Green IT

Fortunately for Green BI, the “Green IT Movement” has already achieved great success and can be used as a springboard for selling Green BI initiatives to senior management. After all, the Green IT movement has shown us just how profitable green can be, as it has helped ease IT budget strains better than initially anticipated. In the last few years, one of the main hallmarks of Green IT is the successful consolidation and reduced financial and ecological footprint of corporate data centers. Leading business organizations worldwide have reduced the footprint that comes with maintaining a portfolio of large global data centers, which were often built-out for the exclusive use and support of a single corporate entity. As would be expected, a huge amount of energy can be consumed by these distributed data centers—draining corporate coffers and localized environmental resources. When treated as a whole, CIOs had encountered more and more difficulty in showing a return on investment on their distributed data centers; no matter where they have been located (i.e. countries which offer cheaper human and natural resources and rents, not to mention less regulatory oversight), the maintenance of data center infrastructure is not cheap. Thus, there has been a huge amount of consolidation in these data centers in order to reduce the burdensome energy costs and associated environmental impact with mass consumption of electricity for heating, cooling, lighting, and other related operating costs including personal, applications software, and beyond.

The saving grace for information executives has been the proliferation, ease of access, and reduced costs of outsourced IT and technical infrastructure solutions. Hosted and on-demand infrastructure service models have been a key enabler of data center consolidation. With a trusted partner/provider of leased infrastructure, the cost savings to large data center-laden companies can be experienced almost immediately. It is not uncommon for companies to see ROI seen within the first few quarters of switching over to hosted paradigms; with other value added benefits arising out of these new arrangements, such as marked improvements in business continuity (better immunity from natural disasters or business interruptions associated with the procurement of energy resources used to power the data center) and operational consistency and standardization. In addition to reliance on leased or hosted networks, servers, and telecom infrastructures, improvements in virtualization hardware (and VM software) have given IT a way to better lead their business into greener pastures and reap the financial, social, operational, and regulatory benefits associated with the consolidation of corporate computing hardware and associated facilities.

Being a Green IT shop is about much more than enforcing recycling policy. Assuming that IT computing resources are properly cataloged and usage patters are transparent, the existence of dashboard enabled “green intelligence” will help you indentify innovative ways to be more environmentally sensitive. Some quick wins may include:

• Increasing opportunities and tolerance for telecommuting
• Ability to offer better travel logistics for employees, including intelligent car-pooling or off-peak work hours
• Better management of corporate energy consumption on a floor by floor or business unit basis
• Incentives for use of hotelling and mobile hotspots to reduce PC energy usage
• Consolidation of global data centers or server clusters by strategically implementing the latest virtualization technologies
• Intelligent procurement of printers, monitors, servers, and PCs that offer state-of-the-art energy management
• Reduction of corporate automobile reliance through public transportation incentives
• “Virtual Office” creation

Being Green Before Green Was Cool

 A classic but often forgotten example of proactive greenness was the 1992 decision by The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to adopt a new jewel box-sized packaging standard for new releases of recorded music on compact disk. The decision to scrap the surrounding cardboard outer sleeve on CDs was an easy one to make and required little intuition or (business) intelligence. The RIAA at the time represented approximately 95% of all domestic record labels in the United States and used its power wisely by realizing that there was negative perception related to the disposable CD longbox packaging and its adverse environmental consequences. (It did not hurt matters that there was added pressure for change from a number of famous recording artists at the time and several environmental watchdog groups like the Sierra Club.)

Once longbox inserts were omitted from CD packaging it became immediately apparent that the customer base for CDs was not going to be negatively affected. If they did miss the big wasteful cardboard insert, it certainly did not affect CD sales, which continued to skyrocket. “Green innovation” had trained customers to consume in a different way long before BI was a twinkle in the eye of the software industry and innovation and value creation could still be made by applying common sense. However, in our present business climate, although common sense still trumps all, true competitive advantage (or innovation as in the example above) will usually only be possible through the application of focused and dashboard-based business intelligence. Furthermore, with today’s constant pressure from environmental groups and governments coupled with a virtual flood of knowledge that could be gleaned from Green BI dashboards, going green (such is the RIAA example) will be the norm, as companies reduce their footprints and move towards sustainability goals en masse.

There is endless opportunity to be green yet there are still many challenges to going green in entertainment and multimedia mediums. To this point, there appears to be no market-ready alternative to using polycarbonate plastic in the production of CDs. Also consider that a typical empty CD jewel case and insert weighs 80g, yet a standard cardboard CD wallet weighs 25g; however the industry still chooses to crank out jewel cases. What is even more alarming is that the standard DVD package (without the DVD) weighs 85g! In addition companies are not doing enough to eliminate the excess PVC DVD packaging that has sprung up over the years, or switch to cleaner environmentally-friendly inks in this packaging. However, there is a cost-effective environmentally friendly solution out there somewhere.

It is time for the industry to once again innovate by turning to Greet BI, where risks and opportunities can be quantified by empirical numbers that represent all cost of goods and materials in the manufacturing and supply chains of DVDs and CDs. To my point, sometimes packaging and service delivery can dictate environmentally-friendly consumption instead of the usual, yet polar opposite scenario — entrenched consumption patterns solely driving future manufacturing processes. A notable success story was how Apple Computer, through its iTunes music service, set an outstanding precedent in helping to reduce the number of CDs produced worldwide. Their innovative strategy transformed the marketplace by changing the way music was consumed and packaged: Environmentally-unfriendly CD packaging was eliminated as customers were able to download music directly from the internet and enjoy music from a hard drive-based music player. Green BI will help us identify similar opportunities for innovation and empower companies to not only save money and environmental resources, but pass their cost savings on to consumers so they can continue to capture more market share with better products at cheaper prices.