May 2nd, 2008
Instrumenting social responsibility
As I’m sitting in an Orlando hotel idly flicking through RSS, I come across this guest post by Stacey Monk on Go Big Always. To cut a long story short:
After all, I’m the perhaps crazy person who, after a trip to Africa last year, left a really successful career in consulting to found a new nonprofit called Epic Change. I don’t go half way, ever. I go big…always.
In its short life, EpicChange has done amazing things:
- 8 months.
- 350 people mobilized. Nearly $40,000 raised.
- 1 Case Foundation award.
- 4 classrooms constructed & open.
- 200 smiling faces
This could not have come at a more appropriate time. I’ve just come off a trip to Boston where a group of NGOs, environmental activists, socially responsible investors, along with SAP, Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and Adobe met to discuss sustainability, accountability and the relative importance of topics to stakeholder and business. It was a fascinating day that highlighted for me the potential to bring competitive advantage through pursuing sustainable IT. That is a topic to which I hope to return in future.
I am in Orlando for SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual customer conference. Before the main conference, I will attend a special interest group day devoted to business process, sustainability and measurement. In part these topics will be related to corporate social responsibility. Like it or not, these are important issues and I am happy to be involved, albeit in a pro bono capacity.
Stacey needs help. She’s looking for volunteers in the following areas:
- Accountant/auditor: I’m not sure I can help directly but I can point to some software that might be useful
- Social media strategist: Jeremiah Owyang is always out there in the Twitterverse so, he’s been pinged.
- Social Networkers and Web 2.0 Fiends: We can start with Social Media Today. They have more than a 100 people who fancy themselves as Web 2.0 experts. Surely they can find a few people willing to lend a hand?
EpicChange needs a lot of other things. I’m wondering how the enterprise vendor community might respond. Jive Software has donated a Clearspace instance to help orchestrate Stacey’s work. That will make life a lot easier in not only creating the community around the project but also keeping people up to date while developing a sense of engagement.
I’ll re-post this to the SAP Community Network and see what they have to say. There are a lot of socially aware participants in that community. Some of my Oracle contacts might want to pick this up.
Why am I using these pages to pimp EpicChange? Stacey is using classic socializing techniques combined with her enterprise nouse to kick start this project. That’s innovative. Given my recent and current travels, there’s a certain serendipity in offering a little additional publicity at this time.
I’d like to think that is irregular enterprise responsibility in action.
Disclosure: SAP is covering my T&E for my current round of trips. I am a mentor and blog contributor to SCN.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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