Earlier on this year, Eclipse Awards was selected by Dell as one of Canada's top ten most innovative small businesses.  This is an award that we take great pride in as we've made some bold investments in technology in order to improve our customers' experience, elevate our performance and reduce our environmental footprint.

When Dell invited me to speak as part of their Future of Computing tour, I was a little nervous as I'd never done a presentation on technology before.  However, I was interested in the green element they were promoting at the event, and curious about the prospect of bringing green ideas to a room full of IT professionals. 

Aside from the technical side of things, my basic message was this:  invest creatively in technology to improve the customers' experience, while also improving efficiency and freeing up company resources.  These freed resources can then be used to pursue sustainability initiatives that ways that were not possible before.  These initiatives can then help reduce your environmental footprint, advance your social mission, and strengthen your company by differentiating it.  In our case, it allows me to put close to 20% of my time towards community building and sustainability projects in Strathcona. 

Overall, it seems as though these ideas were well well received, which is all I really hoped for.  There is more to our company that crystal awards.  Technology does have a role to play in moving sustainability forward - we just have to use it wisely and creatively, like any powerful tool.