As Kermit the Frog always demurred “it’s not that easy being green”, however in the last twelve months, Green BI has gone from being a trendy buzzword to something very real and important. Now, eco-friendly corporate knowledge factory concepts are garnering a large amount of attention from BI vendors, corporations, governments and community activists. In reality, companies have been “going green” for years — reducing emissions, recycling, and controlling factory waste in order to achieve compliance and better corporate citizenship.  

Yet current waste cycles (driven by both manufacturing processes and the consumption habits of customers for the world’s goods and services) are still mostly unsustainable in terms of cost and environmental footprint. While environmental scientists rush to come up with socially-engineered environmental friendly solutions to current eco-dilemmas, the business world scrambles in parallel to better control and manage their accountability to the environment and the communities in which they transact business.

The good news for enterprises is that going green — being an environmentally sustainable business —can be profitable. With green intelligence, companies can better control and cut material waste in manufacturing cycles and reduce excess packaging used for consumer or client-facing merchandise; they can better control consumption of environmental and human resources used in the production of goods, thus preserving capital and saving money. In addition, Green BI offers businesses a new frontier in the dogged pursuit of better productivity and cost savings by addressing and leveraging new and previously untapped (environmental) areas of opportunity and interest. A Green BI practice does not have to be a cost center like so many other regulatory-centered business units or compliance initiatives. Executives are finally starting to catch on that this whole Green BI thing is not another revenue-gobbling vortex, but a means to unlock certain information that was not transparent before - information that will help them save money and not spend it.

Green BI is aimed at empowering organizations with new detailed eco-knowledge and corresponding indicators of performance, where companies are armed with relevant information that will greatly assist them in their mission to be more environmentally friendly. When implemented correctly, sustainability and environmental footprint factors will be tracked and measured by a dashboard which has been seeded with data that can drive and influence sustainable behavior both internal and external to the corporation’s immediate locus of control. In the some cases companies can enforce and encourage green behavior (leading by example) with their customers, motivating them to be environmentally conscious through various incentives or innovative ways for the consumer to utilize their goods throughout the product usage lifecycle—from procurement to obsolescence—with recycling being the end goal. Green BI encourages innovation in how a company conducts business internally and interfaces with the rest of the world that exists outside its corporate boundaries. It will become an essential component of corporate governance, helping companies achieve the important status that comes with being recognized and perceived as being a good corporate citizen in the public’s eyes.

An intelligent dashboard will help organizations best understand and assess the environmental impacts of the operational status quo, as well as factors that are more external or physically separate from traditional core business considerations. Green BI metrics and indicators of performance will be customized for each type of business or industry; however generically speaking, all business will want to ask similar core questions:

• What are the outputs/or waste from business processes or the contents of packaging?
• What hard and soft resources are consumed by each process or packaging?
• What worker habits use what resources—at work, commuting to work, etc?
• What interaction with vendors or clients can be done more effectively with less environmental footprint? (For instance, can web-based applications take the place of brochures or mailings?)

Only through applied Green BI can you give shareholders, customers, and internal auditors the detailed transparency (i.e. data and measures) to show you are really following a sustainable course and care about the natural environment.  Sustainability management will save companies money and force them to better their business processes and establish cost saving infrastructure through ecologically sound decisions.

Put in place now, systems that offer green intelligence will not only help corporations identify new opportunities for cost savings, they will anticipate forthcoming environmental compliance regulations and legislation that is going to inevitably materialize over the next five to ten years. At the present time, governments in Europe, North America and Asia are focusing on higher-level regulatory environmental enforcement, such as emissions control and bulk waste management – areas that can be addressed without applying much detailed business intelligence. However, regulatory bodies are becoming attuned to more micro-level environmental issues, as they are starting to address areas of product packaging, employee commuting habits, and similar less transparent issues that have a measurable environmental footprint.

Green BI gives companies a way to proactively go green in an unprecedented holistic fashion and present the results of their green agenda to employees, shareholders, governments, and communities with real-life numbers and measures. Green BI’s value proposition is well-rounded—measuring the economic, environmental and social performance of an organization in definable and concrete terms.

Green BI can help mold customer expectations and behaviors by offering them alternatives to the usual patterns of consumption and product disposal. The goal is to have a more risk-free and educated means on how to best offer their customers incentives and rewards for consuming in an environmentally friendly way. How a product is sold, packaged, and marketed in the future will be determined, sometimes to a great extent, by green intelligence. Green BI will alert companies of when a product’s lifecycle is coming to an end, creating all sorts of combined marketing and environmental opportunities. Increasing brand awareness and brand loyalty by co-opting an environmentally sustainable posture and visibility throughout the product lifecycle is not a novel business idea anymore. By all means, adopting such an approach offers a solid win for the both product provider and consumer.

Green BI helps bond together people, planet, and profits so that the promises of being a Triple Bottom Line can be realized. Triple Bottom Line (TBL) is a well publicized criterion for measuring an organization’s commitment and conformance to various economic, societal, and environmental factors. The TBL standard guides a corporation in the calculation of their environmental footprint; at the same time it scorecards their commitment to corporate social responsibility. There is currently legislation under consideration in Minnesota and Oregon that would bestow tax breaks to companies that have proven to be environmentally sustainable TBL entities — more proof that Green BI is a money maker and not a bank breaker!

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.

The Big Picture

Green BI initiatives will help lead the way toward a more sustainable future for ourselves and our loved ones worldwide. With proper green intelligence, managers can look at business and manufacturing processes from a new sustainability-driven perspective so that they are better able to help their organizations reduce waste, emissions, and improve the time to market of all products. Green BI will service a wide range of users; however Green BI should be thought of in the most holistic terms possible so that a pioneering sprit of change will lead to tangible green innovation, i.e., organizations small and large understand their environmental footprint and begin to eye how they can achieve cost savings and sustainability gains in tandem. It does not take long before companies start to realize that having an environmentally friendly image (being a TBL entity) and implementing environmentally friendly policies (including employee training and incentives) actually help the bottom line; after all, green is the color of money as well.

It is not a stretch to think that without Green BI, a well rounded and robust corporate governance agenda will not be plausible in the future. Intelligently reducing natural resource consumption, using more energy-efficient technologies, and encouraging carpools and employee-sponsored flea-markets or company garage sales are just the beginning. The larger social implications and possibilities are limitless: Might Green BI help foster an enlightened awareness among an organization’s employees who would choose to propagate this green thinking in their daily life outside the office, spreading the green sprit throughout society at large? I am going outside now to hug a tree — me and my green friend, Kermit.

About the Author

A Contributing Editor for Dashboard Insight, William Laurent is one of the world's leading experts in information strategy and governance. For more than 15 years, he has advised numerous companies and governments on technology strategy, methodologies, and best practices. He is a regularly featured writer and columnist for DM Review where he writes about IT and corporate governance. William currently serves on the faculty of Baruch College, runs an independent consulting company that bears his name, and lectures frequently on various technology and business topics worldwide. He would enjoy your comments at wlaurent@williamlaurent.com

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