There is still another quiet day or two on the fresh page of my calendar, before the new year really gets going. Schools are still playing Bowl games, and the tree is still up (if brown-ish), so it must still be the holiday season.

And I have three topics I want to discuss before the 2012 agenda kicks into gear. These aren't really on the mainline IT-for-sustainability topic, but rather observations on changes underway in the IT industry, which may have some implications for companies' or individuals' sustainability efforts downstream.

Have you heard of Kickstarter? This is social media meets venture capital meets (very) early-stage entrepreneurs, tech and otherwise. Pretty much accidentally, I was pinged by and ended up contributing to two different projects which I will mention below. But check out the overall story at Kickstarter; it looks to me like a revolution-in-the making in terms of how new ideas will get funding and build community (increasingly those are one in the same).

The first project that found its way to my inbox is called Twine. It's . . . how to describe it? It's a little box that connects things to the Internet. Along with some software rules, the Twine box links internal or external sensors (temperature, moisture, motion, open/close, and the like) to the Internet via an email, text, or tweet.

My fellow keynoters hailed from Germany, Brazil, China, Switzerland, and the US. And one of the topics over dinner was the coming round of sustainability conferences, COP 17 in Durban, South Africa, next month; the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi in January; and Rio+20 in Brazil next June, all part of what the UN has dubbed its "Sustainable energy for all" initiative.

Which got me to thinking: Is it sustainable for all these experts to be flying around the world attending sustainability conferences? The "industry" of creating more sustainable business, home, and public environments should be a role model.

All of us involved in improving sustainability should take a look at our travel schedules and see if cutting one or more of those long-haul flights can be part of our "carbon diet" for the coming year.

And we should pay attention to technology-enabled alternatives, like the VERGE virtual conference run a few months ago by my friends at GreenBiz. Videoconferencing, webcasting, and other technologies can help habitual conference-goers like myself to separate participation in an event from travel to the event.

So here goes:

• Prediction No. 1: IT is the buyer of ECEM systems. "During the next few years [I wrote in December 2009] we believe that enterprise IT organization will emerge with the clear ownership role [for] ECEM systems. IT will bring its expertise in data analysis, data integrity, network connectivity, and overall systems architecture to bear on the corporate sustainability challenge. The faster that data sources for ECEM become more instrumented, more granular, [and] more real-time … the faster IT will move to the center of ECEM system evaluation, implementation, and operation."

It's been clear for some time that sustainability is moving from the periphery toward the center of many companies' strategic agendas, and that IT systems and software will play a crucial role in accelerating that movement.

But what's been missing -- until now -- is an overarching framework for understanding who the stakeholders (and buyers) of IT-for-sustainability (ITfS) systems are, what motivations and barriers they face, and which categories of products, services, and solutions can help them. With the research report that we will publish next month, Forrester takes a giant step towards providing that framework. Based on interviews with sustainability leaders at more than a dozen large global enterprises, we developed three company archetypes of sustainability adoption (see Figure 1):

Click the image for a full-sized version

• Marketer: Improving branding and transparency with advanced reporting. Companies that fall into this category are either early in their sustainability maturity or just do what they have to do when it comes to regulatory compliance.

All of us in the technology industry get caught up in the near-term fluctuations and pressures of our business. This quarter’s earnings, next quarter’s shipments, this year’s hiring plan . . . it’s easy to get swallowed up by the flood of immediate concerns. So one of the things that we work hard on at Forrester, and that our clients value in their relationships with us, is taking a few steps back and looking at the longer-term, bigger picture of the size and shape of the industry’s trajectory. It provides strategic and financial context for the short-term fluctuations and trends that buffet all of us.

I am lucky to co-lead research in Forrester's Vendor Strategy team, which is explicitly chartered to predict and quantify the new growth opportunities and disruptions facing strategists at some of our leading clients. We will put those predictions on display later this month at Forrester's IT Forum, our flagship client event. Among the sessions that Vendor Strategy analysts will be leading:

• "The Software Industry in Transition": Holger Kisker will preview his latest research detailing best practices for software vendors navigating the tricky transition from traditional license to as-a-service pricing and engagement models.
• "The Computing Technologies of 2016": Frank Gillett will put us in a time machine for a trip five years into the future of computing, storage, network, and component technologies that will underpin new applications, new experiences, and new computing capabilities.