Advancing Sustainability Through Technology Leadership with Josh Harbert | EcoTech Insights

org, a nonprofit advancing global sustainability through tech, leadership, and industry-wide initiatives. Josh, it's great to have you here. Great to be here.

Thank you. I'd love to hear more about your background. Long story short, I fell in love with demand side of marketing.

So for me, over the course of my career, I, I've built my reputation and skillset on full stack marketing. That's my background. Hardcore techie turned entrepreneur, love of the science and spreadsheets around marketing.

org. I know you're a founder of the organization. Can you take us to the beginning of why you started it, when you started it, and what's evolving to right now?

It's almost been three years, not quite. I'm the co-founder and, and the f my other co-founder is Jen and I ua. He's the founder of Delphis.

And we were sitting at an event together. It was the first time we had met in person. We're in the height of Covid and we were surprised that the audience that an award ceremony had brought together.

And one of the things was just watching them celebrate their successes and the awards that they were getting for being great at their jobs and the initiatives they were driving internally. But none of the conversations, none of the awards, none of the stories were around how technology could be great for the planet and the responsibility of the technology leaders needed to have. And we immediately that night, sat down and said there is a gap.

And so we ended up within, I'd say a month and a half, two months, identified a group of CIOs and CTOs from some of the world's most prominent organizations, Morgan Stanley, b and p, and pulled this group together and Southern California, some were virtual. That's when the idea was truly born, that we needed to advance sustainability globally and that we needed technology leaders to play an active role in it. So almost three years.

And the initial mandate was gonna be around telling stories and it very quickly turned to what we needed to establish a standard. We needed to build a framework that was gonna work for technology for their departments, for their business, and really for their industries. The second was building community.

Too many of these organizations were doing things in isolation. They were almost afraid to share their stories around sustainability. Greenwashing was starting to become prominent and we wanted to provide a safe environment to share what they were doing.

There was great stories, early maturity, recycling programs all the way through very mature programs. And it was awesome to see these folks starting to learn from each other and inspiring one another third was around education, and we're just now starting to really evolve that, uh, we have a really strong community. We offered all sorts of webinars and other programs to be able to deliver to our membership and beyond.

Uh, but we're gonna continue to evolve with education, meaning up leveling skills and everybody within, within their departments and talk about sustainability. And then I think lastly is one that we're still pretty immature on, but we've had made a lot of progress is really in the transparency piece. And that's establishing the benchmarks, right?

We're not gonna be the one set the benchmarks, but we want to make sure that we're, uh, leaders and making sure folks are starting to measure and make improvements in how they're driving their sustainability efforts internally. So that's how it got started. We very quickly moved it to how are we gonna make this real?

And that's where we're at today. Well, can you talk more about those standards that you mentioned? Our audience is filled with IT practitioners and they may be unfamiliar with the standards and, and the practices of being more sustainable.

Got it. Well, these are open standards and for, for us, again, this was about it's ability to really describe three core areas. Obviously environmental is what everybody's honing in on now.

com. It just clicked on standards and you everybody can go through these, but it's environmental, so, and governance. So it's not just about greenhouse gas, it's CO2, although that's been the one most have really oriented around.

But we also have those that are centered around, you know, social. So what are some of the things that we're doing to help it measure technology accessibility, it could be technology, partner diversity, and, and everybody knows a lot of of visibility that's happening today around all of these European directives, whether it's the CSRD or the due diligence directives. Some of these things are about how are you sourcing?

And it's not just about the materials, it's about, uh, overall, you know, supply chain that you're driving. We make these standards real for IT and for IT leaders and practitioners to start to understand how they should categorize and start to look at the structure of these metrics for the organization. That's great.

Well, you mentioned the corporate reporting and ESG mandates and things that are happening. A lot of it's in Europe, but it's certainly coming to the US and in 2025 we'll have new regulations and deadlines to meet. Has that spurred a little bit more urgency in this movement?

It has. And listen, you're right, Europe is certainly has a little bit of a, a headstart, if you will, around their sustainability initiatives. And some of it has been because of the, the regulations and some of it is just simply because of the best practices that they believe in.

I think here we're gonna be impacted 'cause of the CSRD and the due diligence directive because a lot of the companies here, they end up doing business in Europe, so they're gonna have to just like GDPR, it's gonna be the same thing, right? You're all eventually gonna have to operate that way. So it's created urgency around it.

I think secondarily, just forget about ESG or any of the acronyms that people want to use. Companies are orienting around it, not just because it's the right thing to do because their employees are really pushing them. So I think there's the regulations and I think it's also bottoms up for the people that are coming to work.

They expect it. That's a great point about employees. I've found that too in the research that I've done.

People are pushing it from the outside and from the inside. So how would you say sustainability in IT marries with the overall corporate sustainability package within an organization? Well, I think, look, there's certainly the, the ability to manage the data in a consistent manner.

So I mean, I think the strategy has to be paid off by technology. We've made some commitments to Comp 29. We participated in the World Economic Forum because there's a lot of strategic discussions that are happening around this problem that they're gonna require technology to go solve.

They're gonna require businesses that are going through these massive AI and transformational abilities. They're gonna require them to do big, big things. CIOs and CTOs have to be part of that discussion.

So I think first and foremost, like companies are starting to realize that and these technology leaders are becoming part of the conversation. And I think that's a piece of this. I mean we're, we'll be a climate week here in, in a few weeks and we've got six, six sessions that we've set up.

And the purpose of those is to continue to inject the thought leadership that we know has to be there and elevate the technology leader voice and helping to solve the problem more broadly than just what's happening within corporate. But the corporate strategies are there to pay that off. So I think that's been the biggest thing, is they're tying together because the, the, the role technologists play is just becoming more increasingly important.

That's interesting. You mentioned AI obviously requiring a lot more energy. So when people are looking to reduce energy, a lot of times they might turn to the IT department and say, well, you guys gotta figure out a way to use less energy.

But at the same time, it seems like what you're talking about is leaning into the IT leaders for more innovative ideas, maybe being more energy efficient and and create that new technology that will balance the use of AI and energy. Yeah, and and that's true. And I think there's always gonna be the balance between what can the business do to be more efficient and the cost side of things and and marry that with the sustainability side.

And they're both equally important. There is a gap between that, right? In the day a lot of these companies are shifting to ai, they didn't realize what was gonna happen both from power and consumption standpoint, but also from a cost standpoint.

But when you think about technology and you think about ai, we already know that there isn't gonna be enough power in the next five to 10 years to power the, the data centers that are being built by the big, big cloud providers. I mean, it's pretty unreal if you think about how quickly they're scaling to be able to fulfill this need for all the businesses. So there has to be some other innovations, obviously on the renewable side of things, I probably attended 20 different sessions at the World Economic Forum that just centered around how in the world are we going to power in each of these cities?

It's gonna be really difficult and technology has to find a way to do it and they need to govern it. And I think there's ideas that many CIOs have around power consumption or even companies like Delphix that looks at virtualization or companies like Couchbase. When you think about how you build software and make sure that you're not just putting things in the cloud and and leave them on perpetually, but you build guardrails in place where you shut systems down that aren't used.

So, right. I think there's not a way to say you're not gonna use technology because it's consuming power, but you can do it better and smarter developers can work smarter. They can start to figure out when they deploy software and when they power down their machines, when it, all of those things can happen just based on knowledge of with your power and grid is running on renewable energy versus coal.

What's fascinating, as you were talking about it, I was thinking about it, um, a piece I did on data tiering and how you can just, even by organizing your data, reduce energy use or be more efficient with it. So I agree there's a lot of, uh, techniques that developers can lean into. Yes, for sure.

I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about sustainable IT as an organization and what you're working on now. org is absolutely incredible. Partners that were really important early on.

Deloitte, of course Pure Force and Delphix from a funding perspective, human it, when you think about e-waste and some of the other social programs, they have million laptops for underserved communities. Just really unbelievable programs that we're partnering with that allow us to really make a bigger impact. We're trying to establish to really accelerate the thought leadership agenda on the global, one of our board members former under Secretary General to United Nation Wendell, he just joined.

So we're really trying to push and be a part of really big initiatives like the, uh, global digital Compact gonna be unveiled at Climate Wake of York at the General Assembly or the AI for Good initiative. That that is absolutely huge. It's not about power consumption, it's about equality and how do we make sure that AI is being used for good and is accessible for other countries that may not have access to that type of technology.

So a lot of amazing partnerships that continue to involve, evolve over over time and more and more companies continue to, to reach out to make sure that we're not creating duplication. Green Software Foundation is a great example of a, um, partnership that we created to make sure that all the work that we're doing and the work they're doing to The individual companies that are a part of this get to share their solutions. Let's say they have a carbon accounting software or they're, they figured out a way to create a solution that's more efficient.

How are you able to share that with an audience and with each other That's evolving. We have a community platform. We often, what we we hear are great solutions.

Some of our members or even some of the non-members that wanna share with our membership, that's all about the community and sharing and that allows people to accelerate their learning. What we haven't really done is found a really great way to market those things to generate interest. I think that's one that we are gonna continue to, to try to improve on over the next year is great things happening in our community.

Members love it, great tools, tips, tricks, companies are inundating like crazy. How do we distill it down into something that's consumable where the market can understand it, figure out how to leverage it, The more people that get involved. That's right.

Retos, That was actually my next question. So you have chapters and are and you're expanding internationally. Tell me about that.

It's for us, we, we, we were, the idea was that how do we do this Adam, one or two locations in the States and we couldn't. So we wanted to make sure that we found the enthusiasts and the evangelists in different markets. We're doing it slowly.

Uh, so we could definitely start launching chapters everywhere and we focused on Copenhagen. Las Sorensen is doing a fantastic job with Donka Bank. We have the former Allianz Chief Sustainability Officer, Ryer Karcher.

We have a very great ulus there. We wanna make sure we continue to grow and nurture and we've done a few more. One in London and one in la We want to go faster, but we wanna make sure we build a model that we can sustain.

So we're learning from it. The plans are definitely to grow that once we start more systematized in how we think about those chapters. But we're learning a lot and certainly we'll continue to make improvements in that front as well.

You're a chief marketing officer, do you find that your members have similar c-suite positions in their organizations? Are you getting a variety of types of, of people? Are they all or are they all CTOs you working straight with technology?

They are not all CTOs. Now. Our, our boards have been pro predominantly chief information officers, chief technology officers, CSOs.

That's been a really important aspect. But the members have ranged from folks that are technologists and sustainability practitioners that want to come in and learn and want to hear about the best practices and learn from some of the experts. So it really does rage across the board.

It's not all C-Suite. In fact, we encourage the c-suite when they become members. Um, they have up to 20 seats they can fill and we wanna make sure they have a good representation across their teams, um, to bring into the community, to share, to provide feedback and to just interact.

And that's a big part of the model is to not just have, um, c-suite folks. They share that passion for sustainability. That's right.

That's absolutely right. Will you have an event coming up a sustainable IT Impact awards and symposium in Austin? Can you tell me more about that?

Last year we did an award ceremony. It was awesome. And we decided that, look, this, this great and you have an award ceremony.

But they also wanna learn, we wanna inspire people and help teach people how to drive sustainability initiatives within the organization. It's hard to believe that this just all started a few years ago. It sounds like you published a lot considering it was covid back then.

Oh my gosh, it's been a whirlwind need. Let just Think. Yeah.

We were talking about the deadlines of 2025 more eyeballs beyond this topic. What are your goals and what are you excited about? Well I think it's a, it's across two fronts really.

Our goals is we, we really do want to expand membership and to every organization across the globe. And that's a really, that's a big goal And obviously that's not something that's gonna happen overnight, but we have to accelerate companies that are getting involved. It's really exciting to see the work we've done prepared for Climate Week when it's even more exciting, see what's on the horizon stuff yet to be announced.

And Now that you're a couch base, you haven't been there too long, right? I think it's fairly 30 Days. Okay.

Yeah. How are you gonna bring this all to where you work now? It's exciting 'cause they've already been doing a lot internally and you've got a little page on the website that talks about their ESG activities and some of the stuff they're doing around social within the group.

And they embrace my history and the things I'm doing with sustainable it, they're all very curious about how that could translate into Couchbase and how that can motivate our employees. We haven't solved it yet 30 days. Um, but everybody here is really open to the ideas and certainly from a technology perspective as well.

They have a lot of forward fingers in the way that our technology's being built and deployed. So there's a lot of discussion still to be had. Couchbase is a great place that's a very open minded and, and ready to, to make an impact.

That's fantastic. org. And thanks, uh, for joining me on Ecotech Insights.

We always are talking to great thought leaders like yourself, so appreciate your time. Thank you Bonnie. I appreciate it.