For 39 years Derek has been advising clients how to make the most of Information Technology – especially how to maximise the business value from IT. For 17 years he worked for the leading Information Technology vendor, Hewlett-Packard. In the 90’s HP led the field in Quality, Customer Care and looking after its employees.
HP played a leading role in partnering with SAP for the introduction of SAP R/3 in 1992. Derek has been involved in SAP ever since. At HP he led an SAP Competence Centre on sizing, performance management and hardware design for R/3. He was head-hunted by Gartner in 1998 as an analyst and SAP technology specialist in their ERP team. For 19 years at Gartner and AMR Research Derek’s SAP research resulted in many international publications, strategic and best practice advice provided to thousands of clients and keynote presentations at SAP conferences around the world.
Inspired by his 1976 PhD on combustion-generated air pollution he has always been passionate about the environment and sustainability. Over the last 20 years Derek has published 18 research notes and articles demonstrating how IT can make a major contribution to sustainability strategy and initiatives.
IT can effectively provide a green lens for business executives to examine and reduce the environmental footprint of their organisation. Sustainability and profitability are inextricably linked. Smart companies, leading companies, have been quietly exploiting this for years.
It is no coincidence that SAP has been active in the field of sustainability since 2008. They offer specialised software tools for sustainability, but there are many software tools vendors and service providers in the market today that are totally focused on sustainability. How focused is your organisation on this critical business issue?