get to that sustainability thing right now because I have to focus on cost. But I think there’s a cool opportunity to to bind the two and to think about when you’re more efficient with your usage of resources, you can also reduce your cost in the production of your product and then flip it around. If you’re selling your product to customers of yours, if you are reducing the cost of your product by reducing usage, you can increase the value to your customers. So you can build in this efficiency of usage of resources, energy, power, water. You can build all that in as a way of increasing value to your customer, but also as making your operations internally more efficient. So I think there’s an opportunity to not sort of say one or the other, but and it’s an and not an or. Michelle, I think we can get after cost and sustainability at the same time in a lot of cases. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Let’s talk about leadership. It’s so vital in any field, but specifically we’re talking about here is sustainability. So where is the leadership coming from and why? And then a follow up to that, who is leading and who is lagging and why? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

So, Michelle, in addition to the geographic look at it, you can also look at leadership coming from associations of companies and people and innovation happening that way. There’s, of course, things like the well-known Paris Accord around the net zero pledge for 2050. Then you can look at things like Amazon and they’re affiliated with this climate pledge that may know about where hundreds of companies have gathered together and pledged to be climate neutral by 2040, 10 years before the Paris Accord. And then further thinking about what I’m familiar with with Amazon is in the work they’re doing on being water positive. So they’re giving more water back to the communities in which they operate than water that they consume. And that by 2030, or if you look at what Amazon is doing for commitment to renewable energy usage being 100 percent renewable energy usage by 2025. So you see these commitments by groups of companies, single companies. You see regulation coming on certain schedules in certain countries. And that’s providing the impetus. That’s providing the pressure and the urgency on timelines that is then driving the leadership you’re seeing in these different places, different companies. And I think we’ll see more of that as we start to get closer to some of these target deadlines. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

When it comes to improving sustainability, what information technologies do you think will be most useful? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

It starts with measurement. If you’re going to improve anything, you got to start by measuring it. And then you have a baseline and then you have a chance to see how you what progress you’re making. And so in information technology, one of the obvious places that comes up and certainly from the cloud space where I come from, data lakes are a great opportunity where a lot of companies have invested in their data fabric enterprise wide, their data lakes, their data infrastructure, data architecture. And that enables you to bring multiple sources of data together from across your enterprise, from outside your enterprise, and to then analyze that data, snapshot that data, trend that data. And data lakes are a great way to get after this problem, at least baselining and then measuring your improvement. To drive improvement, there are other technologies like one of my favorites is Internet of Things and Out at the Edge. So I talked about cloud and things in the center. But then when you go all the way out to edge computing and Internet of Things, putting sensors all over devices around the world, essentially putting a skin around the around the earth. So we get all these stimulation, all these these this monitoring, this detection of data that happens on the ground. That’s going to be a great application of technology to help us get our arms around all this data, collect all this data and then synthesize it into something actionable. But then you’d say, OK, if you have all this data and you’re going forward and you’re designing new things or building new things, I like digital twins. Digital twin is the idea of taking the data about, let’s say, a building where you can create a virtual image that building. You can load in all the parameters that tell you what kind of material you’re going to use, all the measurements of it. One of my favorite learnings over the last few years, last few months was about concrete. I didn’t realize, Michelle, that concrete and the specific cement ingredients in concrete matter to sustainability. It’s called embodied carbons. And if you use a certain kind of cement, it emits certain kind of carbon. If you use a different kind of cement in your concrete, it emits less carbon. Didn’t really come to think of that. But if you build a digital twin to your building and you know how much concrete you have to use in it, you know what kind of ingredients you’re using. Then you’re going to understand your carbon footprint in that building before you build it, instead of afterward and trying to manage it afterwards. So digital twin is another way that we can use technology. I think the last example I’ll give you, Michelle, is around the notion of circular economy, the idea of reusability, recyclability. We all think about recycling our waste in our homes. But if you apply it to industry and think about the waste in health care, the waste in construction or other things, and then you think about reusing those materials and then redesigning them for better use so that they don’t end up in a landfill. They end up actually get another time around. And that we study the life cycle of these ingredients or these products throughout these different industries better. I think circular economy and circular marketplaces is a great place for technology in there, too. So a lot of great things we’re seeing. At the end of the day, the accounting part of it and rolling it all up to measure how we’re doing, I think is super critical. One of the top companies I’m seeing in this space is a company called Persephone. They’re the leader, as I can tell, in carbon accounting, carbon accounting software. And they’re doing a lot of great partnerships with various companies and organizations around the world. And I encourage everybody to take a look at them. They’re a good example of a software as a service provider running in the cloud, but then helping governments and enterprises account for their carbon emissions. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

As we’re looking to the future, of course, we’re talking about wanting to make things better, wanting to make improvements. So what would you say are the biggest opportunities and then challenges for sustainability in 2023? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

I think that there’s still a big awareness gap. Michelle, I think there, you know, I take myself as an example. I told you six months ago, I had a rough idea what ESG was. I didn’t know what scope one, two and three were. Didn’t understand about concrete and cement and how that mattered. So I think there’s still a lot of education and awareness to do. And I think it’s up to all of us to get curious. I think we need to go, then partner up with others who have, who are like-minded and collaborate and share ideas because the innovation, the ideas are coming from all over the place. But I think the biggest first opportunity is just awareness and education. The second is this thing I talked about with cost and usage and binding those together with the pressures in the market today around cost, but also then you can link to it. If you’re smart, you can say, yeah, how are we thinking about usage of our resources to also drive down costs? And then we get a two for one on that. I think there’s a bunch of interesting venture capital going into technology and climate tech. There’s an article out that we’ll make sure is available in the resources alongside this podcast. But there’s a good article showing the rapid increase in venture capital going into climate tech, Michelle, where there’s great opportunities for startups. There’s great opportunities for individuals to launch new careers in this space if they care about it. And so I think that’s another opportunity in 2023 to take advantage of the pressure that’s building the supply of money coming in and then the innovation that’s already begun and to get on top of that. I think in the challenges space, companies are going to have to evaluate how much time they have to get after this, how much money and where do they get the skills? And so there’s going to be buy-build decisions that are tough in this case. Now that I would argue that you can’t afford to try to build it yourself and then miss the target and lose the time. You got to think more carefully now about buying solutions that are available and then making the best of those. So you have time to then apply them to your business. So I think there’s buy build decisions around climate technologies for doing this work inside your enterprise and throughout your supply chain and your value chain to get to that scope three. And this scope three is the hardest challenge of them all. I think, Michelle, in terms of us getting our arms around measuring it and then driving improvement, the whole data part of this going out through, as I said, all the way through your supply chain, out through your distribution channel, all the way out to your customers measuring that. That’s all what they call scope three in the greenhouse gas emission. That’s a big challenge, but we got to get after that. I think companies who have done it find out that there’s huge leverage in that. Companies who are still trying to stay insular and inside and just figure out theirs because they feel like they got to get their house in order. I’d encourage them to open up quickly and start collaborating up and down your value chain. I think that’s the biggest challenge, but it’s also the biggest opportunity to catch up. We’re behind on a lot of these metrics. There’s great leverage in our networks around our companies. I think that’s an opportunity and a challenge all at once. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Why does sustainability really matter? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Well, everybody’s got to find their own why. I had to go back and kind of look at this myself and figure out why does it matter? I had to answer this question for myself. When I got to it, it was back to those principles. It was leaving it better than I found it. It was producing more value than I consume, and it was thinking about the next generation. I have children in their 20s, and when I sit down and talk with them about this, they’re fired up about this, and they are excited that I care. They’re pushing me a little bit to do more and to be more responsible, and they’re curious, too. So I say a lot of it is that simple. It’s down to some of the science that says that by 2050, that’s the breaking point, where if we don’t have this under control, then it’s downhill from there. It’s arguable. All that’s debatable, but I’m motivated by it just by talking to the next generation and feeling some responsibility around those principles. And then it gets to my takeaways for the audience. I’d say, get curious, go learn, go out, go build your allies, go figure out where you have things in common, and there will be other people that disagree with you, but don’t get caught up in that. Don’t get caught up in the politics. Stay focused on your why and your allies and go. And then I’d say, get after this measurement. Get after the data piece, estimate it, and don’t get caught up in perfection of your measurements. Good at perfection become the enemy of the good. Get after it so that we can make progress. And then find your spots to improve and then iterate. We know in the IT world that agile methodologies of iteration are a lot more effective than often than these big waterfalls where we take these long time to get through one version and another long time to get through the next. Really got to get this pace of innovation picked up in this area through iteration. And I think that’s another call to action is to say, find your place to start with your allies. Get your first result and then iterate on that and keep improving. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

We covered a lot of territory, Todd, but any final thoughts as we are wrapping up things here? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Well, I think, Michelle, that we’ve all got a responsibility in this area and it’s been so exciting for me, reinvigorating for me. I’ll share that once I dove into it and got down to the principles, I have found a new area that’s a top priority for me and my top five now and climbing. So I hope that others will take the time to follow up and look at the resources that we provided here, find their why and get after it. So thanks, Michelle. Appreciate the conversation today. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

And really appreciate having you here today, Todd. Todd Weatherby is an independent consultant and founder of Rafiki Advisors. And as Todd said, we’re going to have a lot more information in the show notes. And of course, you can always go to the Device 42 website for more information. But if they have any questions or want to connect with you, Todd, how do they do that? 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Yeah, I use LinkedIn as a big part of my professional networking. My contact information is out there. That’s a great way to do it. And then I’ve also got a website up, RafikiAdvisors.com. So either way is fine. But LinkedIn is a great way. My email address is available there. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Todd, thank you so much for being here today. Great conversation. And we know why it’s important because if you didn’t get it for the first part of the conversation, you summed up everything there at the end really is so important. It’s interesting conversation and it’s exciting to see where things are going to go and a lot of hope for things to get even better in 2023. So I really appreciate your time. 

(Guest:Todd Weatherby)

Thanks, Michelle. Thank you. 

(Host:Michelle Dawn Mooney)

And I want to thank all of you for tuning in and listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to IT. It is a podcast brought to you by Device 42 talking about sustainability today. And of course, please subscribe to the podcast to learn more about Device 42’s fabulous guests and some great topics as well. And be sure to visit the website as well if you’d like more information there. I’m your host, Michelle Don Mooney. Once again, thanks again for joining us. We hope to see you soon.