And from this information, we get the signature of what a levee looks like when it's breaking, and we're working with two Dutch organizations, to develop a concept for a smart levee, a levee that is capable of reporting its own condition and reporting when it's under stress. I mean and that could save hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of property and economic activity and potentially could save hundreds of lives too.

The work that I believe you're familiar with on the Hudson River, it's a collaboration with the Beacon Institute, and basically it is creating a real-time picture of about 300 -- of the water condition at about 300 miles miles of the Hudson River. There will be multiple sensors mounted on buoys in the river and also on little autonomous underwater vehicles.

They -- the data comes in, is processed through a piece of IBM software called System S that we believe has unique capabilities to process streaming data and generate conclusions on the fly as the data comes in so that, you know, for the first time, you have the capability of tracking genuinely immediate responses to a condition that's developing in the river. So that work is, as I say, that is ongoing. I believe we are just getting to the point of actually towards the first part of implementation of that.

MW: Given all of this diverse work that IBM is doing around the water, what are some of the obstacles or challenges that you're looking at, whether it's looking towards large scale water management or just the kinds of obstacles that you'll need to overcome to get WaterOrg under way?

PW: I think the biggest single obstacle will be the inherent conservatism of the water industry. And it's not clear, while there are specific examples of collaboration, and indeed some very good examples of collaboration. I've heard about several of them in this conference. It's not the norm. And, you know, it needs to become the norm. That's why we're creating WaterITOrg.

As I say, we encountered very similar conditions in the electricity industry, which is why we joined Grid Wise, and we've seen the role of it played and we think well, wouldn't it be a neat thing if we could do the same thing for the water industry, which is why this time we've taken it into our own hands to actually propose it.

MW: And thinking about the conservatism of water industry, the tech industry, although not necessarily known as well for its conservatism, is certainly one that doesn't really have a deeply ingrained sense of cooperation and openness. And I know IBM has pioneered the Eco-Patent Commons which launched earlier this year. Are there lessons that you've learned from the break down walls between -- walls preventing cooperation in the tech industry that you see being applicable to WaterITOrg?

PW: Yeah, I mean we had to collaborate very extensively. For example, there's a whole group of organizations that we work around our chip architectures. The lesson I guess is openness. You know, it's the proprietary standard, proprietary architectures and so on absolutely don't help. I think it's, you know, it's down to straightforward sort of willingness to listen and be very clear as to what you're after, what your partners are after, and crafting, you know, a product that satisfies all partners objectives. I mean when it comes down to it, it's a cultural thing.

MW: Have you got the sense that thinking about, again, Eco patents, commons, or working with -- collaborating with tech industry partners, that once businesses or other organizations sort of get a taste of the benefits of collaboration that these walls sort of lower themselves when they realize there are benefits to working in this way?

PW: That's right. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Now I mean Eco patent probably is a very specific thing around intellectual property, but at the end of the day, as they say, you know, maybe a better example would be around our semiconductor architectures where we routinely collaborate with a group of companies. And as you can infer for yourself, that evidently works very well, the idea being that if you demonstrate the value of this, and also, I mean the other piece which we haven't discussed is the fact that water today is not priced properly.

It is increasingly gonna be priced properly simply through the operation of supply and demand. There isn't enough of it in the Western United States. Something's gotta give and you've gotta attract the price. My prediction in this conference that I was at that water would increase by two to three X over the next 10 to 15 years, excluding its inflation.

So when that sort of stuff starts to happen, the return on investment calculations from taking action on the necessary scale become a lot easier to susdain. That's gonna help drive things forward as well and that's gonna help people think about collaboration because the generally see the return on investment for being able to step in at a level of the resource you're working with, the entire river or whatever, should exceed the return on investment for doing it piece meal.

MW: So what are the next steps? We've got the discussion document out. What do you need to go, to take it to the next step?

PW: Right now we've got the discussion document out in May in diverse directions. We need people to take a look at that, think about it, and come back to us and tell us what they think. We're trying to get a nucleus together with which we can then go and approach the federal government and say, “You know, we the undersigned, think the following. What do you think?” And to see how that discussion.

Now the complication obviously is you've got, I mean, leaving aside the kind of shenanigans on Wall Street at the moment, you've got the presidential election and the change of administration. So we need to think about how we time what we do in the back. But my sense of it is that once the administration, the incoming administration has got it's kind of immediate priorities straightened out and put steps in hand to start to achieve those, we then have an opportunity with some people who will be fairly new and might be fairly receptive to ideas to have that discussion with them.

MW: Peter, thanks so much for taking the time to talk. I look forward to hearing how WaterITOrg progresses.

Matthew Wheeland is the Managing Editor of GreenBiz.com.

Peter Williams welcomes your thoughts and suggestions on WaterOrg. Send him an email at peter.r.williams@us.ibm.com.