Knowledge management: naturally green

"This calculator takes just a few minutes to use," says Stoker, "and suggests ways to improve energy use. It might be something as simple as printing double-sided, or something more dramatic, such as converting paper to electronic documents and automating workflow."

At a more complex level, consulting firms provide guidance and have also developed software tools for conducting audits and reducing emissions (see "The Greening of Software," KMWorld October 2008). Many government organizations are focusing on reducing energy consumption and are carrying out audits to identify areas of potential savings. The U.S. Department of Energy  provides a list of software tools supporting energy efficiency (http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/). The American Bar Association devotes a section of its Web site to "the sustainable law office," which discusses the law profession’s use of resources, particularly paper, and lists best practices for sustainability.

Virtual travel

Web conferencing is not new, but rising fuel costs have contributed to more rapid uptake. Gartner predicted a worldwide growth of over 20 percent in the revenues for Web conferencing solutions in 2008, to reach a market size of $2 billion. Products such as WebEx, now owned by Cisco, Lotus’ Sametime from IBM and LiveMeeting from Microsoft are among the leading products in that market.

IBM uses Sametime for its own Web conferencing, and has reported savings of $8 million per month in travel costs for more than 300,000 users worldwide. Over 1,000 Web conferences per day take place, including both internal and external users. Audio and video conferencing are also available, but are less popular than Web conferencing.

In addition to providing travel savings, Web conferencing also enhances communication with customers and fosters interaction among workers, which can improve customer satisfaction and support business objectives such as innovation.

Training needs can also be met with Web conferencing, reducing what would otherwise be extensive travel requirements. The online flower supplier, 1-800flowers.com, frequently had to send trainers to many locations to instruct seasonal delivery staff for peak periods such as holidays. Once the company implemented WebEx, its travel costs dropped, and employee retention increased, WebEx reports. With training materials made available online through the WebEx Training Center, printing costs for manuals were eliminated. Increased ratings from trainees indicated their satisfaction with the new approach.

Greening the IT infrastructure

Improvements in energy utilization by IT departments benefit KM applications along with other enterprise applications, because they share the same infrastructure. For example, HP provides devices for monitoring and controlling temperatures in data centers.

"Two-thirds of energy in data centers goes into cooling them, rather than providing energy for the servers, storage and networking," says Eitenbichler. "With sensors next to each rack, enterprises can carry out 3-D heat mapping, and adjust the speed of fans near the hot spots." HP’s Dynamic Smart Cooling (DSC) can cut cooling costs in half, according to Eitenbichler.

Virtualization also helps reduce energy costs by making better use of IT resources. Storage virtualization is the process of separating the physical and logical aspects of a computer system. A single drive can be presented as multiple drives, or alternatively, multiple drives can be combined into one apparent drive.

"Utilization of most servers and storage is between 10 and 50 percent," Eitenbichler says. "This rate can be increased to as high as 90 percent for storage with an HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, which automatically provisions storage as the volume of information increases."

Virtualizing servers and keeping drives as full as possible reduces the number of physical devices that are required, and subsequently the amount of energy needed to maintain enterprise applications