We had the opportunity of talking to Patrick Tiernan, HP's vice president for corporate social and environmental responsibility, and some of the other folks from HP last night and enjoyed a good chat with them.

There is no denying that Pat, in the six months or so since he took up the role has got stuck in, and the fact that he is spending nearly half his time with HP’s customers sounds like a good idea.

One of the key issues that HP is keen to put forward, is that it has been 'a good guy' (let's agree that means caring more than average about its social and environmental impact) for over 30 years, and is one of the key differentiators between how it behaves now, how it feels it should be perceived by the world at large, and what everyone else is doing. I have no reason to take issue with HP on this point but am currently wondering out loud (as I did last night) as to how much it’s actually going to help them in the future.

What I mean is this: Accepting HP's position that it has been making an effort to be environmentally sound for much longer than the rest of the market means we could decide to agree that the market’s thinking has caught up with HP's.

However, I feel that HP's heritage in this market (or anyone else's for that matter) - given the rest of the world has only just woken up to the fact that being good guys and being successful in business are not mutually exclusive - might not count for much outside its existing customer base. It might not have counted for much within its customer base either, unless HP already knows how much incremental business it has won from other suppliers as a result of its good-guy activities over the last 30 years. Which I doubt it does.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I’m not convinced that using its heritage in this area to give it a head start against other IT vendors will help very much at all. The user market only started counting recently, as did the mainstream media, the analysts et al.

So where does this leave HP and other IT vendors that have, in the past, at least made an effort to be responsible?

HP’s risk is that it has never been that great at getting the positive stuff out into the market - this can't be the PR department’s fault, more a bushel hiding, slightly odd bit of 'protective' corporate policy at work perhaps.

This could mean that relatively, HP could end up going backwards while others shout louder and 'do green stuff' more obviously to claim the plaudits. I didn’t have to look far to find an example - where is HP on this list?

I'm sure there are other lists where HP is riding high, but if the goal is to tell everyone what’s good and positive about HP's activities both now and in the past, then HP needs to start playing the game harder. It runs the risk, like everyone though, of hyping the 'green thing' into meaninglessness.

Let’s not forget, the ideal goal is to make green the norm, but NOT, as I fear many will, to make the norm green.

From a business point of view though, bragging rights with no substance to back them up doesn’t win business and this is where HP might have the edge.

The sustainability, energy consumption and general manageability of corporate IT is a big focus right now for sure. The work HP and other vendors are doing on energy efficiency, cooling, recycling/waste disposal and ‘designing green-ness’ into their products sets a better, (but related) agenda to the more emotive ‘green campaign’.

It’s better because it makes business sense for its customers.

They don’t even have to be green-minded to benefit either. The good thing about most of the issues surrounding the notion of being kinder to the planet is that they make sense at a business level. If the result of them making purchasing decisions based on energy efficiencies and capability to comply with ever-more stringent disposal and recycling initiatives saves money and is kinder to the environment, then everyone’s a winner.

We’ve not even touched on the other side of HPs corporate responsibility  activities, and that’s supply chain ethics (essentially ensuring that sourcing and manufacturing activities don’t necessitate the mistreatment of workers or the environment), which is as emotive and important an issue as the environment, but is harder to pin down in terms of impact on cost and availability of certain goods.

This is one area in which any company acting alone faces the risk of being undercut by less scrupulous rivals, and so it will be interesting to see how HP handles this going forwards. 

Spreading  the environmental message, supply chain ethics best practice, and demonstrating how HP's kit helps ' the customer’s business and the world at large are then good reasons as to why Pat Tiernan has been spending significant time with customers.

If he can seed some of the 'ways to do things', on top of the ‘buy HP because it will save you money and is greener', then HP stands a much better chance of being aligned in its customers eyes with being 'the good guy in business, and the good guy for our business'.

Now if they could just show me how to stop my printer defaulting to hi-res...

One final thing. I found out last night that HP recently made the offer of off-setting every analyst’s travel carbon emissions for a year if they’d pay for half their airfare to attend a recent event.

Nobody took them up on it. Shame on us.