Host Sanjay Podder speaks with Dr. Katia Chaban about uniting IT and sustainability through circular economy practices. Dr. Chaban shares her journey into sustainable IT, the importance of addressing e-waste and embodied carbon, and the growing challenges posed by AI. She highlights how circular thinking, training, and cross-industry collaboration can help CXOs and technology leaders embed sustainability into IT strategies while reducing costs and environmental impact.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Sanjay Podder: Hello and welcome to CXO Bytes, a podcast brought to you by the Green Software Foundation and dedicated to supporting chiefs of information, technology, sustainability, and AI as they aim to shape a sustainable future through green software. We will uncover the strategies and a big green move that's helped drive results for business and for the planet.

I am your host, Sanjay Podder.

Welcome to another episode of CXO Bytes, where we bring you unique insights into the world of sustainable IT from the view of the C-Suite. I am your host, Sanjay Podder. Today's guest, Dr. Katia Chaban. Brings over 30 years of global IT leadership, including with NTT Data, EDS, and many others to our current mission, harnessing technology, business and people so that enterprises, ecosystems, and the planet can thrive.

Katia, welcome. Excited to dive in.

Dr. Katia Chaban: Thank you. I am as excited as well. Appreciate the opportunity.

Sanjay Podder: Katia, can you, introduce yourself? You know what? You have been doing and what got you interested in the field of, you know, uniting sustainability and technology? You know, that will be very interesting to know.

Dr. Katia Chaban: It's actually a funny story because back in 2021, I had been with NTT Data actually, and back in 2020, 2020 I started my doctorate. During the period of COVID I decided. That I needed to do something right other than be upset about what was happening in the world. And so I started my education, so my doctorate in business. And then in 2021, I decided to actually leave corporate world, leave the IT industry and go and focus on school.

And I did that. And as I was trying to research my dissertation, like what is my topic going to be? I mean, it's a big part of that education through your doctorate. I had, I had two choices. I came up with this really interesting concept around acceleration of the digital transformation, right? How do we apply that emergency change behavior from COVID to digital transformations?

But then I also had this idea where I kept seeing this sustainability topic, this ESG topic in all of our strategy courses and all my readings and discussions, and then I came across this thing called the Circular Economy, and I'm like, "what is this thing?"

And so I started doing research about it. And so I then decided that I wasn't gonna do something that I had already been doing for a very long time.

I wanted to restart my brain and focus on something new. And so I did, and I focused on circular economy actually in the consumer goods industry. So not even in IT, but it was with that dissertation, its business impacts, and it turned out to be, you know, planet impacts with the amount of waste that comes from the returns process.

So I graduated, I accelerated that schooling and I graduated and I thought, "yay, I am out of IT! I'm gonna go and work in sustainability and save the world. This is awesome." And then I started talking to people and really building that network, from around the world and got to speak at a conference in Thailand where I got to,

and then, but I started talking to all my IT friends and some folks are like, "Hey, you know, there might be an opportunity for you in sustainability in IT."

I'm like, "what you talking about?" So as an academic now I've started to do the research and I went, oh my goodness, the water, the waste, the emissions, the carbon, what is the rare earth mineral? What is happening? And this, to me, this invisible impact of IT is a massive sustainability, and with the advent of AI and the other, is going to be something that we have to control.

And I said, well, I guess I can't get out of IT. I'm gonna go back to IT but I'm going back to IT with a new lens, a new purpose, and a new focus. And that's really to become that advocate, right, that evangelist, and to really drive the practices that we need to have in order not to be the negative impact to the planet, right?

We really have to maximize all the positive things that IT can do and at the same time minimizing our harm. So I thought I was outta IT after all those years, but now I'm back, but really energized on the topic itself because it really will have a massive impact.

Sanjay Podder: No, absolutely. I agree with you on that. In fact, some of the studies shows that, by 2040, 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions will come from IT. And this data came from a research which is, which predates the rise of generative AI. So we can just imagine how things can be. Before we dive in further, I just wanted to let the audience know that everything we discussed today, will be linked in the show notes below this episode.

So, Katia, you know, you are now focused on sustainability and technology and your background research in the area of circularity, right. You know, that is very interesting. How do you see all of this together? Like what are the big opportunities you see when it comes to, say, circularity in the IT context?

Right. You know, are people missing it? Because most of the time we talk about, for example, carbon emissions. We talk about usage, operational emissions, right? So, but when we talk about circularity, would be very interested, given you have been an expert in this topic, how do you see those opportunities in the IT context?

Dr. Katia Chaban: Yeah, so there's massive opportunities. One, circularity is a way of thinking, right? It's almost a, it's a philosophy and it can be applied to everything. So even when we're talking about software development and the SCI and how we're calculating emissions and what those environmental impacts are, what we're also trying to

teach people is that whole lifecycle develop development of keeping things in use for longer, and how do you develop things that are more modular and can be replaced and repaired versus having to create something in a whole and then get rid of it, right? So that's a philosophy, but where it really comes into play is hardware.

So we look at corporations with massive amounts of end user assets. We look at IT assets, your servers, your network devices. I mean, and the larger the organization, the more these assets are out there. And so from a circularity perspective, it's, for me, the big focus for those assets is something called e-waste diversion, right? And so how do we buy these things? How do we treat these things? How do we, end of life, dispose of these things in a way that we are not contributing to a massive, already massive e-waste problem? A problem that's gonna continue to get worse with AI, right? Because as we're building more data centers, we need more equipment, we need more things to run our AI on, and those things are gonna be end of life very quickly because just of the usage on them, the energy that it's, and where are we gonna put it?

What's gonna happen with those things? And so where circularity is a, is massive. And by the way, circularity then also causes, right, e-waste causes emissions. So it all comes around to emissions and it all comes around to climate change. But we have to look at, you know, very different things.

The other thing in circularity that people don't consider is how do you make these things. And so it's rare earth minerals. It's, we take things from the ground, right? And we use those things to make things, chips and LEDs and all of these things within our electronic devices. And the one thing I tell people, which is interesting to see their reaction is

 when you take that stuff out of the earth, it doesn't grow back.

And people are like, "what do you mean it doesn't grow back?"

You know, there's just this preconceived notion that, you know, whatever we take, it's like a, it's like a weed. You pull it out and it comes back and it doesn't. And so the more and more that we are mining, the more and more that we're taking those virgin minerals out, the less and less there is.

And so as we see demand increase for IT assets, because we have this increase in AI infrastructures and our cloud and all these kind of stuff, there's a decrease in availability. So there's cost issues there as well, but there's just availability issues, which should then force the conversation about how do we recycle these components and reuse these components.

And again, going back to that modular design, create our assets in a way that we can easily go in, take the things out that we can reuse and remanufacture, avoid massive carbon emissions, because we're not completely building from new anymore, right? It's 80% of the emissions in a laptop is when you actually make it.

And so avoiding that is avoiding the emissions conversation as well. So circularity is a mindset. Circularity is something we can actually contribute to our IT assets. And we have a massive program that we've just launched right now to meet our circularity metrics around E-waste avoidance and responsible management of those assets.

And by the way, anybody that's in IT knows how hard hardware asset management is, and I've never met an organization that has a perfect asset management in their organization. And so this also is a benefit because we have to be able to manage our assets in order to meet circularity. So there's benefits also in the IT organization that says we're gonna get a better handle on our assets.

We're gonna have a better handle on those costs associated with those assets. We have to manage the life cycles and we have to change the way we buy.

 Right, and so just don't buy the new, but start to look at those programs that are being introduced by those OEMs that are actually selling repurposed and remanufactured items.

The interesting part about that is people's mindset, and I saw this in my research too, on circularity, is people don't wanna buy something that's 'used.' Everybody wants something new, right? New cars, new clothes, new this, new that. And so there's a behavioral change and a mindset change that comes along with this that says a laptop that's been remanufactured by an OBM that comes with a guarantee is just as good as the new one, but it's even better because we just avoided all those emissions and we just help achieve our circularity targets by buying in this manner. So it's massive, right? it's a massive impact.

Sanjay Podder: And, you know, that is probably also one of the reason when we defined the Software Carbon Intensity standards, we factored in embodied carbon, right? So, because most of the time people forget embodied carbon, you know, the carbon that goes during the manufacturing of the servers themselves.

And, many a times people don't factor that in when they do procurement of the hardware, for example. Or just extending the life of the assets by a year more, you know, can help you lower your carbon emissions. so I think these are some great points and this is obviously

the other aspect would be end user devices as well, right. You know, there's such a proliferation of end user devices. Normally we only think about the servers in the data centers. you know, but then, that has been like so much of end user devices. Again, there's a lot of embodied carbon. You mentioned about the laptops themselves, you know, 80% of their lifetime emission is doing the manufacturing process.

So, you know, how do you manage that? I think definitely this is a big opportunity for the industry. Now, when we think about some of the recent innovations happening in this space, and you briefly touched upon AI and generative AI. Something that strikes me, how does this whole challenge amplify in the age of generative AI?

Right, because, if I think aloud, we are already looking at new data centers coming up every week, right? If I think about, you know, more and more models getting created, right. You know, and then, the emissions from inferencing are quickly surpassing the emissions because of training those models.

So, wearing your hat of an expert in the field of circularity, has this bothered you? How does the Gen AI world make this problem even more difficult to manage?

Dr. Katia Chaban: So it's funny, I've done a few talks and panel discussions and I always start out with, I say, I hate AI. And I hate AI, it's gonna be, there's gonna be great things, but it's like the center of attention, right, for everything. And so it is so critically important to get our arms around

AI and I look at it in a couple of different lenses. There's the responsible AI, so it's the governance of how we implement and how we manage that. So back to your comments around models. How are we training our models? What modals are we using? And there's a difference between AI that's hosted in the cloud versus on-prem, right?

And you're building your own models versus AI models. And then when you're in the cloud, it's the token usage, the input token usage, output. How do you put thresholds on those things? How do you force certain use cases to use certain models? 'Cause you don't need the big choppy GPT-5 model. You can use a mini model to be able to get, so there's that responsible AI layer. Then there's the sustainable AI part of it, right? That starts to say you have to put in metrics to be able to measure the emissions associated with that. So if you're in a cloud environment, Azure or Google, and you're building your Azure platforms or your AI platforms, measure that, what does that mean?

And you have to measure the models. You have to measure the throughputs, the outputs, all of those different types of things. And then you have to wrap in tech innovations that help to mitigate the harm associated with it. So yesterday we had a fascinating conversation on quantization, right? So the, how, what they're doing, and I won't even pretend to get into what those details, but it's how do you minimize

the impacts from those models that you're training? And then, you know, then we're looking at things like innovation that helps with improved prompting, right. Because that's the big issue is people put in their prompts. People are like, please and thank you to AI. Right? So you have all this great but they're, people aren't good at good specificity, right? They're never gonna get their first answer on the first try. And so what you're trying to do is build those types of prompting where you're caching things and you're able to provide better responses, but you're also doing better prompting.

So there's all those things. And then there's the ethical AI component, and then there's the inclusivity AI, right? To make sure that everybody gets access to it. Because if we continue to keep building AI and only we get access to it, right, we continue to build that digital divide, which is not good.

And so there's all those aspects. So when I say I hate AI, it's because it is moving, it's the fastest moving tech that I've seen in my career. Probably that you've seen, right. And just the adoption of it and it's almost like we're just running in second place all the time, try and get arms around what's happening. And nevermind the security challenges.

I was at a security conference last week and they were talking about some of the security issues related to AI, which was frightening alone. So they talked about, you know, how it's learning on its own and it's gonna make its own decisions and all those types of things. So we talked about, what is it, Odyssey 2001 movie where Hal can't get control of his robot.

And I bring the perspective of those old movies that say, well, I'm a Mad Max, right? So now we're running around on a planet that doesn't have any water, doesn't have any wildlife, doesn't have any of that, and that could possibly happen too, unless we can catch up, take a breath and make sure that we, wrap that AI or really put a lot of people on it to get that governance in place.

So, it's massive. So when we talk about circularity, yeah, how do we manage the infrastructure that is being built to support it in a manner, how do we ensure that it's more modular? All of those things, right? And then, how do we use software to, and AI, to manage how we're doing all those types of things?

So not only do you have an issue with climate and whatnot using AI, but we also wanna use AI to manage our AI. And so how do you do that in a way that you just not continually harming things, but you're actually, you know, mitigating the bad by doing the good. And we have to do that through that circular thinking, especially on the replenishment of those infrastructures. And then again, the coding, right? Optimization. How do we optimize every prompt, every query, and all the models in such a fashion that we are, we don't have to use as much energy, that we know causes an emissions issue.

Sanjay Podder: Well, great points. And that actually takes me to the next question because traditionally, software engineering did not involve all this disciplines, right. So sustainability was by far not a NFR, non-functional requirement. Security was, but sustainability never, right. And now that we are seeing that sustainability is an NFR, it's an important one,

direct bearing on climate impact on energy use. And another important thing, the cost of IT. Because, you talked about circularity, you can really reduce the cost of, you know, procuring devices by delaying the devices you're currently using, you are using them more. So what we are really looking at is rewiring our talents our software engineering talent, our IT workforce to think differently and enabling them with skills,

so that they can build systems that are not only functional, but also sustainable at the same time. In your opinion, from the vantage point you sit in for the last few decades, how easy is that? You know, how do you really, because most of the time we think it's about, okay, let me give some training to some software engineers.

It's not as that, as simple as that. So, for large enterprises like the ones you are leading, how do you see this transformation or change happen? Any insights from your own experience?

Dr. Katia Chaban: So you have to hit it from multiple sides, right? Training is absolutely essential, but it has to be meaningful training. I'm happy. Our organization, we just, we've just launched what we call carbon literacy training. We've partnered with an organization, the Carbon Literacy Project, and we've created training that's focused on digital and tech sector, and it includes our NTT strategies and goals.

And it's intensive. It's e-learning training and it's workshop, and so it's eight hours of somebody's already-busy life, to talk specifically about climate change, emissions, what is GHG? What is methane gas as well? All the science around these things and then how it impacts your daily lives individually, the choices that you make individually,

but then from a digital and tech sector, what those impacts are. What is the impacts of AI? What is the impacts of circularity? What is the impacts of these things? And so, the workshop is then intended to really have deeper conversations so when people have their learning, they walk away, really, it's been, now they've taken away at least one or two things that's associated with not only their individual carbon footprint and potentially how they can reduce that, but what they can do in the role that they do, whether a software developer, whether a service desk agent, whether a field engineer, supporting all those end user devices, whether they're an architect, take away those couple things that say, this is what I can do in my job to be able to make a difference, so that training has to be impactful. The other thing that has to happen is you have to include it in your governance. And from an IT perspective is it's right from the ideation, so I have a great idea, I have an innovation, or our business partner or a client has some innovative ideas.

And so right at that point, you need to start asking those sustainability guardrail questions. Does this entail the use of hardware? If it does, what would you think about what you would do with that hardware? Is this software development? Okay. If it's software development, we start to throw in things like how would you measure SCI, but on all through the lifestyle.

So you go through ideation and then you go through checkpoints where there's approvals of project. You go through your ARB types of processes, right, with your architects that have to be also trained and aware that say, alright, we're gonna design these solutions, but how do we do it that it's low code, lower minimal infrastructure, that it's more modular, it's all these types of things, right?

If it's, if it does have assets, what is that end of life plan? Are we gonna purchase them in a way where we don't have to do the disposal? We're not responsible for that, right? And so, we have to govern that, and there has to be metrics associated with, with how that's governed. So really including the criteria and the mechanisms to ensure that technology innovation throughout the life cycle is environmentally, is socially and economically sustainable,

for the client and for the corporation. So you have the training level, and then you've got that lifecycle level where you have to, and then you've gotta have the, I'm monitoring and measuring you, right? So then you have to have the dashboards and the visibility into all of these things.

What are my circularity practices? What are emissions practices with our strategic application portfolio? What is the emissions associated with our cloud footprint, with our on-prem footprint? All those types of things. And then they all, link back. And by the way, not have an organization that's somebody's monitoring those dashboards and giving people,

like, you know, here you have to do something. My approach is those dashboards are being created by the people that have to manage those every day. So they start to learn about what these things are. So I'll give you an example. It was super, yesterday was a really exciting day for me because I've got a cloud team that I'm working with and they're, you know, always ", right? FinOps, go save money, optimize right size, do all the right things. 

And we've been working with a partner to take a look at what our emissions data is within the Azure environment. And we have now built that dashboard. We thought this was super important, but it's the team that's doing this.

It's not Katia and some folks over here. It's the team that's building a dashboard that can align costs with carbon down at the resource level. And they said to me yesterday, like what we've learned is not a one-to-one ratio between cost and carbon. And I'm like, "yes, no, it's not."

You know, it isn't. And there's water associated with, so we're looking at water.

So now we're not only are they looking at the, Hey, there's a right sizing opportunity where we can save money and carbon and water, but they're also saying, Hey, there's opportunities where we can save carbon and water. It might only save $12 and 72 cents, but I think this is the right decision to reduce our carbon footprint.

But it's them, it's that operational group that you're instilling that thinking into and that ownership and that accountability into, to do that. So you've gotta train 'em, you've gotta put it throughout the life cycle, but you have to integrate it into how people are doing their work.

And you have to do that by engaging them, talking to them, and educating them.

Sanjay Podder: Absolutely. And what makes it very interesting, Katia, in my experience, has been, this has been an emerging area, so to a great extent, you know, most practitioners were not aware, as you rightly mentioned, you need to train them. There have been, there has been no standards, that you know you can use to measure, because you can only start reducing once you measure and know where you are, your baselining,

right? And that's where I found that, you know, all this in cross-industry collaborations are helping. What has been your own experience with cross-industry collaboration and the emergence of new standards, like we mentioned, SCI and the role in accelerating this journey. What have you observed?

Dr. Katia Chaban: Do you know what's super exciting about sustainability in IT, is the amount of collaboration and the amount of people that are embracing the topic, but are also willing to share. And I say that because 

there has been a long time where we don't wanna give away our secrets, right? There's been a long time where you minimize the amount of discussion and collaboration,

'cause you don't wanna, to your competitors, give away the secret sauce or to your suppliers, you're trying to hide some cards so you can negotiate better. With sustainability, we are all driving towards the same goal. And so the openness in discussion and collaboration with others in my industry on how they're doing things is amazing.

And in fact, as a member of the SustainableIT.org organization, I got involved with them very early on this journey, and there's a taxonomy that was created based on Nicholas's, you know, book and kind of that momentum, but that taxonomy is a nice framework to be able to start with, right? It's got the energy types of metrics, the emissions metrics, social metrics, governance metrics, and of course, included in there is a lot of focus on your sustainable sourcing, right?

How you're buying things and how you're monitoring that. And so for me, having that framework and having be able to just have those discussions with people across the industry, across the world about the use of that framework and what they're doing has, it just helps me, right? And I would do the same.

Anybody that wants to call and say, I've got a problem. How do you integrate this? Or how do you do this? Very open. I'm not afraid of giving away any secret sauce because we are all on a giant mission with the same end goal, right? And that is to reduce the impact of climate change. 

And so for me that's super cool.

And then internally, what I'm finding is even though everybody is already busy, we have incredible leaders that support this, but people are embracing it almost at a pace where I can't keep up with providing them the information and the things that they need to know because it feels so, it makes their job much more purposeful now, the same as the way I feel about the role.

So the cross collaboration is great. Now, where it's not great, is in the supply chain. And as you know, even when you're trying to calculate the SCI metrics, right, we're trying to look at emissions metrics, there's a vast amount of data that we need to get to that specificity and that validity of those numbers.

And we can't get that. And so for me that that collaboration and that transparency, and it's the one thing, you know, you see on, in discussions and forums is the Microsofts of the worlds, the OpenAIs of the world, all, they have to be much more transparent with what they're using and where they're using it to help us really understand what the impacts are.

And so I, you know. That's an, that's a tough nut to crack, and I'm not sure if that's something that you've come across and you maybe have any guidance, but while we as leaders are on that goal and we can share and collaborate, we don't have that same level of transparency within our supply chain.

Sanjay Podder: You're absolutely right. That's a challenge everybody's grappling with. But in fact, we did a podcast with Adrian Cockcroft on Real Time Carbon Calculation or Carbon Accounting, because every hyperscaler tends to give you data of different granularity and different frequency, so it gets very difficult to compare apples and oranges, you know, it's, very difficult. And also, as you rightly said, some of the closed LlM models, you don't really know much. You know, I was very happy to see Mistral coming up with some of the data recently. But all that does impede our ability to understand where we stand today,

in terms of emissions. We have to then, you know, go around trying to use other ways of, you know, guesstimating what the emissions, the proxies, what the emissions could be. And hopefully all these things will resolve as, you know, sustainability becomes a key consideration in the way we use AI.

People would love to use AI which is more environmental friendly. Earlier in the discussion you did mention fit for purpose, you know, maybe a smaller model. You don't need to use the largest of the models for every purpose. So there will be a need for the model providers to be more transparent around the emission numbers on training and inferencing. I did see, read Sam Altman's blog on the emissions so that he has, without giving much of a context, he has revealed a few numbers, which I hope is the tip of the iceberg, and we get to see a lot more what's happening, you know, in the closed LLM space.

Katia, you kind of pointed to a very important fact, and it is the journey of adoption of sustainable IT, right? You know, we have these wonderful ecosystems, you know, SustainableIT.org, Green Software Foundation, everybody coming up with the collective wisdom of, the members and making it available for everybody to use and aspirate the journey.

Also emergence of new standards. The taxonomy you mentioned. GSF has been coming up with a lot of standards, like last year we released the ISO standard for Software Carbon Intensity. We are right now working on the SCI for AI. Hopefully that becomes another useful standard. There are a lot of open source tools that one can use as well.

Now, looking at the whole community of CIOs, you know, CTOs, CIOs, large organization, medium organization, you know, if they have to start on this journey, what would be your advice to them? Where do they start? You know, how, what is the smartest way to make progress? You know, any thoughts there?

Dr. Katia Chaban: Yeah, I, well, I have a lot of thoughts on there. So it's funny, I had a conversation with a CIO organization that were starting on the journey and they're like, just give us a couple of easy things to start with. And I said, well, okay, but if it was really easy then, you know, everybody would be doing it.

But let's think about, let's think about this more impactfully. So I'll share the journey or my thinking on this. And this is what I would tell everybody, right? You, it's like any strategy that you're gonna implement, you have to understand what you want to accomplish. What are your goals? What are the visions?

What are the missions? What, are the things that you actually wanna do? And then, you've gotta figure out where you are, right. So how far away that gaps analysis are you from that vision? So, when I started in this role, you know, I knew what my mission was and you said it in the introduction, right?

It's harnessing that power of people and technology so that we're doing good things for our business, the planet and the people. But I didn't know where we were. And we're talking about a global organization across 50 different countries, 152,000 employees worldwide. And what do we do? And so we did

an assessment like anybody does, right, from an IT perspective to take a look at multiple capabilities from that sustainable IT lens within the organization. And this was something that we did through, our SustainableIT.org front. So we were looking at what is the awareness and commitment of the organization?

What is the strategy from an IT perspective? What are the roles, what are the resources that you have in the organization? What are the, what is the level of skills and training related to sustainability? what kind of change management do you have? What kind of procurement practices do you have? And so on and so forth.

Right? So there's a number of capabilities and I talked to the CIOs across all the regions and their EAs, and we got ourselves a score very similar to like an SDLC score, one to five in a maturity. We rated ourselves where we thought we were and then we also said where we wanted to be and that was a great starting point.

Then I surveyed my organization. So all the employees about their awareness, their understanding, do they know what sustainability is? Do they know what sustainable IT was? Right? And would they be interested in training? So now I've got it from my leaders and where they think we are from a capabilities and where they wanna go.

And now another data point from the organization itself across different countries and across different roles about their awareness and even our awareness of our actual sustainability strategy, which we have. And so that also then gave me all right, here's where we are, here's where we are, and here's where we need to go.

And that was all the input that I needed from a strategy perspective. Then you gotta get visibility, right? And so, what is our footprint with some things? What are we doing with the circular, with circularity? what are these things that are important, right? So now I've said I want to have us be able to measure carbon emissions.

We've gotta, we improve all the capabilities to get there, but what visibility do we have? And for me at that time, I wasn't looking for perfection in the numbers like I wanna get to with an SCI type of number on everything where I can use that in an auditable finance or a sustainable report, right?

For me, it was just get me some numbers. Now, it wasn't the dashboards that were provided by, you know, hyperscalers and whatnot. It was a little bit more scientific than that. And luckily we have Gadhu as part of our organization who also is from GSF, so we got good guidance on how do we calculate a variety of things. And so understanding what that just looked like as we get smarter, I could have spun my wheels on perfection and how we're measuring things or

I could have just started to get visibility and get people engaged in understanding what these numbers meant. So we're going through a massive transformation, let's say in Office 365, and we're reducing a number of the tenants that we have. Well, that should be a massive data improvement, and that should be a massive emissions improvement.

We wanna monitor that. So I didn't wanna wait a year to find the best tool and implement and be all, but we created something together very quickly so that team could then set a target for themselves, for our missions for this year and, and move, and move forward, right. 

And so my advice would be,

know what your vision is. Know where you are in your capabilities and the maturity of your organization. Know your people and what they think too, right. Because you, your perspective as a CIO or a CSO may be a little different than somebody that's on the ground. So get that perspective. And then figure out what you wanna do and don't wait for perfection.

'Cause that's, that can be the evil, right? So start to take a look at where are your big environments, so for us, it's cloud and a lot of our apps are in cloud. It's end user devices. It's, you know, these areas where you want to go and get that visibility and perfect that visibility as you go. But without visibility, you can't start making any impacts.

And so do that, but, back to that training and awareness, that one pillar that I talked about with our carbon literacy training for the organization, that was based on the feedback that I got from the employees. I can put visibility, we can create dashboards, we can put reports together all we want, but if the people that are doing that work every day don't understand why we're doing it,

and how they're involved in doing that, it's not gonna work. And so your people have to understand. And so it's that employee engagement and awareness and training in however it is. So it sounds like a lot, but when you start to put your strategy together, right, that's an important pillar.

But don't wait for perfection. 

Sanjay Podder: Cannot agree more. Yeah. No, those are great points. How do people keep track of all the good work you're doing in this space? Is there some website they can go to? What is the best resource?

Dr. Katia Chaban: You know, right now I think we just do celebrations on LinkedIn, when we have some good things, we'll celebrate that way. And hopefully what we'll see start to see at the end of the year, because we'll have a full year, is we will provide a kind of that impact report specifically in the global IT organization within NTT.

And hopefully we'll see a lot of great impact and we can share that again with my peers and colleagues across my SustainableIT.org and those that are interested and we'll be creating, for me, it's a playbook, right? I have to have a playbook that I can pass on to my successor and whatnot that says, here's how we did the things.

Here's how we're measuring these things. Here's why things. So it's almost that to do, that we'll also be able to share across the community.

Sanjay Podder: Wonderful. If you have any question for me.

Dr. Katia Chaban: I think, you know, back to what you said at the beginning, you and I talked about the podcast and I'm a, I've been finding that very similar to your experience, you just talk to people and they don't understand the impact of hitting enter and what that does from an energy and emissions perspective.

And sometimes people just really get engaged. So I often think about should I do a podcast? And would people really care about what that would be? And so I guess my question for you is, what's the best way to get to that larger, there's millions of people out there that are in the IT industry,

How do we get to them all so we can start making sure that they all understand what those impacts are?

Sanjay Podder: Right. I think, I mean, not able to tell you what is the best way, but I can share with you what we have tried to do, to achieve that objective. The very first thing we did, Katia, when we started the foundation. The foundation itself was in that direction, right? Like we felt that, you know, no single organization can solve a problem of this scale.

We have to come together. So we need to form a consortium of like-minded people, and the GSF was formed that it has been ever since doing very well. So that was step number one. Step number two is, you mentioned about the need to make people aware our sustainability, because software engineers never knew what is greenhouse gas emission and how is it linked to that work.

So the very first thing that the GSF did, was released the Principles of Green Software training, which became a huge success for many of the CIOs who have come to the podcast. They did confide to me saying "Sanjay, when I personally took the training, I was so happy that I learned so many things in such a short period of time that I mandated everybody in my leadership team to go through it because it was an eye-opener," right?

So, as I say, it comes from the top. So the whole focus has been, we have to empower the developers, the practitioners, but we also want to make the leadership aware so that the mandate comes from the top, because otherwise this is not going to be sustainable. There has been a lot of Green Software Foundation Summits we have done around the world.

And many of the people who come and participate, they're not even a GSF member, but the whole idea is to come, collaborate, learn, and take it back. Right? So those are some of the things we have been creating, for example, Awesome Tools list, which is a collection of some of the open source tools and best of the tools that people can come and start using it.

Similarly, standards, right? We believe that by creating this collective intelligence, we can influence a collective action about this whole area. So that is, that I believe is very effective so far. Is this the best way possible? I do not know. The podcast is also a part of that journey, where, you know, people will learn from experts like you, right?

You know, from many experts who are coming. You know, I was just, this is our annual year, for the CXO Bites, and I was compiling, what did I learn from each of the leaders? It was mind boggling. You know, I should write a book on it now, saying, you know, what are the insights? You know, otherwise you won't get that any one source.

So I think, those are some of the ways we are trying to accelerate this journey. And the outcome has been very positive, very encouraging, and I hope we can collectively achieve newer heights. So, yeah. Katia, it was so wonderful having you, and thanks for sharing all your insights from circularity to how you're driving it in your organization.

You know, like all good things have to come to an end, you know, we are now coming to the end of our podcast episode. And I want to say thank you for, coming over and sharing your deep insights to CXO Bytes, from entire Green Software Foundation. Thank you so much, Katia.

Dr. Katia Chaban: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Sanjay Podder: Thank you so much. That's all for the episodes of CXO Bytes. All the resources for this episode. In the show description below and you can visit Podcast.GreenSoftware.Foundation to listen to more episodes of CXO Bytes. See you all in the next episode. Bye for now. 

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow CXO Bytes on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we want more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.