Part Nine of What do you really mean by Green IT?

We conclude the journey of walking around the circle to look at how Green IT can impact the enterprise and the environment.  

A lot of effort has been narrowly focused on narrowly defining Green IT to be data centre specific, but the true value is found is using Green IT to deliver economically sound ecological sustainability (Eco 2.0^tm) to the enterprise and the community. The topic for today is Virtual Presence, also called telepresence, which allows the rich collaboration between geographically dispersed people and organizations using IT technologies.

Person(s)-to-Person(s)

Desktop video, earlier ISDN-based video conferencing, email, instant messaging and other technologies are all methods of improving interpersonal communications and collaboration. The advent of lower cost high bandwidth network communications, along with more robust software, has opened the door for improved interaction using tools such as Halo for conference room to conference room  meetings with multiple attendees, eliminating a lot of travel related costs and emissions. Running a Halo site for one year full time generates less emissions that one coast-to-coast business trip, improves the interaction quality compared to alternative technologies, and frees up valuable time for business and personal use.

Another type of technology in this space is Teleportec, which is useful speaker to conference room and desktop person to person interactions. The Teleportec device provides two way interactions with 3D imaging, and delivers nuanced communication "eye to eye". In a conference setting, the speaker can interact with the audience as if they were in the room. One example of using Teleportec technology is a kiosk bank; a private room equipped with the conferencing equipment and other devices could be used to connect the client with a variety of experts, such as loan officers and investment specialists, without having them at the physical site. Backed up by CRM systems, the combined nuanced communications and detailed understanding of the client's total relationship will improve the client's satisfaction but also improve the financial institution's economic and ecological efficiency.

Person-to-Work

Technology today gives us the ability to bring work to the people, instead of the Industrial Age mode of bringing people to the work. I live about three miles from work, so it is convenient for me to drive in for meetings and daily work, but many other folks have much longer drives with inherently greater impacts. Many companies, including EDS, have alternative work arrangements (AWA), allowing remote work on one or more days each week, depending on the type of work and employee capability. There are some technical aspects to allowing secure connections, backup, telecommunications and access control, but also corporate culture and leadership styles that make this a viable approach for some organizations, and not for others. I recently experienced AWA when I had surgery on my foot, making going to work quite a bit more difficult with a cast and crutches, and I did most of my work from my home using my wireless network and cell phone.

Work-to-Work

Technology will redefine the meaning of work, not only at a personal level, but also inter-enterprise. The notion of a corporation owning the majority of its assets (real estate, capital investments, and expertise) may be a thing of the past; rather, temporary or semi-permanent coalitions to bring together the right talent, capabilities and delivery mechanisms to define, design, source and deliver products and services may replace traditional big business. Development may occur where information and communication networks bring together the social and technical interactions necessary to develop the next generation of products.

If you don't need the massive capital asset base to sustain the organization, could you even have an Open Source workforce? A smaller core focused on strategy, brand management, design and delivery oversight working with the supply chain could allow a company to become more agile than staid competitors, using outsourced manufacturing and supply chains instead of capital investments to achieve market dominance. This is already happening with Nike and with a lot of the IT tech jobs, but having the right combination of business and technical skills allows people to sell their services in an open source market, combining in collaborative efforts to deliver a specific task. Technology such as HP's Remote Graphics will allow the sharing of data while protecting intellectual property, improving system performance and leveraging high performance equipment.

Finally, techniques developed for http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ may redefine the meaning of cloud computing. PCs represent a huge investment, yet generally sit idle for long periods or operate at fractional capacity (like now when I'm just running MS Word). Companies which are able to develop software to scavenge the lost capacity in these machines across the enterprise and turn them into useful work may be able to monetize their investments and generate sizable revenue streams or avoid capital investments.

What do we mean by Green IT?

In nine episodes, I've walked you around the circle of Green IT as we see it in EDS. A lot of the thought leadership in this area I credit to Jeff Wacker, another EDS Fellow and our Futurist. Jeff is extensively quoted in Tom Friedman's latest book Hot, Flat and Crowded and has some great insights. One thing Jeff and I point out is that fixing the problems we face is not simply a matter of choosing one thing in the circle; it requires systemic thinking and understanding of your enterprise, your regulatory and competitive environment, your perception of risk, the relationships you have with your employees, community and investors, all combined to intelligently to plan and execute your strategy to achieve Eco 2.0: economically sound ecological sustainability.

Source- HP Communities

Follow the rest of these posts below:

• Part 1
  
• Part 2
• Part 3
  
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8

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