Looks like Thomas "The World Is Flat" Friedman is up to his old tricks.

For those who missed it, in The Dawn of E2K in India, the New York Times columnist and pundit argues that the lift the Y2K crisis provided to Indian outsourcers could look like a blip compared to the opportunities that lie ahead in green computing and other environmentally-minded corporate initiatives.

Before I start laying into Friedman (again), let me say that I do understand the pressure of cranking out a couple columns a week, while hip-hopping the globe interviewing people. And, as often as not if we're talking about Friedman, being interviewed. And I get that there's only so much nuance one can cram into a 787-word column.

But it really seems like Friedman phoned this one in on his way to another love-fest with Charlie Rose.

Friedman’s column says that all this green IT stuff falls into the larger category of what he dubs E2K. "E2K stands, in my mind, for all the energy programming and monitoring that thousands of global companies are going to be undertaking in the early 21st century to either become carbon neutral or far more energy efficient than they are today," Friedman writes.

(E2K -- quite clever actually. Go on).

"India is poised to get a lot of this work," Friedman says.

O-kaaay.

Here's where Friedman’s Y2K comparison comes in. In the late 1990s, he writes, with Y2K looming, some companies reacted by doing some minimal retro-work to make sure their computers would remain operational come Jan. 1, 2000. But other companies approached the impending disaster more strategically; they saw Y2K remediation as an opportunity to replace their legacy systems altogether. This marked the beginning of the IT services boom in India, where low-cost outsourcing players were well-positioned with both the skills and the manpower to do that Y2K work.

Corporations are faced with a similarly pressing and provocative crisis today. While there’s no Y2K-type deadline, no drop-dead date to go carbon neutral, there is mounting pressure (impending legislation; heart-rending reports of polar bears drowning in their ice floes; that ubiquitous Al Gore) for companies to reduce greenhouse gas outputs. At the heart of those efforts is IT -- a key player in producing those harmful emissions in the first place but also a potential partner in innovation to reduce the corporation's carbon footprint.

No news there. There's not a smart IT vendor on the planet not working this new green IT angle to sell new or newly marketed solutions.

But India's outsourcers, Friedman argues, are again uniquely positioned to play the green card to its advantage. Major corporations (Friedman uses Dell as his example, though God knows why) are going to be hard at work taking stock of their total greenhouse gas outputs and developing plans to reduce, eliminate or offset all that junk they release into the environment. The real sweet spot will be convincing companies not to approach the problem tactically, but strategically. Don't just nip and tuck here and there to become more energy efficient. View this as a green business transformation. All that work, Friedman says, will require a whole lot of software, programming and good old man-hours. "Hello India," says Friedman. "Hello E2K."

Indian companies, like friends-of-Friedman Infosys Technologies and Satyam Computer Systems, can again provide that work at lower cost, he says. But there's more, Friedman writes: "To better compete for such business, (Co-chairman of Infosys Nandan) Nilekani is installing solar systems and other

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (3 votes)

Reply