People use the term “green” as inherently positive. If you are reducing the carbon footprint of something, or the emissions of something, that’s something that should be pursued.
The reality is that unless you going green saves you money in some quantifiable way, most organizations are going to be skeptical of the investment, especially in a climate like the one we are in now.
So all you need to do is figure out how much money you will save and your business case is as good as solved, right? Wrong. The fact is that even though we find ourselves in 2010, there is still very limited data about specific benefits (cost reductions or the increase in the value of a property) of going green, whether the subject is IT or whether it is something as basic as retrofitting a building with more efficient windows and heaters. To make matters more complicated, there is the notion of a collective carbon footprint, which is simply to point out that just because you outsource some technology to a third party hosting organization that turns something into a cloud service, in many cases while that reduces your carbon footprint, you have really just moved the work and the overall carbon footprint is the same.
The “trap” is to dive into the green movement without a clear set of goals and target metrics.
So here are some thoughts on where to start on the green journey:
1) Identify the candidates. There’s a huge amount of commonality in the work that goes on in every business, and operations in IT is a good example of that. Identify those areas of your business that are non-core (like IT in most cases). Techniques like the one in the book Rethink are effective because they are inherently more objective than something like a process workflow.
2) Measure the “as-is” state. Measure all of the costs related to the areas that are candidates for improvement so that when the project is over, you have clear and credible data to compare it to.
3) Set your target metrics. Do some research to see what has been tried and been successful and get some actual success metrics to define targets to help make your business case. In some cases you will have to be a trailblazer, but that should be a small percentage of the time in your early green endeavors.
4) Look outside IT. Look at other green successes outside of IT and see if you can learn from their approach, their metrics, and so forth.
5) Look to the future. On June 10th, a group calling themselves the American Energy Innovation Council produced a report called A Business Plan For America’s Energy Future. This small group includes Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt, among a few others and they are asking the US to triple the amount of money invested in researching the future of energy. What does this have to do with green IT? Well we are already using energy in ways we couldn’t have predicted ten years ago, it’s a safe bet that in ten years, things will again be very different and starting to see how usages and sources of energy change, this is also going to change cost/benefit models and that’s something to keep an eye on.
6) Get funded. In this tough economic climate, even something that is going to save money in the long run isn’t going to get funded because the organization needs greater cost savings faster, so you need to test those waters.
7) Execute. Rolling out your green effort, like any project, will take planning, and rigor and discipline. Also like any other project, there will be surprises and those need to be carefully documented in case they can influence the success or predictability of future green projects.
8) Measure the results. Having measured the “before” you should now be able to measure the “after” and produce some concrete results on the short and long term benefits of the green effort.
CASE STUDY
While it may seem an imperfect analogy, current efforts to retrofit buildings to reduce the gallons or oil or water, or kilowatt hours used have many similarities to IT.
1) Both are considered low hanging fruit for savings in the green movement. Building retrofits are much older. In the US, the government has subsidized efforts to retrofit buildings since the 1970s, but even with subsidies adoption has been slow. Luke Falk, a project manager at the New York State energy Research and Development Authority said that these projects don’t happen very often because so little is known about energy usage that people can’t really even make credible assertions about how much energy will be saved.
2) More needs to be understood about “as-is” energy consumption. While many people are smarter about their IT energy usage compared with buildings, many are still not and that will continue to slow the green movement. Falk also points out that “there is no national database that we know of that records the results. Likewise, utilities across the country run Energy Star programs, but there is no central aggregated data base of the results of that effort.”
3) More case studies of results are needed to make the savings real. In New York City, a group led by Deutsche Bank America Foundation (DBAF)is working to collect those case studies on retrofits. According to Gary Hattem, the president of DBAF, “the largest obstacle to making these practices go mainstream is data that will convince building owners to retrofit their properties and at the same time increase underwriters willingness to finance the projects. The idea here is that if underwriters can determine a predictable savings from retrofits then they can create a financial instrument backed by these savings to sell on the open market.”
4) Look at the larger economic impact. When a green project is undertaken, that is work and so beyond the cost savings from the project and the eventual increase in the value of the property, there is also the creation of jobs and work and that’s something that should also be taken into consideration. That’s obviously more interesting to cities that want to retrofit buildings, but it’s also something worth noting in the IT world.
WHERE TO START
Up above in step one, I mentioned identify the candidates for the green work. In the case of buildings, the notion of motion activated lights that turn themselves on is an obvious way to save money. Similarly, a lot of servers and technology are left running all the time. Thinking of ways to turn them off or have some form of “sleep” mode in bulk can be another way to save money. Certainly looking for ways to reduce the amount of paper that is used is another common example. At Microsoft, when it is time to sign annual reviews, that is all done electronically without a single piece of paper, and for a company the size of Microsoft, that’s big. In the case of the “larger economic impact” having people share workspaces and having the option to work from home can not only increase the amount of time the employee works, it will reduce the amount of gas they burn and that’s something that in time can be captured and quantified.
That’s a start. I think the green movement is fantastic, but I also know that business is business and unless you have some concrete predictable benefits, your efforts may not get very far.
If you have questions or suggestions or feedback, I would love to hear them.
-Ric
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