There is increasing awareness that human activity may threaten delicate ecological systems. From evidence of global warming to concerns about water and soil toxicity, individuals and groups are asking what they can do to reduce their environmental impact. New technologies, processes and laws relating to carbon emissions and other environmental issues come forth and will seriously affect how companies operate in the future. Green transformation is increasingly a key management initiative in a corporate response to climate change. This paper presents a software tool, Green Transformation Workbench, which can help companies work toward the goals in logical, manageable stages as well as position them to reach the vision of a Sustainable Business and Corporate Social Responsibility. The Green Transformation Workbench is a framework that aligns processes, people and infrastructure of an enterprise to realize targets on carbon emissions. It implements a methodical approach that was devised to analyze green transformation opportunities and make business cases for transformation initiatives and thereby provides decision-support to the consultants. Unlike the traditional consulting methods and tools in the domain, the Workbench effectively addresses issues such as scalability of methodology, data and knowledge management, method enforcement, asset reuse and governance, consolidated views of upstream and downstream analyses well, to name a few. The Workbench is a practitioner’s tool for business transformation addressing the issues. The Green Transformation Workbench builds on IBM’s component business model [9, 17] and offers a consolidated view into data center operational components, processes, metric and infrastructure. It provides an intuitive way to evaluate and understand various opportunities in infrastructure consolidation and operational improvement. It embodies structured analytical models, both qualitative and quantitative, to enhance the consultants’ practices. It provides diagnostics in data center operations based on benchmark data and business case analyses to the proposed green solutions. The Green Transformation Workbench has been instantiated with data from real-world data centers and applied to address a client situation as a case study.
By: Shyam Gonella;Juhnyoung Lee; Shyhkwei Chen; Chun Hua Tian
Published in: RC24774 in 2009
LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:
This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.
Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .