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World of Good
5 expert tips to reduce your organization's environmental impact.
by David A. Kelly
Some people might think that "sustainability solutions" are only aimed at helping organizations understand their impact on the environment and make them more eco-friendly. But the truth is, such efforts can also have a positive impact on an organization's bottom line by saving energy, cutting waste and making marketing more efficient. In short, these initiatives can be good for both a company and the environment.
Corporate and environmental sustainability has many facets. Here are five IT-focused recommendations from our experts:
- Identify potential savings. Tie potential projects to cost savings, says Sid Adelman, principal of Sid Adelman & Associates. First steps include determining how much you're spending on electricity and where it's going, as well as how much cooling the data center requires. Then, start the easy way by turning off unused equipment, or placing notebooks, desktops and printers into sleep mode whenever possible.
- Be efficient. Consider the implications of both the energy required to operate a system and the air conditioning needed to cool it. "A good rule of thumb is that it's a one-to-one relationship between energy usage and cooling requirements," says Adelman. "So if you use one kilowatt of energy to run a computer, you'll need about one kilowatt of energy to cool the computer as well. Having more efficient servers and less cooling requirements can save a whole lot of energy, which translates into a smaller carbon footprint. Also, if you have smaller, more efficient servers, you don't have to have as big a facility, which also translates into reduced environmental impact, lower energy and cooling costs, and more."
- Consolidate. According to Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner Research, a server simply plugged in and doing nothing will use about 60%-70% of its peak energy. "If you have an environment with server proliferation, where a lot of people have bought servers and many of them are underutilized, it's possible to go green through a process of server consolidation," he says. "If you can consolidate, rationalize and decommission servers that aren't being used, it's possible to save a lot of money." One way to reduce server proliferation is to replace multiple data marts with a centralized data warehouse.
- Take the heat. Determine whether you can run your data center a little warmer. "Data centers have typically been designed to run at around 61-62 degrees Fahrenheit, but there's no need for that now," says Kumar. "Air conditioning systems suck up a huge amount of power in data centers, as much as the servers do, so if you can raise the operating temperature to 66-70 degrees, the equipment will still work but you won't be using as much air conditioning and it will make a big difference."
- Go virtual. Virtualization can also cut energy usage. A growing trend, it enables many applications and their operating systems (OSs) to work simultaneously on the same hardware. According to some estimates, many servers that are not virtualized operate at less than 20% of their capacity. "Virtualization technologies can improve the utilization of servers and storage, reducing up-front investment requirements and ongoing electricity and cooling costs," notes Kumar.
“At the same time organizations are saving money in the data center, they can also initiate sustainability efforts by making their business processes more effective.”
Doing business better
At the same time organizations are saving money in the data center, they can also initiate sustainability efforts by making their business processes more effective. Business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing technologies can enable many environmental efforts. Here are some examples of how these technologies can have a positive environmental and economic impact:
- Marketing. Take the example of catalog sales: Many people still receive duplicate catalogs, each of which consumes trees, energy and chemicals to produce. "If a company can do a better job in the area of data quality—for example, recognizing that two similar names at one address represent the same person—it can minimize mistakes and redundancies," says Adelman. "Also, business intelligence can be used to do all types of analysis to understand exactly what offers will be most compelling to individual shoppers, reducing wasted marketing materials as well as costs." This can be seen as more marketing efforts migrate to mobile and Web channels, which don't involve any printed materials.
- Optimizing. Optimizing inventory for manufacturing or retail environments is another area where data warehouses and BI can have an impact. "Inventory is a huge cost, and if companies can cut it back by using good enterprise resource planning or data warehousing packages, there are phenomenal savings opportunities," notes Adelman. "By managing inventory more efficiently, organizations won't have to throw away as much inventory, they won't have to mark down merchandise, and they'll be able to produce the right number of items. Data warehousing and business intelligence can deliver green IT benefits by helping to optimize inventory through better product planning and demand forecasting."
In these turbulent economic times, it's more important than ever for organizations to reduce costs, increase revenues and help address broader social and environmental concerns. And with so many sustainability approaches to address corporate economics and, on a broader level, environmental opportunities, there's no better time for action.
David A. Kelly is a Boston-based freelance writer who specializes in business, technology and travel writing.