Green IT Can Make a Splash in the World of Water

By Matthew Wheeland, GreenBiz
Published October 6, 2008

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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.