Thoughts on Best Practices

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Revision as of 15:01, 19 August 2007

MI Summary

Main article: Thoughts on Best Practices

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AMR

• Need to ensure that suppliers and customers conform to modern thinking regarding sustainability and pass up those who ignore the issue.
• Environmental initiatives need to receive a large investment. (Many firms put most investment into environmental initiatives out of all CSR activities.) This is important because sustainability can translate into a business opportunity and protect the company against prejudicial selection.
• Need to be environmentally proactive; the enterprise dashboard is helpful in achieving this. This approach provides data at all levels of the organisation so people throughout the company can view potential waste and emissions inefficiencies before committing to a process change.
• A proactive approach will provide competitive advantage, given increased customer discernment. Companies ignoring the call to be proactive could soon be at a big disadvantage.
• The fact that businesses don’t really have a true picture of their spending makes an enterprise dashboard with trend analysis imperative.

Gartner

Environmental Actions

• Over the next few years addressing environmental issues will become as important as technological innovation and revenue generation.
• Need to address the issues of environmental impact throughout the life-cycle of products and services.
• Need to be proactive in reducing environmental footprint and reducing the contamination of products and services throughout their lifecycle.
• Companies should be taking simple steps e.g. switching off lighting in unused buildings to cut its carbon footprint.
• Manufacture hardware and software that uses less power, use recyclable components and provide asset recovery and recycling schemes.

Presentation and Communication

• Vendors need to highlight the benefits of IT to the environment and the achievements to date.
• Buyers are expected to become more environmentally concerned and informed. They will increasingly challenge vendors on their full life-cycle environmental footprint.
• Need to provide investors with proof of the industry’s environmental credentials.
• If company wants to be able to draw from the widest talent pool possible it needs to show itself as being proactive on environmental issues. (The next generation are more likely to be attracted to jobs in businesses making a positive contribution to tackling global warming than to those who do not.)
• Vendors need to support Green initiatives e.g. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative, this will give the impression they are being proactive in tackling climate change. Enterprises should continue to challenge the members of the initiative to demonstrate their environmental credentials.

IDC

• IT users need to evaluate and carefully consider the infrastructure investments they make and confirm that power and cooling considerations are clearly understood and evaluated.
• Sustainability is important for a company’s competitive dynamic; this shift towards sustainable practices requires IT and IT vendors to adapt as well.
• Sustainability makes good business sense; it can lead to revenue generation and can help drive cost savings.
• Companies should apply the concept of sustainability to their entire product and services line as well as internal business practices.
• Sustainability will impact upon; product life-cycle management, returns processing, transportation management and hardware management.
• Need to take a holistic approach to solving energy challenges. A holistic approach will allow the identification of where power is being wasted.
• Power and cooling concerns are the top issues in the data centre today; the problem is compounded by the fact that most IT managers have no idea how significant the problem is.
• For the future IDC sees an increasing emphasis placed on power efficiency in relation to IT, this will be driven by a number of factors e.g. product labelling will increase in importance.
• IDC believes that datacentre TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and capacity are now the two key drivers placing power efficiency considerations front of mind in purchasing decisions.
• From a services perspective environmental issues represent a significant revenue opportunity. It is essential that the sales process should include a first-level datacentre assessment; this would create an engagement model that could offer future revenue rich opportunities at both product and service levels.
• Customers are forced to look more closely at carbon footprints; hence an insight into the carbon footprint of suppliers such as IT vendors will be crucial.
• Vendors should first focus internally and set internal targets for energy efficiency and demonstrate awareness of the environmental impact of their own and other enterprise operations.
• Companies should present themselves as a vendor of “green computing” and show awareness through demonstrable best practice together with aggressive but achievable internal targets. These targets must be met, as the ability to drive business around green issues today is as much about credibility as it is about know how.

For an overview on the topic(s), see also

• Analyst Views