Sustainability: Using IT to Support and Benefit from Going Green (Jun-07)

From Lauraibm

MI Summary

Expectations for socially conscious corporations has become more sophisticated over the past couple of decades, this growing concern for sustainable practices requires IT and IT vendors to adapt as well, there needs to be innovation in the products and services companies use to support a changing business model.

One of the most significant announcements from an IT perspective is IBM’s “Project Big Green”; this involves IBM applying the concept of sustainability to its entire product and services line as well as internal business practices. As sustainability now has an impact upon a company’s competitive dynamic it is expected that many companies will do the same.

Sustainability is expected to impact IT in a number of ways, these include; product life-cycle management, returns processing, transportation management and hardware management.

Text of Article

By: Kimberly Knickle, Research Program Director

Source: http://www.idc.com/MI/getdoc.jsp?containerId=MI207635&pageType=PRINTFRIENDLY

This Manufacturing Insights Perspective introduces our understanding of how sustainability will impact IT and require IT's support. As a growing concern for companies, sustainability will bring significant changes to the IT organization and the infrastructure and applications that must support sustainable practices.

Supporting long-term environmentally sound practices goes by many names — going green, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and more. And guidelines are just as plentiful in the form of regulatory obligations and legislation, consumer demands, and even pressure from active environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Sierra Club. Our expectations for socially conscious corporations have become more sophisticated over the past couple of decades, when the standard was originally set by companies like Ben & Jerry's, which donated portions of its profits to nonprofit organizations and community activities. There is a subtle shift now bringing together genuine interest from consumers and corporations. Today, we think of Toyota's hybrid Prius as a prime example of bringing green development to an eager market, complemented by the Senate's recent passing of a bill to increase automobile fuel economy to 35 miles per gallon for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks by 2020.

In the past few months, several high-profile companies made announcements related to "going green." Sustainability is becoming a well-defined program as part of a company's competitive dynamic, not just part of a green marketing campaign. To some extent, sustainability is good business sense — it can lead to revenue generation and help drive cost savings, and sometimes it is even recognized as the minimum cost of entry to the market. With the shift toward sustainable practices, IT and IT vendors must change and adapt as well, with innovation in the products and services companies must use to support a changing business model.

Examples from Fortune 500 leaders for the past few months include:

• Ford Motor Co. named executive Susan Cischke to lead its sustainability efforts;
• Dell detailed its "Zero Carbon Initiative," with goals of reducing its global operation's carbon emissions by at least 15% by 2012. The company expects to reduce its electricity use and set new energy-efficient standards for new facilities as well as add sustainability to its evaluation criteria for its partners, using greenhouse gas emissions and environmental records as criteria for awarding contracts.
• Apple will phase out the use of two toxic chemicals — polyvinyl chloride and brominated flame retardants — from its products by the end of 2008 and expand an existing recycling program allowing customers to return old iPods for free disposal.
• HP plans to cut its operation's harmful emissions by 20% and purchase 25% more clean energy.
• Wal-Mart's "Sustainability 360" program spans renewable energy, waste reduction, and sustainable product initiatives. Most recently, the company announced plans to install solar panels to partially power 22 stores in California and Hawaii. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart is using its influence to rely on its expansive base of suppliers to support its initiative.

One of the most significant announcements from an IT perspective is IBM's "Project Big Green." IBM is bringing together more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM. The goal is to dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in IT primarily through redesigned datacenters using options such as new cooling techniques for IBM's systems and Tivoli management software to monitor power consumption and create a feedback loop for power management policies. But IBM doesn't stop there. The program also emphasizes hardware virtualization to improve performance with little or no increase in power consumption. Other elements include promoting IBM hardware for its power-saving abilities and IBM software for its faster processing abilities and provisioning capabilities. To put it bluntly, IBM is going to apply the concept of sustainability to its entire product and services line as well as internal business practices, and we expect many companies to do the same.

We'll expand our definition of sustainability in future articles, but for now we introduce a few ways sustainability will impact IT:

• Reporting and analytics: The creation of a knowledge center on company policies and applicable regulations as well as a measure of how well the company is performing against its requirements

Procurement and supplier relationship management applications: Additional evaluation criteria related to recycling-friendly materials, processes, or packaging, and more

• Product life-cycle management: Design for compliance; a product life-cycle management practice to understand and manage tradeoffs at any point in the product life cycle, provide visibility into compliance, enable the creation of "what if" scenarios (such as how much will it cost to perform a green repair), enable recycling, support the development of green packaging materials and consumables, and more
• Returns processing: Documentation related to how used goods are recycled as well as warranty replacement processes both internally and at third-party service providers
• Transportation management: The ability to evaluate transportation options that impact the environment, such as the tradeoff between fuel consumption and arrival time
• Hardware management: Trends toward reduced power consumption in datacenters, virtualization, and the use of provisioning software