Sogeti Tech for Sustainability Global Hackathon 2022

 

In partnership with

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We are excited to announce the Sogeti Tech for Sustainability Global Hackathon 2022 in association with Intel, under the ‘Become Your Best’ initiative.

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As organizations around the world look to balance their growth objectives with the need to build sustainable businesses, it is important to ensure that the balance extends to the use of technology as well.

The last day to register for the Hackathon and submit your solutions is Nov 25, 2022, 12pm CET.

Sustainable IT – Our Four Pillars

 

Despite widespread recognition of the significant impact IT makes on the environment, enterprise IT has yet to step up and turn the tide. Sustainable IT is the solution.

From user devices to data centers and networks, the technology powering business today has a significantly high carbon footprint. Further, its energy consumption is expected to increase three-fold from 2010 to 2025.

CIOs and sustainability leaders need to turn the tide on global CO2 emissions by reducing the carbon footprint of enterprise IT and accelerating the transformation into Sustainable IT.

Across the Group, we call this a transformation into Sustainable IT. It is much more than a technology and operations domain; it goes beyond structurally transforming IT in terms of consumption habits and ways of working, to embrace the whole culture of Sustainable IT and getting employees to champion this transformation.

We offer 4 entry points to activate the sustainability IT transformation of an organization depending on its stakes and ambitions.

 

This hackathon will focus on the Pillar of Sustainable IT Transformation.

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Sustainable IT Strategy

Conducting a qualitative and quantitative diagnosis with lifecycle assessment methodology, creating a vision and ambitious targets with roadmap

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Sustainable IT Transformation

Reducing the environmental impact of enterprise IT, thanks to our library of 50 levers from hardware to infrastructure, applications, and data

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Sustainable Employees

Bringing employees on board to deeply transform the organization's culture with packaged employee engagement and training plans

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IT for Sustainable Business

Using new technology to create solutions that reduce business impact and leverage our Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) network

 

Hackathon objectives

 

Why it’s time for a Green revolution for our clients’ IT. Our clients need sustainable solutions, to assess and reduce the environmental impact of the IT carbon footprint and promote green practices and sustainable IT.

However, 49% of organizations say it’s a major challenge, when it comes to implementing sustainable IT initiatives, due to the lack of tools or standards/ratings to evaluate the carbon footprint of IT.

Choose your Hackathon challenge

 

Are you a technology innovator? A maker of value? Then this Hackathon is for you. Organizations are looking for technology leaders like Sogeti to lead the change when it comes to sustainable IT.

With a focus on innovation and design thinking, this fun event will pit like-minded colleagues against each other, solving real-world problems targeting sustainable IT.

Our global Hackathon is about playing around, encouraging you to fail fast, fail cheap, and learn new things. If your code isn't production ready, we're not going to penalize you.

You will need to use Intel Dev Cloud. Dev Cloud a free cloud service to learn, prototype, test and run on the latest intel hardware in the cloud. Plus,  participants need to use Intel Toolkits and Intel® oneAPI.

These toolkits will configure into your development tools and they are optimized for Intel platforms. Intel® oneAPI allows you to run on any CPU or cloud from any hardware manufacturer or cloud hyperscaler.

You can find out more about these development tools below:

Intel® Developer Cloud

Intel® DevCloud for oneAPI

Watch a short two minute explainer video on DevCloud

Choose one of the following challenges to develop and turn into a concept with genuine value-making potential. You'll see that they are 'problem statements/ use cases' – which one will you resolve? The areas to consider are just examples; feel free to explore other use cases.

1. User hardware and devices

Despite the enormity of the e-waste problem, many organizations do not treat it as a priority. Only 35% measure the environmental impact of disposing off their hardware.

Areas to consider:

  1. Procuring hardware and user devices with minimum lifecycle carbon cost
  2. Improving employee awareness of device utilization and sustainability
  3. Proper disposal, recycling and refurbishment of hardware
  4. Utilizing energy certified and auto-off hardware
  5. Prolong the lifespan of devices

Moving from on-premises infrastructure to cloud computing offers significant energy savings. While many organizations are adopting cloud computing, few are aware of its environmental impact and ways to measure it.

Areas to consider:

  1. Switch to a green cloud architecture and framework
  2. Use AI/ML to optimize data center utilization and improve cooling solutions
  3. Utilize or shift to public cloud utilizing low carbon grids
  4. Shared data, i.e. using shared data between data ecosystem partners can reduce the need to store data. How can organizations rely more on external/ shared data and how can data sharing technologies be made more sustainable?

The application landscape of an organization is often overlooked from a sustainability perspective. How can organizations measure the energy impact of the pre-production application environment (the development and testing of applications) and the sustainability impact of the production environment (live applications).

Areas to consider:

  1. Ecodesign applications to minimize resource utilization
  2. Develop sustainable architectures to rationalize applications, and identify and decouple energy intensive applications
  3. Streamline data architecture and optimize the data lifecycle
  4. Design efficient and sustainable AI applications
  5. Green coding

Few organizations have established policies mandating the reporting of the enterprise IT carbon footprint. In addition, most organizations do not extend disclosure requirements to their vendors.

Areas to consider:

  1. How to assess the environmental impact of technologies and computing hardware
  2. Establish and follow lifecycle carbon footprint accounting for all hardware
  3. Establish carbon cost of IT operations

Webinar Replay

 

As a part of the Hackathon, we had organized an internal webinar on Nov 21 to help the participants/teams prepare for the hackathon and to address their queries/doubts. The objective was to help them plan and submit their entries to find new potential solutions for our clients.

The webinar featured Sogeti leaders from our portfolios, who explained the structure of the hackathon, the challenges (themes), and expectations.

If you missed the webinar, click here to watch the replay.

 

Ask your questions

We have created a channel on Teams for you to connect with the leaders and experts on the topic of Sustainable IT and have your queries/questions answered in real time. Please join the conversation here.

We encourage you to participate in this thought-provoking and enriching session and register for the hackathon.

Judging criteria

Team submissions will be evaluated by a panel of technology and sustainability leaders, including external experts on the following metrics:

 

SCALABILITY
Value / weight: 20%

Can the solution be implemented with current technology? How difficult will it be to create an MVP and deploy at scale?

 

TECHNOLOGY
Value / weight: 25%

How technically feasible is the solution? Does it use a particularly innovative technique, or many different components? Does the technology involve a partner's collaboration and if so, which features of the partner's ready solutions does it use? Did it use new technologies or leverage our partner ecosystem, and was there learning involved?

 

MARKET RELEVANCY
Value / weight: 20%

Does the solution appeal to a wide range of industries? How unique is the solution?



LEARNING
Value / weight: 15%

Did the team attempt to collaborate with technology and sustainability leaders within Sogeti and the wider group.
Please complete the mandatory Sustainability Globe Awareness Module.

QUALITY ENGINEERING
Value / weight: 20%

How well does the solution address one of these questions:

• To what extent is an app/system sustainable (e.g., perdurability, scalability, maintainability, energy, and resource efficiency)?
• What are the various methods for assessing the levels of sustainability of an app/system?
• To what extent are our Development and Quality Engineering activities sustainable?

At a minimum, teams will be required to submit a pitch deck that includes:

  1. Product or Service Overview
  2. Architecture Sketches
  3. Storyboards and Journey Maps
  4. Participants need to use Intel Dev Cloud, a free cloud service to learn, prototype, test and run on the latest Intel hardware in the cloud
  5. Participants need to use Intel Toolkits and Intel® oneAPI

Teams can also submit any additional material that helps communicate the vision or value of their solution.

Hackathon Prizes

 

 

  • First Prize – A fully loaded Intel Laptop, one for each participant in the team (worth approx. €4,000)

  • Second Prize – A Microsoft Surface Pro, one for each participant in the team (worth approx. €1,000 each)

  • Third Prize – Secretlab Gamer Chair, one for each participant in the team (worth approx. €500 each) 

Register Now!

The registrations are closed now!

FAQs

What is the objective of this Global Hackathon?

To ENCOURAGE innovation and have fun! We also want to Ideate, Incubate and Innovate.

Come up with new technical solutions for the problem statements provided.

Skill development is another objective. We are inviting technology leaders like our Sogeti Lead Technologists, Portfolio leads, Sustainability SME’s and our partner Intel. There will be a few interactive webinars with Intel SME’s for you to ask questions related to the topic/challenges.

This Hackathon is for Sogeti employees.

Yes. The rule is to have minimum 2 and maximum 4 participants per team.

No, the objective is collaboration, so a minimum of two people team is mandatory.

Yes, they absolutely can. Just select the themes while registering for the event. MULTIPLE entries are welcome, but each entry must be separately processed.

Yes, all teams need to register and submit their solutions by November 25, 2022, 12pm CET.

Registrations + solutions submission: By November 25, 2022, 12pm CET
Hackathon Finale: Early December, 2022

You can see the prizes here: See Prizes

No, it will be a virtual judging process.

The teams are expected to mandatorily provide Idea details, High level Architecture, Tool blueprint and source code/API for their solutions, checked into the Capgemini GitHub repository. Other optional deliverables such as PPT, videos, images or documents can also be uploaded directly to a Teams shared folder (link will be provided).

Please upload the code to the Capgemini GitHub repository. For any queries related to GitHub, please reach out to Clemens Reijnen.

Yes, with appropriate attribution for source and within the limit of Group IT’s permitted software usage policies.

No, the entire idea need not be fully implemented, but the submission should be functional so that it can be reviewed by the judges.

Please contact the core team.

Winners will be announced on the date of the finale.

Yes, in fact that is encouraged.

Yes, the participants need to zip all the material and upload a single zip file to a shared Teams folder (link will be provided). The maximum file size limit for the upload is 200 MB.

Yes. We recommend you use Microsoft Teams Sites for this event.

Yes, with approval from Intel – contact the core team for trial licencing.

This effort will be outside of working hours, so no reporting is required.