The One Thing Sme It Can Do That The Big Guys Can’t: Change The World

Opinion The smaller the org, the better the jobs. Not universally true, but a good rule of thumb. Small organizations have fewer layers of management, and each individual has much more influence. One voice in 50 is 100 times louder than one in 5,000. You get to say what you want to do and get to do it. Happiness. 

This also gives SME employees much more say in setting culture and priorities, and vice versa. This can be quite explicit. In 2004, Google had around 2,500 workers and “Don’t be evil” embedded in its IPO.  The phrase was dropped from the corporate code of conduct in 2019, when the company reached around 100,000. Boom. 

One place all organizations can fight evil like caped crusaders is in their impact on the environment, in particular through how and where data is created, transformed, communicated and transported. It’s a way of thinking more than puritanical prescription, of creating a culture where doing things better is a matter of pride, where small details reinforce the sense of being part of the answer, and getting good at asking hard questions of suppliers. 

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It feels like everything is free and unlimited, CPU, storage and networking are ubiquitous and barely worth metering. If that were true, there’d be no double-digit billions of investment in datacenters, no projected double-digit percentage increases in energy usage. Microsoft claims that this will be OK because AI will help create nuclear fusion – though it’s no worse than other tech giants in this regard – which is like a smoker saying that tobacco taxes will lead to a cure for lung cancer. It’s better to give up smoking. No single individual decision to do that moved the needle on mass mortality statistics, yet millions now live longer. So, here are some ways of thinking, small company by small company, that can move this generation’s needle. 

Text is better than graphics, graphics are better than video. Text is magic, it conveys information while taking minimal storage, minimal bandwidth and minimal distraction. Graphics are great if used well, especially the simple and bold sort that compress very efficiently, but look at any corporate website and ask how much of that is true of all the pictures and how many are there just because that’s what everyone else does. Video is lovely but spits out carbon like a forest fire compared to the other formats. As for using AI generated content, multiply the above equation and add in the variables of model size, training cost, and unreliability of results. You’re a small company full of bright people. You know the score. 

Where things happen can make all the difference. It’s not necessarily true that using cloud services in a distant megawatt-munching datacenter is more profligate than local hosting of an equivalent. Datacenter power management and economies at scale are huge reasons these things make economic sense, after all. But you will never know. You can’t ask how much of a footprint your cloud usage is stamping out. You do know your local stats, you may even be able to maximize renewable energy usage, and there are more options than you may suspect – search for locally hosted Google app alternatives for instant enlightenment. 

Also, get your head around grid mix. Some countries have almost entirely renewable electricity supplies, some quite the opposite, and some – well, it depends. In the UK, the Scottish grid mix is said to be much cleaner than England’s, with some places making more renewable energy than they know what to do with. The big cloud providers all talk up their love of net zero, none has a button to move your load to minimize emissions, although you can have fun asking their AIs how to do this. There are many smaller cloud providers with more tangible guarantees. 

Don’t pay for things you don’t want to happen. There are arguments for and against staying away from Microsoft, Google, AWS et al where you can, and it’s easier to say no when you’re small, nimble and know what you’re doing. Alongside the economic and data control benefits, you might not want to give money to companies that treat environmental issues as a playground for promises they won’t keep. Pop quiz: which company said in 2016 that “I’m thrilled to announce that in 2017 Google will reach 100 percent renewable energy for our global operations — including both our datacenters and offices”? There may be a clue in the quote. When you pay for something, you’re investing in a business model and voting your approval. Sometimes you can’t help it, sometimes you can. When you can, you can, and you should. 

Back to the future is always an option. There are entire refurb supply chains you can buy from and keep fed, including company schemes to retrieve employees’ personal obsolete kit. 

It’s needed. If you want crisp new hardware with a bright future of its own, look to companies like Framework, whose new laptop has got more innovation inside it than the last three generations of iPhones – only  it’s all about repairability. Think sideways, too. You may have a project that needs a bunch of Raspberry Pis, but you can fish more powerful systems at a lower price from the sea of thin client x86 systems some industry sectors throw back after three years. You’ll need to be smart to use them, which leads to the final and most important point.

The most important component in sustainable IT is human. Much of this column is itself recycled from an engaging and enthusing presentation from Considerate digital, a small company that builds things, including open source tools that do as well as anything can in quantifying the unquantifiable world of digital footprint. The biggest enemy of making change is believing you can’t, that one drop won’t save the ocean. Whereas, all change comes from small groups of people who can, who do, and who show the way. In IT, that’s the job of SMEs, and finding people already on the path is more than half the fight. 

The question of sustainable SME IT culture has an answer:  What, where, and how digital happens will always have options. If you can’t get good answers, ask elsewhere. There may be no good answer, asking is what matters. Take pride in building a sustainable future, take more in bringing others with you. 

How many words? 42. There’s an answer worth recycling. ® 

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