There has been much talk and action about business-IT alignment and misalignment and their impact on business. Now, one more factor -- environmental sustainability -- needs to be included in the business-IT nexus. With growing concern about the deterioration of our environment, businesses -- IT and non-IT, small and large -- are required to minimize their environmental impacts and take on a new agenda, environmental sustainability, into their portfolio. Business executives are now required to develop business, IT, and environmental sustainability (BITES) strategies for their business enterprises that are aligned with each other. This linkage is the key to the successful realization of their business goals and the fulfillment of their environmental and social responsibilities.
As is well known, IT has fundamentally altered our work and life and contributed significantly improving the productivity, economy, and social well-being of people. Moving ahead, IT now has an important role to play in creating a greener, sustainable environment and in offering environmental benefits. To realize the fuller potential of IT in addressing its environmental problems through reduction of its carbon footprint, each enterprise must develop a holistic, comprehensive, realistic, and relevant green IT strategy, and it should form a component of and be aligned with an overall enterprise’s business strategy.
To create and implement a holistic and effective green IT strategy, executives and IT professionals need a better understanding of what green IT means and how it can contribute to enhancing an enterprise's environmental sustainability. We examine these two foundations in this Advisor and discuss the creation of an enterprise green IT strategy in Part II.
What Green IT Means and What it Can Do
Green IT is not just about creating energy-efficient IT systems, though this is an important component, especially as the use of IT proliferates. Green IT is also about the application of IT to create energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable business processes and practices, which among other things include telework and videoconferencing to replace energy-intensive activities such as travel.
To improve an enterprise’s environmental sustainability, making IT green -- more energy efficient and environmentally friendly through its lifecycle (procurement of green computers and peripherals, use of cloud computing, minimizing emerging consumption during use, and appropriate disposal [1]) -- is only part of the solution. Several studies, including a recent one by Connection Research for the Australian Computer Society [2], reveal that IT contributes only to about 2% to 3% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; the vast majority of the rest of the emissions come from non-IT sources, almost all of which can realize enhanced energy efficiency and minimize their contributions to environmental pollution through smarter use of IT. Thus it is only through the broad application of IT that we can expect to see significant energy savings and improvements in overall environmental sustainability in the emergence of a green economy (also known as a carbon economy).
As I outlined in my recent Business-IT Strategies Executive Report and other publications [1], in addition to itself becoming green, IT can play significant roles in creating a more sustainable environment in a number of ways. For example, IT can help in:
- Coordinating, reengineering, and optimizing the supply chain, manufacturing activities, and organizational workflows to minimize their environmental impact
- Making business operations, buildings, and other systems energy efficient
- Analyzing, modeling, and simulating environmental impacts
- Providing platforms for ecomanagement and emissions trading
- Auditing, monitoring, and controlling energy consumption, as well as reporting energy savings; calculating and managing carbon footprints
- Integrating and aggregating data from environmental sensors and monitoring networks, and offering environmental decision-support systems as well as environmental knowledge-management systems
- Creating awareness of environmental sustainability and fostering collective wisdom to address environmental issues
Thus, IT is both a solution and a problem to environmental sustainability. So, enterprises need to develop their green IT strategies considering IT as a means to achieve environmental sustainability as well as considering it as a contributor to environmental problems in the absence of appropriate measures to curb the problems.
Benefits of Going Green
Benefits to greening a business include direct cost savings, competitive differentiation and advantage, improved corporate branding/public image, compliance to regulatory requirements and thereby avoiding penalties, and satisfaction of doing public good. A number of case studies [3] on greening efforts by businesses showcase that business have been able to achieve financial and public image gains through their efforts as well as to reduce their environmental footprint -- thereby helping to create a low-carbon economy.
In Part II of this Advisor, I provide further insights on how to create a BITES strategy.
I welcome your comments about this Advisor and encourage you to send your insights on business-IT strategy in general to me at comments@cutter.com.
Notes
1. Murugesan, San. "Going Green with IT: Your Responsibility Toward Environmental Sustainability." Cutter Consortium Business-IT Strategies Executive Report, Vol. 10, No. 8, August 2007. Also see Murugesan, San. "Making IT Green," IEEE IT Professional, March-April 2010.
2. Philipson, Graeme. "Carbon and Computers in Australia: The Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint of ICT Usage in Australia in 2010." The Australian Computer Society, May 2010.
3. Greening Your Business Through Technology: Leading you towards a sustainable future through GreenIT, Australian Information Industry Association, November 2009.
