One of the topics I have been writing about for a while is the concept of open-sustainability. open-sustainability is an approach that applies-information centric techniques to solve challenges related to Sustainable Development. The complete framework for an integrated approach to sustainability is available at www.open-sustainability.org.
but you can also read about it on the MIKE2.0 site.

We set up MIKE2.0 and open-sustainability so they work together, drawing in sustainability professional to have an information-centric view and information management professionals to the sustainability challenge.

One of the key principles is around balancing the different dimensions of the problem. Bill Johnston also wrote a good post on this subject. Only with sophisticated IM techniques can be find this balance – spreadsheets aren’t going to do the trick.

Climate change is increasingly a mainstream issue. There is growing momentum to address the issue at a number of levels, in the corporate sector, with private citizens and within government.

There is, however, a real danger with the trend towards carbon neutrality that is analogous to the poor systems designs. As described by the United Nations, climate change is just 1 of the 36 areas of Sustainable Development. An Information Development approach can help:

• Understand the impacts of decisions and how they impact other areas of Sustainability (e.g. how a programme that helps reduce a retailer’s carbon footprint by stopping imports from Africa impacts other areas).

• Collaboratively develop standards and share lessons learned. This will be a major benefit as the transformation organizations must go through is so significant. This isn’t necessarily “trade secrets” but an open and transparent forum for them to share information.

• Collaborative Business Intelligence platform to make objective decisions. Decisions can be based on a historical evidence and make us of historical models. Policy analysis, researches and the public can share different forms of information as part of the process.

• Information Sharing across different organisations, involving operational and analytical information. Enablers include open and common standards, search and collaboration. Some information can be anynoymised while other content can seen by both parties.

• Collaboratively develop standards and share lessons learned. This will be a major benefit as the transformation organizations must go through is so significant. This isn’t necessarily “trade secrets” but an open and transparent forum for them to share information.

• Measure progress based on standard metrics. We need standards because when we don’t account for what we produce, we may get unexpected issues. Information Quality issues are analogous to the pollutants we see from poor sustainability design.

The Information Development approach to Sustainable Development can be applied to design the interaction points between the different areas. It also means the ability to make fact-based decisions, share information between systems and provide easy access to information from complex, federated sources.