What is Green Leadership in the IT-World?

Nowaday’s companies have been very keen in protecting the environment. A lot are geared to changing how companies and their programs can help the environment. We have been hearing a lot of news about how different companies can in some way affect our environment and have not been keeping in mind the safety of the rest of the people. This is why green leadership was established to save the environment and spread the news on how to still continue being a successful company and at the same time be conscious about the environment.

In the lean and green leadership era, initiatives seek to increase and enhance executive discussion and awareness around the ways IT organizations can reduce energy drain and impact business gain by consolidating storage systems, embracing efficient computing practice, and introducing power-saving techniques. In this program leaders will examine ways to address the accelerating energy demands and rampant waste of data center power, along with methods to increase IT yield and data productivity.

A press release dated April 16. 2008 stated that the new BPM forum study finds that IT curbing has failed to curb data center energy consumption despite the increasing number of those concerned. Despite the stated concerns and priorities for making data center operations more environmentally friendly, still only a few organizations have any specific plans in place. Most IT managers give their operations failing grades in reducing energy consumption. Data center energy consumption continues to rise due to rising energy costs amid increasing environmental concern over global warming. Nearly half of IT managers surveyed say that their organizations have run out of energy resources in the past.

BlueArc is a leading network storage company focused on high performance and scalability, and on making environmentally responsible computing both possible and cost-effective.  The company also has the ability to drive server consolidation in reducing complexity, lowering the total cost of ownership and cutting power and cooling expenses at the same time. They have helped companies expand ways to explore, discover, research, create, process and innovate in data-intensive environments. Replacing complex and cost-inefficient and power-hungry products with high performance and environmentally beneficial scalable and easy to use systems is one field that BlueArc has been involved in.

BlueArc has conducted a study assessing issues and opportunities presented by green computing and ways to address accelerating energy and performance demands and perceived waste in the data center. The findings reflect responses from more then 150 IT professionals in an online survey completed February of 2008. The study revealed the following:

• Three-quarters of respondents gave their organization a C grade and found them to be worse in their ability to control IT energy consumption.
• There were no specific plans in place for the data center for almost two-thirds of the respondents.
• About 20 percent of those polled spend more than a million dollars annually on IT energy consumption and 8 percent spend more than 10 million.
• Another 20 percent of respondents set goals of 5 percent energy reduction or less and almost two-third had set goals of 25 percent reduction or less.
• Last year, almost half of those spoiled IT energy consumption increased in their organization and even in their cost of energy.
• And finally, forty-six percent of respondents reported that they had run out of space, power and capacity.

The study gave an overall result which pointed to a gap between what IT leadership knows, what it needs to do, and what it has accomplished to date in terms of environmental responsibility. (Derek Kober, Director of BPM forum). Derek also said that in polling the marketplace and talking with industry leaders, they have heard that there are opportunities for those who deliver on the environmental promise to also save substantial cost and drive revenue opportunities through more efficient and enhanced data performance practices.

The BPM, better known as the Business Performance Management Forum, is a new management mantra that is aimed at bringing business gain to the value chain through enhanced trading partner visibility, flexibility and new levels of verifiable sustainability which applies across the entire demand and supply ecosystem of global corporations.

 Its current programs have been unifying, focusing and controlling complexes which are globally distributed and highly synchronized value networks in turbulent, unpredictable times. They also require real-time operational insights down to the product level, accurate sourcing and sell-through intelligence, and relentless dedication to eliminating waste and realizing new efficiencies in all areas of the go-to-market process.

At the same time these programs have followed the economic, social and regulatory dynamics and are putting real pressure on global companies to be both “lean and green” in their product sourcing, logistics, transportation, distribution and operational practices as well.

Now that there is a growing number of organizations and programs such as the ‘lean and green initiative’ and BlueArc, people have high hopes that these newly formed programs will inspire other individuals and companies to follow in their footsteps. They are role models in environmental preservation.

For anybody interested to find out about some other aspects of this topic, feel free to review a recent article at http://tinyurl.com/dfurmc

We only have one earth, one environment and one world, and if we all work to save, conserve, and use environmentally friendly programs and processes, our children and future generations will have a more sustainable environment than what we are creating if we don’t act in a conscious “Green-Leadership” approach.

I invite everybody using computers, working with data centers and computing-intensive fields to join the movement and become eco-conscious pioneers, so that we can leave the world a better place without loosing any of the comforts and benefits of modern technology.

Axel Meierhoefer & Marie Saycon