Back to the Green IT Basics

Back to the green IT basics

While one definition of greener IT may be to reduce the amount of power consumed by systems, there are other ways, as the Tetra example illustrates, that IT organizations can creatively drive change to support the environment-and still generate significant cost savings for the business. To do this, IT and other corporate stakeholders need to re-examine the fundamental processes and practices that drive the business on a daily basis. Think about these three basics:

1. Paper: How much paper do you consume as an organization?

2. Fuel: How much fuel is wasted on inter-office location mailings and paper mailings to customers and suppliers?

3. Materials: How much raw material is wasted because of inefficient manufacturing processes?

As an IT organization, you have the power today to leverage technology to significantly reduce consumption across all three of these areas. With a common BPM solution and Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Modeling technology platform throughout your organization, you can have an immediate impact on both cost-saving and environmental improvements, and deliver a platform for ongoing improvements and long-term sustainability.

What is business process management (BPM)?

BPM is an approach to business process improvement that focuses on modeling and understanding how you do business, looking at ways to improve the efficiency of key business processes, automating processes and measuring, monitoring and fine-tuning processes for ongoing improvement across your operations. A BPM suite is a set of technology that allows you to achieve effective BPM and support continuous improvement. The best BPM suites are designed to provide a platform for deploying an unlimited number of processes of all types on a single technology platform. This reduces the need for multiple applications to support various business needs.

What is enterprise architecture (EA) and modeling?

EA are also functions designed to understand the current assets (such as systems, information, people and products) in an organization and their interdependencies, and to plan new models and asset acquisitions to support future growth. EA and modeling technology allows for the graphical modeling of the enterprise, collaboration on models and enterprise strategy, and the management of enterprise asset portfolios.

Together, EA and BPM technology provides a common framework of understanding that helps organizations align strategy with execution, and foster collaboration between the business and IT functions in an organization.