Over the course of the last couple years, IBM -- famously known as Big Blue -- has begun a significant shift toward the green end of the spectrum.
With the launch of its Big Green Innovations program in 2007, the company is making big plans to apply its technological and organizational skills to all sorts of environmental problems, including carbon management systems, smart grid technologies, and environmental modeling.
IBM is also getting serious about developing technologies to improve water management, including large-scale projects underway in Latin American watersheds, Dutch levees and New York's Hudson River.
And IBM is now hoping to take the process to the next level, by creating an ambitious, non-profit water education organization. WaterOrg, as the project is temporarily named, aims to bring together all of the many stakeholders involved with managing bodies of water, with the goal of developing standards for sharing information about water availability and quality, and showing how cutting-edge information technology can make the use of our most precious resource all the more efficient.
IBM has also joined with GreenBiz.com to launch their call for WaterITOrg partners as the first in our series of GreenBiz Research Reports. You can download the report here.
I spoke with Peter Williams, IBM's Chief Technology Officer for Big Green Innovations, about the launch of WaterITOrg, what he thinks it can accomplish, and how the company and its future partners in the organization will achieve success.
Matthew Wheeland: Peter, thanks so much for taking the time to talk today. We're here to talk about a new project that you're working on at IBM. It's called WaterOrg. As a good place to start, just give me a thumbnail sketch. What is WaterITOrg?
Peter Williams: Now WaterITOrg is our shorthand cycle at this point for a concept. When you look at the water industry, a number of things become very apparent. The first is how fragmented it is and the second is how in our view and in the view of a number of other people we've spoken to, it doesn't used advanced information technology as effectively or as extensively as it might.
There's a lot of reasons for that, but given the likelihood with which water is gonna come under -- be increasingly scarce and the price of water is gonna increase in the future as well, we believe that the role for more advanced information technology in improving water management decisions has never been more obvious. Just as an example, yesterday I was at a meeting sponsored by the Wester Governor's Association, and literally every speaker referred to either the need for more information or the fact that the information was there but it was split and fragmented, or again, the fact that the information was there but they had no tooling and no time and no bandwidth to use it.
What WaterOrg is about doing is bringing awareness to the water industry of exactly what advanced information technology is capable of doing, and it wants to do that in a particular way. It wants to do it by encouraging interagency collaboration around particular water resources. Let's say for the sake of argument, Chesapeake Bay or the Mississippi or the Sacramento River Delta, to provide the information base that will allow those -- the agencies that are involved in it with each of those resources to collaborate together so that at least they've got one version of the truth.
They might disagree on decisions, but at least they disagree from the same information base. There are precedents for that. The Republican River in the Midwest, the water agencies along that, the state agencies collaborate extensively. And yet I believe they argue extensively about, you know, the appropriate way to manage the river, but at least they're making the arguments from the same basis of information. And that's something that we want to achieve more generally.
What we're doing with WaterITOrg is patterned quite closely on another idea and initiative in the electricity sector that has been very successful. We have partnered with the Department of Energy and a number of other organizations, I should add, partnered with the Department of Energy to create a thing called GridWise.org. Part of the purpose of gridwise.org is very analogous to what we're trying to do here, which is to make the electricity transmission and distribution industry aware of the benefits that advanced information technology can bring to their industry.
It also does things like positive collaboration between central and local agencies. It does things like identify reference architectures, technology architectures and standards, which have been because we want WaterITOrg to become involved with. So what we're doing is basically patterned very closely on that.
Our way of trying to build the thing up is right at this time, you know, right now we are in the process of soliciting interests from a group of organizations that we hope very much will include water industry associations, some water utilities, water agencies, in other words, and ideally also some large private sector water users as well, so that we've got a nucleus around which we can build this thing.
It's also important to add that we are -- we entirely expect that IBM competitors will be members of this organization as well. It'll be based entirely on open standards and it's not going to basically advance IBM's agenda, per se. It is genuinely designed to do a bit of good for the water industry as a whole. And to that extent, if our competitor's doing it, then they will be very welcomed. Obviously we've got our ideas on what we want this thing to achieve, but and other organizations become interested, they're gonna have their ideas too and, you know, the end result is gonna be an amalgamation of all of those.
MW: Let's talk a little bit about what outcome IBM is looking at from this. I know from reading the prospectus, there are a handful of different applications for this. But in a perfect-world situation, what is WaterITOrg going to accomplish?
PW: In a perfect-world situation, WaterITOrg will basically stimulate a number of successful collaborations between agencies that will enable them to manage the nation's water reserves more effectively. It will stimulate the creation of standards that will allow the better of exchange of information within the water industry, and it will accelerate the adoption of information technology, you know, that the sound bite we use is bringing information flow to water flow. It's that fundamentally what we're trying to achieve.
MW: And some of the applications for this in terms of managing water flow in drought prone areas or just in heavy agricultural areas, what are some of the potential uses for this?
PW: Okay, so it would be -- might be organizations collaborating to record water usage from a particular river or from, let's say, the Great Lakes or whatever, the Ogalalla Aquifer, whatever resource we're talking about. It might be organizations collaborating to share water quality data, so you can sort of picture for the entire water resource, not just the small parts of it.
It might be organizations collaborating to manage levies. The idea of being, you know, to say you bring these organizations together, you enable them, you provide the tooling to enable them to work together to create the information base that they work from, and you've added value to society by doing that. And at the same time, we then created show pieces we hope for the value that information technology can bring to water management.
MW: And there are some industrial applications for this as well, for water intensive industries to get a grip on exactly what their water use is and ways to make that more efficient.
PW: It could potentially work in that area, but the primary impact we're aiming at first of all is, I mean, if you've got a heavily water extractive industry in a specific area, you can't manage the water resources in an integrated way without involving that industry. And if we can provide the basics for the conversation necessary for that to happen, then again, we've added value.
We do, not through our water organization, but we're already finding, for example, in the Netherlands, where we're doing water work that a lot of industries are actually very -- a lot of -- sorry, agencies are actually very willing to talk to each other through IBM where they wouldn't necessarily be willing to talk to each other direction. And we're finding that people look at us a kind of a neutral broker. And, you know, it's actually a role that we can play in the course of going about our work, and that's absolutely fine. We have no objection to that. Indeed, we welcome it.
MW: Why do you think that is?
PW: I think it's partly because -- well, I don't know. It's partly I guess because we have not historically have not been very active in the water industry and we're relatively new. But I think it's partly because people are beginning to recognize the strength of our argument, if you will, around the notion that a large part of water management is information management. And, you know, that's the argument we've been advancing all along, and slowly and surely people are starting to get the message and they're saying it is very, very apparent at this conference that you've been to over the last couple of days, just as the most recent example.
MW: And although true that IBM is relatively new to the water business or even just studying water, you have been doing some work on this type of water management around the world. And we've talked in the past about the great rivers project in Latin America. There's this Netherlands levy project. Tell me a little bit about what IBM is currently working on on the water front.
PW: So the thing we have going on on the water front firstly is you refer to the Great Rivers work as ongoing. I believe that's due to produce its first public deliverables either late this year or early next year. The work we're doing in the Netherlands is I'd say is around this project called ijk dijk, which is Dutch for reference levee, or calibration levee where we are instrumenting a levee which has been deliberately broken. We monitor it remotely, and this is the new news because a lot of the monitoring is traditionally done through a hard drive mapping in a shed somewhere onsite. We monitor the thing remotely.
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.