Photo Supplied by www.absoluteandalivephotography.com.au

We’d like to thank all our customers who have embraced the sustainability challenge and recognise the whole team — and especially Phil Marshall, our Product Development Manager — who’ve all been working very hard for the last three years to make our vision for Greensense View a reality.

We’ve been thrilled with the response Greensense View has gotten in the last 12 months, and we have some really fantastic customer implementations in the pipeline that we’re looking forward to unveiling.

As a winner in the WAITTA Awards, we will go forward to compete in the iAwards, a national ICT Award, and then, fingers crossed, on to the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards in Thailand.

Greensense Press Release — WAITTA Awards

Greensense wins best product in WAITTA Awards! is a post from: Greensense

During May, here in Western Australia, daysofchange.org has been running a very comprehensive multi-channel campaign on broad sustainability changes that everyone can make in their lives both at home and work . One of the things I like about this programme is that it gives you the opportunity to state the actions you are already undertaking, as well as pledge to make new improvements in your life. If you haven’t been to their web site to fill out your profile, it’s not too late!

Another programme starting this week has a more specific focus — International Green IT Awareness Week www.greenitweek.org.  This event promises some very practical presentations as well as good resources on the event website.  You might like to send a link to your IT Manager.

The web sites both post tips about improvements you can make.  Even though the audiences are very different for these programmes, one of the themes you can see on both these web sites is the monitoring of energy consumption.  Our Greensense View product is designed specifically to help organisations tackle this issue.  We believe this is a great way to drive energy efficiency programmes that save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Sustainability Advocacy and Awareness Programmes is a post from: Greensense

Source: Traffic Light Tree — wwarby

Historically, performance in IT has generally been measured in terms of cost and service levels.

Some describe Green IT as the environmentally responsible and sustainable use of IT assets, incorporating triple-bottom-line philosophies (Note: for a wider perspective of Green IT, see Fabian’s previous post). Even taking into account a very narrow viewpoint that simply focuses on energy efficiency, it is obvious that performance in IT needs to be expanded to take into account some new standard metrics.

Issues and considerations

Firstly though, let’s take a look at some issues that we can address so that we can determine some valid metrics:

• IT assets consume significant amounts of electricity and devices are often left on when not in use.
• Over time it has become culturally acceptable in many organisations to leave work PCs turned on overnight to save the hassle of turning them on in the morning.  This alone is responsible for a large amount of wasted energy.
• Data Centres are responsible for a very large amount of energy usage, not only because of all the servers, storage and comms equipment, but in the environmental conditioning required to keep them at the correct operating conditions.
• e-Waste is a fast-growing issue which is compounded by planned obsolescence.  e-Waste can be reduced by planning to keep equipment longer before replacing it.  e-Waste can also be reduced by evaluating the environmental impact of the manufacture and disposal of assets using the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT).

Metrics to consider

You might like to consider these kinds of metrics, depending on your priorities:

• Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) — This is an industry standard metric for determining the energy efficiency of the data centre infrastructure.  Total Data Centre Power Consumption divided by IT Equipment Power Consumption.  It is also expressed as its reciprocal, Data Centre Effectiveness (DCiE).
• Average User IT Energy Footprint — Total electricity used attributable to IT equipment for a period, divided by the number of users in the organisation for the period.
• Average Daily Desktop Run Hours Per User — The total number of hours desktops are turned on divided by the number of users.  These numbers should be targeted between 8 to 12 hours.
• Average Energy Per Gigabytes Storage Capacity — Total electricity consumed by server storage devices divided by the total gigabytes of storage capacity provided by those devices.
• Number of Pages Printed Per User — The number of physical pages printed (i.e. pieces of paper) and/or the number of page impressions, dividing each by the number of users.  Measuring both can give an indication of total printing volume as well as behaviour choices such duplex printing.  In circumstances where total volumes cannot be reduced, duplex printing should be encouraged.
• Energy Star Compliance — The percentage of IT assets that comply with various Energy Star ratings.
• EPEAT Compliance — The percentage of IT assets that comply with various EPEAT ratings.
• Desktops Purchased Per User Per Year — This is for long term trending to determine if length-of-life targets are being met.

Decisions can be made regarding the granularity of calculation, for example, by division, by department or by building floor to allow cross referencing and benchmarking.

Once these metrics are collated, it is important to publish the metrics so they are visible across the company.  Graphically appealing dashboards with rich user interfaces are an engaging way to present this data.

Collating these metrics often requires new data to be collected.  There are tools available to streamline the collection of the underlying data to minimise the human effort involved.

How we can help

Greensense has helped companies implement customised Green IT Performance Management Frameworks including the supporting data collection and we also have many years experience in visualisation technologies.  Please contact us here at Greensense if you would like more information about these services.

Green IT Performance Management is a post from: Greensense

What is Green IT?

The common view is that Green IT is about making computer equipment more efficient. Taking this view misses the chance to get more leverage from IT. It misses the chance for IT to contribute to the overall sustainability of the organisation.

Here I’m going to describe five factors that characterise Green IT for us at Greensense.

1. Green IT helps meet the organisation’s legal and compliance requirements for the environment (ensuring the ‘license to operate’). It provides tools for records and document management and ensures robust and auditable data collection, data management and compliance reporting.
2. Green IT helps to promote the organisation’s brand and environmental reputation. It ensures that publicly accessible information on the organisation’s environmental performance is correct and consistent. It also provides tools for effectively managing customer and stakeholder relationships, including relationships with government, the media and community groups.
3. Green IT encourages innovation and a sustainability culture within the organisation. It makes operational and management information on environmental performance more transparent and more widely accessible (for example providing a dashboard on the corporate Intranet). It also provides tools, such as wikis, blogs, and discussion forums, to encourage information sharing, collaboration and innovation.
4. Green IT improves business efficiency. In today’s economic climate this is particularly important. First, Green IT makes IT facilities and equipment more energy efficient and reduces IT waste. Then, Green IT improves efficiency in other parts of the business by enabling physical activities to be substituted for electronic ones (e.g. video conferencing). Green IT can also provide tools to help manage efficiency projects (measuring, tracking and reporting).
5. Lastly, Green IT provides a platform for growth. By providing services or goods in a more sustainable way, new options can open up. Customers are attracted to more sustainable offerings and they are often cheaper. The way Green IT can be innovative and make services and goods more sustainable is to either transform them from being physical to being electronic (sometimes called ‘dematerialisation’) or through automation, reducing the number of people required to provide the service.

It is important for IT departments to see the potential from thinking and acting sustainably. Green IT should be a major strategic theme that cuts across the whole IT function.

In the next post in this series I will discuss how you can develop a Green IT strategy. I’ll also cover how Green IT relates to climate change and carbon management — our main priority at Greensense.

Green IT — Part 1 is a post from: Greensense

As we’ve discussed before, having a green PC strategy is a key part of being sustainable. One submission to the review also focused on PCs. The submission drew the review’s attention to EPEAT, a registry set up by the US government to track the environmental performance standards of PCs, monitors, and laptops. 

A report by the US Environmental Protection Agency suggested the following benefits, over four years, from the US government purchasing EPEAT registered computers:

• save US$71.4 million in energy costs
• reduce energy use by 824 gigawatt hours
• reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 64,700 CO2e

The Australian government review made only very high-level recommendations in relation to sustainability. So while it was refreshing to see sustainability recognised as an important topic, it clearly wasn’t the top priority for the review.

The principal sustainability recommendation was that a whole-of-government ICT sustainability plan be developed. While there is an element of Yes Minister to commissioning a review that recommends the development of a plan, this is actually a good recommendation. According to the review the plan should:

• identify which of the available standards (for example, EPEAT) should be adopted as mandatory for relevant ICT acquisitions 
• include a whole-of-government ICT energy target, with agencies to report their progress towards the target
• take into account potential implications of a carbon pollution reduction scheme.

Australian businesses, and particularly large businesses, should be developing a similar plan for ICT sustainability. We think there are three good reasons to focus on ICT.

Firstly the cost savings and environmental benefits can be significant, as the US government report mentioned above demonstrates. In fact, in many cases, implementing a sustainability plan for ICT can be cost-positive because of the energy efficiency opportunities.

Secondly, starting with ICT can provide a good learning opportunity, which can prepare your organisation to tackle potentially more significant core-operational areas of your business: the same processes, tools and general approach will apply. 

Lastly, ICT can drive benefits in other sustainability areas and can be a key enabler of your overall sustainability programme. It’s very important to think beyond just reducing the environmental impacts of ICT (which is perhaps all this review is doing). 

For example, we’ve previously discussed travel as another great first area to focus on. Video conferencing systems can reduce the need for business travel and the right ICT systems can also enable staff to work productively from home, reducing commuting and office-space requirements.

ICT systems can also provide the tools to baseline; capture and track data; and report progress against your overall sustainability goals. Similarly it can provide tools to engage your employees and other stakeholders in your sustainability initiatives. Imagine, for example, a simple and interactive dashboard on your corporate Intranet that allows your employees to compare the performance of different business areas and submit ideas for reducing emissions and energy use.

Please contact us if you’d like help putting in place a sustainable ICT strategy for your business.

Sustainable ICT is a post from: Greensense