8 Tips to Green Your BI Strategy
Insurance Networking News, May 5, 2009
Green often symbolizes money, and gold symbolizes wealth used wisely and good health. As the famous proverb says, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” perhaps this correct recession offers a “green lining” to the overall information management era. Innumerable discussions have been going on in every business sector about green IT and green initiatives – going green is not a fancy initiative but rather an absolute necessity for survival. What had been ignored for years is gathering momentum, with no alternative in sight.
If there is any positive development in the present severe recession, it is that the industry is getting absolutely serious about corporate social responsibility. There is evidence of this with HSBC giving appreciation for its green data center initiatives. On the other hand, Microsoft releasing its environmental sustainability dashboard, free software for its enterprise resource planning customers, shows that volunteers are now working quite aggressively for the global reporting initiatives.
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In the near future green reporting is going to be as mandatory as any other financial reporting. When tight controls are in place, people discover and reinvent more creative and efficient ways to save money. There is no better time than now to take action and allocate a piece of the budget toward serious and productive green IT. Environmental issues will shape the information management landscape for decades to come, affecting areas like data management and data governance. It also will have significant impact on areas such as competitive strategy, business intelligence marketing and even a company’s ability to attract and retain people.
The green BI initiative consists of two aspects to make it complete. The first aspect is to save all the expenditures that can be avoided from the already existing data and information. These savings are significant toward reducing the expense which is number one priority in this economic climate for the good health of corporate. The second aspect is to collect relevant environmental data and derive the useful information out of it. This reduces the company’s carbon footprint and should be a long-term priority for the good health of our planet.
Reducing power consumptions in servers is one way to contribute. One might think that these savings appear small, but when you see companies like Google and Yahoo! using millions of servers the combined contributions are substantial. It’s believed that a single search engine query alone uses 1,000 servers in 0.2 seconds. However, saving power is the only way to contribute to green IT. Quality, time and cost are also areas to be researched to make the most of your green initiative.
BI has been around for decades and I am confident it’s mature enough to deliver green BI reporting.
Gathering and reporting environmental data is like a time bomb; a problematic situation of today which will eventually become monstrous if not addressed with high priority. Below are some of the important attributes to begin the journey toward green BI reporting.
1. Dedicated green BI team: Every organization should form a dedicated team which addresses the green BI aspects. Anticipating the seriousness of businesses carbon footprints, a green BI initiative will not remain a part-time activity. It will require a dedicated team working closely with business in deriving an action plan toward green reporting. This team should be strong and capable enough to handle not only the technical issues of how to implement but also take into account the corporate politics behind these initiatives. Green initiatives will be critical, and will require good funding without actually having much clarity about the end results. But then, if one looks the past, that’s how BI also came into existence. Even in the last decade, decision-makers, though reluctantly, started funding BI initiatives despite some uncertainty about the final outcome. Today it is difficult to find an organization that does not implement BI.
2. Common consensus on the green metrics: The green BI team has to work closely with business in agreeing upon the metrics they want to use. The existing GRI framework is one of the best models to begin with. Even in green BI initiatives, one has to carefully scrutinize information which will eventually enable decision-makers to take appropriate actions. Today there are numerous examples of data warehouses flooded with data, but only a little information is useful for making decisions. All such lessons learned from past projects should be taken into account. The purpose of bringing in green data is not to complicate the existing warehouses, but to streamline and derive the information which could result in actions.
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