Do you have a good idea for reducing your company's carbon footprint?
If your boss looked across the meeting table tomorrow and asked you what your department is doing to reduce energy consumption, would you have anything to contribute?
That is a question IT people today must be prepared to answer since the equipment and facilities they oversee do contribute significantly to the world's carbon emissions. Since everything today is made in China, I offer a slogan from a recent IBM forum in Beijing that you may wish to consider as the centerpiece of your future energy-consumption-reduction reporting to higher-ups: "Wisdom of the Earth."
Think about how you might incorporate this phrase into future environmental impact reporting, and I guarantee that your status in your organization will rise like cream doth flow to the top of a glass of milk (well, not in low-fat milk; this was back when there still was cream in milk). The phrase is so wonderfully descriptive and yet so non-specific that it reminds me a little bit of Peter Sellers' catch phrase "I like to watch" in the movie Being There, in which he plays mentally challenged Chauncey the gardener, whom everyone perceives as an insightful mystic.
The Wisdom of the Earth initiative is serious business to the Chinese, however, and for the past two years has served as the focal point for how the country—with IBM's help—will merge its information technology infrastructure with emerging social trends to more artfully manage the country's transportation, food, manufacturing, water, utilities, and energy resources. We're thinking IBM came up with the wisdom-of-the-earth phrase; the company is a master of catchy marketing jingles. The phrase also lends itself to offshoots such as "wisdom of the city," "wisdom of the operation," etc.
As we approach Earth Day (April 22), we all are being asked to make some kind of commitment to improving the environment. It could be in the form of turning off the lights on a Saturday night as we did on Earth Hour last March 27, recycling our trash or…wait, here's an idea…buying a new ENERGY STAR-compliant POWER7 server in place of that old, clunky POWER6 server you purchased last year. Let's get with the program—puhhleez! The point here is you need answers, you need good answers, and the answers need to be persuasive. Once again: What are you doing to help reduce energy consumption? Wake up!
While you have been thinking about that question over the past year, IBM and Business Partners in more than 50 countries have been developing more than 1,200 solutions that address efficiency issues in various fields pertaining to energy, manufacturing, and resources management. How many of these have been implemented in your shop?
Recently, a group of more than 45 energy, investment, and IT firms along with a number of non-governmental environmental groups have come together to ask the White House to support the idea of advanced smart-meter technologies in all U.S. households and businesses. The concept has the weight of a coalition backed by a number of large organizations, including Google, AT&T, Intel, GE, HP, and Verizon, to name a few. The idea is to "adopt the goal of giving every household and business access to timely, useful and actionable information on their energy use."
In an open letter to President Barack Obama (referenced on the official Google.org blog "Powering consumers with information about their energy use"), the group proposes giving people the ability to "monitor and manage their energy consumption" through their computers, phones, or other devices. The objective is to harness the power of millions of people to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The idea should be appealing to both consumers and businesses since it is expected to save literally billions of dollars. The letter gets fairly specific on how this would be accomplished and calls for a White House-led research program to work out a means of providing consumers and businesses with energy-use information while addressing privacy issues. It also requests that federal agencies use the collected data as the basis for a wide range of low-carbon and -energy projects, such as one already underway involving home weatherization programs and others such as energy-efficiency grants, appliance standards, home and commercial building programs, and clean tech R&D funding programs. Smart meters and smart appliances that turn off energy-consuming devices when not in use already have been shown to save as much as 15 percent of energy consumed, the group noted.
So if you're too busy trying to meet demands from upper management, middle management, and users alike, but you need an idea on how to reduce energy consumption, remember this phrase: "Wisdom of the Meter." After all, Confucius say: "Measuring what wasteful IT department use always good first step in reducing what IT use!"
If that isn't good enough, consider attending the IBM-sponsored Global Eco-efficiency Webcast: Smarter Solutions for Energy and Environment at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time on April 21.
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