Process

By Howard Baldwin, CIO Leadership Forum

How CIOs Can Help Companies Reduce Their Environmental Footprint

Upfront, some disclosures. We're looking at how IT can help companies become more environmentally conscious, fully aware that it looks as if we're jumping on a bandwagon. After all, if you Google the phrase "going green," you get 2.8 million hits. Even if you add the phrase "information technology," you still get more than 75,000 references. We know we risk being seen as embracing a fad.

The fact is, we're not, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, environmental consciousness can save money—on energy, on water, and on paper. That's good for business—and it's never bad to make the chief financial officer look good. For another, consumers and even investors are looking more closely at how companies respond to environmental issues.

A more pertinent keyword phrase is "corporate social responsibility" (CSR), a term that roughly covers how companies act charitably and responsibly toward employees, the environment, and the developing world. Increasingly, companies are issuing CSR reports along with their annual reports to demonstrate their social commitments. General Electric, British Telecom, Accenture, Exxon, Cisco, and others all do this on a regular basis (full disclosure: I served as managing editor of Cisco's 2006 CSR).

All this is pertinent from a business standpoint. Equally important, IT has relevance to environmental issues. It runs the data center, where most companies consume their greatest amounts of energy, and it buys the computers that end up as electronic waste (e-waste). It's logical to look at what IT can do to improve those areas. But IT can also make improvements in other areas: helping companies to use real estate more efficiently and setting up systems that allow companies to save fuel, paper, and other resources. The topic may be old, but the ideas we've gotten from polling experts are not.

Cooling Down the Energy Centers

"Most companies are unaware of the amount of energy their data center consumes," says Don Dashefsky, co-founder of Datacenter Efficiency, a New York City-based consulting firm that focuses on improving energy usage for IT installations. "The data center is not independently metered, nor is it set up as a standalone profit center where energy is a line item."

Dashefsky recommends that companies increase their awareness by doing a heat assessment of their data centers. (There are other reasons to do this: servers that run too hot not only have an increased mean time between failure but also run the risk of producing abnormal processing results.) This is especially important if a company has reconfigured what once was a mainframe data center. "Mainframe data centers were vented from the bottom up," Dashefsky points out. "New technologies, such as blade servers, need to be vented differently. We've found that in some cases, when the blade servers were installed, the exhausts were not positioned properly."

Dashefsky also says that there can be problems with air circulation within the blade servers themselves. "Just as you need to have air circulation within the data center, you need to have air circulation within the rack," he says, adding that one inexpensive solution is to insert blanking panels between the blades for better airflow.

"You have to look at where the heat goes and how you move it," says Mark Lobel, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers IT Advisory Practice. It's a matter of making sure that the hot air exhaust coming out of one bank of servers doesn't face the intake fans of another bank of servers, he says. Otherwise, you increase the amount of energy it takes to cool the servers. While he concurs with Dashefsky's recommendation for an engineering assessment, Lobel suggests that it helps to do a quick walk-through and make your own assessment of heat and airflow.

Using Real Estate More Efficiently

As Lance Perry points out in this month's Inside Cisco IT article, "Achieving Environmental Sustainability," companies can save on real-estate costs by allowing employees to telecommute. While this directly benefits the environment by keeping cars off the road, it also enables companies to use their physical space more efficiently. By doing that, they can reduce their energy costs.

IT, of course, can spearhead this effort. IT maintains the network infrastructure, which allows remote access from home, wireless access when using common space, and videoconferencing capabilities so that employees can be productive no matter where they are. Kevin Moss, head of corporate social responsibility for British Telecom (BT), notes that his company tracks the reduction in carbon emissions that results from employees using videoconferences rather than on-site visits. In 2006, the figure was 55,000 metric tons; the company expects to increase that savings to 97,000 metric tons in 2007.

The benefits of telecommuting and videoconferencing are well documented, but there are other ways to gain from environmental responsibility on the real estate front. It's now possible, for instance, to link heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to your corporate network. Don Dashefsky tells of explaining to a CIO in charge of a 150,000 square-foot data center that his equipment could actually now accommodate an Ethernet network interface card. Linking HVAC to the network helps IT to monitor for overheating, of course, but you can also deploy motion sensors so that when the building is empty, the system will automatically lower the thermostat setting.

Using Technology More Wisely

Sometimes CIOs use technology in intriguing ways. At delivery service UPS, David Barnes, now the CIO, helped shepherd the development of software devoted to new package-flow techniques. The application includes concepts such as preloading vehicles in the morning and routing drivers according to volume. But the most unusual feature designed the delivery routes so that drivers almost never had to make left-hand turns; waiting to turn left wastes time and fuel, it turns out, and for a delivery company that cost can run into millions of dollars.

Admittedly, that's a specialized application. But Moss says that British Telecom has set up systems with wider ramifications. One of BT's clients, a vending machine company, found that when its drivers went to refill machines, a machine was still full 10 percent of the time. BT deployed technology that monitored whether each machine needed refilling, and rigged the machines to transmit that data to a central database via the cellular telephone network. 'It didn't matter how efficiently the driver was getting to the machine,' says Moss. 'It was a wasted trip if the machine was full.' By identifying whether a trip was necessary, the client reduced vehicle loads by 30 percent.

Finally, the illusive goal of the paperless office always beckons, perhaps fruitlessly. But consider the savings just on postage and paper storage if you offered clients and suppliers the option of electronic invoicing and online statements. Granted, many consumers print out those documents, but at least the postal service wouldn't waste fuel transporting them.

Environmental consciousness, in many ways, is simply a matter of efficiency, and that's a topic in which IT is well versed. "You can serve the business, but at reduced cost," says PricewaterhouseCooper's Lobel. "These measures are not going to save a dying company, but if you're looking for an edge in efficiency, these are programs you can take action with today." Start expending some energy to think of ways to save energy, and chances are you will come up with some highly effective ideas.