Resources: White Papers

The Green IT Portfolio: A Comprehensive Approach for IT, Business and Beyond

Green IT has quickly become a key initiative for many CIO's to cut energy costs and reduce IT expenses through data center improvements, optimized servers, asset recycling and more. But it would be a mistake if CIO's thought that Green IT was just for the IT department. Regulations and policies like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) take into account an entire company's environmental impact - not just IT's. Growing environmental concerns from employees, shareholders and the community have further increased the importance of taking a more comprehensive approach to Green IT. In fact, according to a recent Accenture study, over 50% of companies now consider the environmental record of their supplier when conducting business, and 50% of shareholders are more likely to buy shares in a company that shows environmental awareness. Clearly Green IT needs to be more proactive, look beyond the IT department, and take into consideration IT's environmental impact on the entire company and the community.

A NEW APPROACH FOR GREEN IT

Basic Green IT Tactics for the Business

Green IT is commonly defined as "environmentally sustainable computing," and most CIO's assume that means initiatives which directly reduce their IT department's carbon footprint, including data center consolidation, power management for servers, virtualization, etc.

But data centers and servers are just part of IT's impact on the environment. According to Booz & Company, almost 2/3 of a IT's emissions come from how IT enables the rest of the company - namely personal computers, monitors and printers. To help the rest of the business reduce their environmental impact, IT can help with four simple yet proven IT tactics:

Printing: While many aspects of reducing printing are behavioral, there are some things IT can do to reduce the amount of paper that is used at a company. This includes ensuring that printers automatically do double-sided printing, centralizing print servers, requiring badges to finalize print jobs, etc.
Sleep mode: Over 90% of computers never go to sleep no matter how long they remain unused. If IT departments set up PC's to enter sleep mode after a few minutes of inactivity, that alone can save 14 billion kWh just in the USA.
Thin clients: For many occupations, a full powered PC or laptop is overkill. With jobs that don't require portability or high performance, thin clients can be perfectly suitable and substantially reduce energy costs. In fact, an average thin client consumes between 6 - 40 watts of power, compared to 150 - 350 watts for a PC.
Telecommuting: According to the US Department of Commerce, telecommuting, online meetings and remote learning can help companies improve productivity by 20% and reduce costs by 45%, while reducing carbon emissions by 25% or more.

The Impact of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing - also referred to as "on demand" or "Software as a Service (SaaS)" - has substantially altered the dynamics of how IT can help green the business. Traditional or "on-premise" software usually comes with a significant carbon footprint. By "moving to the cloud," IT departments can eliminate all the packaging, shipping and manufacturing associated with traditional software. For example, compared to buying a CD, downloading music over the Internet generates 40 - 80% less carbon emissions. For traditional on-premise software, which usually involves extensive consulting, hardware and other infrastructure, the impact can be much higher.

But cloud computing has a much bigger impact on sustainability than just product packaging. Many cloud platforms maximize the use of hardware and electricity for data processing, storage and performance, creating significant financial and environmental savings. Sharing infrastructure also helps eliminate the redundancy of underutilized and redundant servers that are usually in place to accommodate peak demands with traditional software deployments.

Green IT as a Business Enabler

Because IT powers so many business processes, there are so many ways it can improve the environmental impact of the business beyond basic tactics like printing. For example, project and portfolio management (PPM) enables IT to more intelligently prioritize which IT and business initiatives - whether a SaaS migration, a new chip design, or a customer portal - can best help the business, allowing IT to minimize redundant or low-value efforts and all their associated hardware and infrastructure.

Another way IT can help is with procurement. Procurement for many small-to-medium businesses often can be a very paper-based process. RFP's and purchase orders are faxed back and forth, and invoices and payments are often sent through the mail. IT can help green the procurement process by automating payments, instituting electronic document signatures, and even providing a collaborative platform with suppliers, customers and partners.

In addition, IT can dramatically reduce carbon emissions by helping business processes that have a broader environmental impact - such as supply chain processes. IT can enable more efficient supply chains by helping companies to not only measure and improve manufacturing efficiency and quality, but also identify and measure the energy, waste and emissions that factories and equipment can generate during the entire lifecycle of their company's products and services - from the procurement of raw goods to customer shipment to product disposal.

Green IT and the Community

CIO's should take a look beyond the walls of their company and think how IT can improve the communities where their companies operate. Green IT provides two key ways for improving their companies' surrounding communities:

Stakeholder collaboration: Most companies work in an ad-hoc manner with their key stakeholders - such as community members, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGO's) - and IT can provide the technologies to streamline this process and encourage more participation - through online meetings, social media, and idea exchange platforms.
Prioritization of community initiatives: Should a company donate money, goods and services to a local community cleanup, a series of career education classes, or a water treatment plant? Ideally a company would like to do all of these initiatives but is faced with limited bandwidth and resources. IT can provide the technology and infrastructure to help companies intelligently prioritize and manage the green initiatives that make the most sense.

THE GREEN IT PORTFOLIO

Instead of taking a piecemeal approach to Green IT, CIO's should really consider a comprehensive portfolio approach to intelligently prioritize, manage and measure all the potential initiatives that impact IT, the business, the community and the environment. To begin defining a Green IT portfolio, a CIO should:

Define green categories: Correctly categorizing your initiatives can help ensure your Green IT portfolio doesn't have any critical gaps. Some ways to categorize your initiatives include Tactical vs. Strategic, IT vs. Business/Community, or Mandatory vs. Desired.
Agree on green metrics: You need a common way to compare initiatives, such as level of effort, cost, duration, corporate alignment, ROI, legal risk, and environmental impact.
Identify green initiatives: Finally, you need to compile all the potential initiatives in a checklist and map them in a portfolio view, so you can make a more informed choice.

POTENTIAL GREEN IT INITIATIVES

While most companies already have a number of Green IT initiatives already under way, CIO's may also want to include the following initiatives in their own Green IT portfolio:

Tactical IT Initiatives

Asset recycling and reuse: Recycling old computer hardware at an electronic disposal site, using refurbished hardware, and ensuring assets are reused instead of disposed can all help reduce IT's carbon footprint.
Efficient servers: Migrating from older lower-performance servers to more efficient servers can drastically reduce energy costs while improving processing speeds. When considering performance per watt, make sure to consider all the energy costs to maintain new servers.
Server consolidation and optimization: Fine-tuning configuration settings, modifying cache control or installing optimization software can help existing servers perform better, while further reducing the need for more servers.

Strategic IT Initiatives

Cloud computing: In addition to its positive environmental impact, on demand applications also offer fast deployment, high user adoption, flexible billing options and ease of use.
Project and Portfolio Management: PPM provides IT an excellent framework for increasing value to the business, delivering IT initiatives faster, and helping the company become greener.
Virtualization: Running multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine not only reduces the amount of servers needed, but has also been shown to increase IT efficiency and improve availability.
Data center consolidation: A comprehensive approach to consolidating servers, applications, networks, storage, shared services and real estate can substantially reduce the carbon footprint from existing data centers.
Dynamic provisioning: By being able to remotely adjust features and services to meet a customer's rapidly changing needs, dynamic provisioning reduces the costs and efforts typically associated with service calls and dispatches.

Tactical Business Initiatives

Asset recycling and reuse: Recycling old computer hardware at an electronic disposal site, using refurbished hardware, and ensuring assets are reused instead of disposed can all help reduce IT's carbon footprint.
Efficient servers: Migrating from older lower-performance servers to more efficient servers can drastically reduce energy costs while improving processing speeds. When considering performance per watt, make sure to consider all the energy costs to maintain new servers.
Server consolidation and optimization: Fine-tuning configuration settings, modifying cache control or installing optimization software can help existing servers perform better, while further reducing the need for more servers.

Strategic Business and Community Initiatives

Procurement and supply chain: Besides eliminating waste and inefficiencies, IT can help procurement and manufacturing implement a "green scorecard" for potential suppliers.
Green products: "Greening" products involves reconfiguring existing product design, packaging, and manufacturing in order to reduce the overall environmental impact during the entire product lifecycle.
Community initiatives: CIO's can help Community Relations departments with technologies that provide oversight into which community efforts are most aligned with their corporate objectives and how they can best be done, including local community cleanups, school donations, sponsorships, charity donations, etc.
NGO partnerships: Working with key NGO's may provide companies the ability to drive environmental changes that are beneficial to both the company and the local community. For example, the Environmental Defense Fund has worked for many years with companies to provide guidance on green best practices.

NEXT STEPS

Putting together a comprehensive and truly Green IT portfolio can seem daunting, so CIO's should take the following steps to ensure success:

Obtain as much executive support and buy-in as possible.
Train and educate employees on what you are planning and how they can help with Green IT.
Assess your budget, resources, stakeholders, and regulatory requirements for green initiatives.
Take time to identify and objectively score all green initiatives.
Look at your existing or new IT systems to see how they can help prioritize, enable, manage and measure success with Green IT.

To learn how Innotas can help with your Green IT portfolio, contact us today.

Visit http://www.innotas.com or call 866.692.7362 or +1.415.263.9800