Sustainability in IT - Essay Example

? Sustainability in IT Table of Contents Introduction 3 IT Industry and Software Engineering 3 Sustainability in IT industry 3 Discussion & Analysis 4 Principles of Sustainability 4 IBM: A Brief Overview 6 Sustainability at IBM 6 Sustainability: Is it really important? 7 IBM: A step further towards sustainability 8 Benefits of Sustainability 9 Conclusion 9 References 10 Introduction Achieving sustainable development has become one of the major challenges of the modern day business. Organizations around the world are striving hard to achieve growth in a sustainable manner. The economic perspective of sustainability is about creating a long lasting trade system. On the other hand, corporate suitability is about focusing on the impact of business on the environment and society. The adoption of principles pertaining to sustainable development is therefore extremely important (Newsome, Moore and Dowling, 2002, p. 303). Nevertheless, in reality sustainability and business do not makes a good pair as organizations often struggle to implement sustainability measures. IT Industry and Software Engineering Information technology can be portrayed as a tool which is used to record, store, classify and process data into meaningful information. The information or the process data is then used for different application. Software Engineering is another major area of the IT industry. It is defined as the application of a quantifiable, disciplined and systematic approach towards the development, design and maintenance of a software package. In software engineering, sustainability is a crucial factor. Although software engineering does not have any direct impact on the ecology due to its virtual nature, the procedure employed for creating it impacts the environment. The IT industry has been a major producer of wastages basically due to its shorter product life cycle. Therefore, depending upon this phenomenon IT companies throughout the world are trying their best to embrace sustainable growth. Sustainability in IT industry Although the large number of studies has been carried out about sustainability, the studies related to the impact and advantage of sustainability on the IT industry have been hardly done before. With buzzwords such as ‘Green computing’ and ‘Green IT’ the relationship between IT and sustainability got strengthened. The primary rationale behind adopting sustainability in IT is not only due to the rules of government, but companies are also becoming socially and environmentally responsible. Now to illustrate the subject of the project in broader way, a particular company which practices sustainable development will be chosen. Once the company gets determined, the topic will be addressed in the context of the company. On reviewing various IT companies around the world the appropriate company for this project is IBM. Discussion & Analysis Principles of Sustainability Sustainability has always been a subject that has discussed along with corporate social responsibility. The principles of sustainability are highly dependent on the aspects of corporate social responsibility. In general, there are six sustainability principles which help a community to ensure social, environmental, and economic systems get well integrated. The principles of sustainability are as follows: 1. Maintain and try to improve the living standards of the residents. The quality of life one leads is highly dependent upon the community where the individual lives. Some of the vital components of a community include health care, education, housing, income, legal rights and employments. Hence it becomes the duty of the organization to look after the welfare of the society and preserve the environment where it is presently operating. 2. Try to enhance the economic vitality of the community. In order to achieve sustainability, it is imperative to have a viable local economy. Furthermore, the economy which is sustainable also remains diversified so that it does not get disturbed by any of the external or internal disasters. Therefore, organizations should try to enhance the economic viability. 3. Promote intergenerational and social equity. The opportunities and resources of a sustainable community remain available to every individual who exists within the society irrespective of the cultural background, religion, age, etc. Moreover, a community which is sustainable neither destroys and depletes any kind of natural resources nor creates any form of unnecessary hazards. 4. Maintain and try to make a greener environment. A community which is sustainable believes that it exists within the natural ecosystem. It always tries to find ways by which it can co-exist with the natural environment. Hence it contributes highly towards environmental preservation. 5. Incorporate adversity pliability and easing into its actions and decisions. A community should try to remain flexible as much as possible. Hence it should prepare itself in such a way that any natural disaster, such as earthquake, floods, tornados, hurricane, etc. causes least effect. 6. Employment of a harmonized building, participatory process while making decisions. In the process of achieving sustainability within the community, a participatory process is of utmost importance. The process mainly engages all the stakeholders to play their part in maintaining a sustainable environment (Monday, 2002). IBM: A Brief Overview International Business Machines Corporation, or what is commonly known as IBM, is a US based multinational consulting and Technology Company. IBM is one of the worlds’ biggest providers of hardware, software and technology services. The company was founded by Charles Ranlett Flint in the year 1911. Presently the company is headquartered at Armonk, New York, U.S. Initially IBM was founded as Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) due to the merger of three companies. The merger took place between the international time recording company, the tabulating machine company and the computing scale company. However, in the year 1924 CTR changed its name to IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, 2012). According to the Fortune 500 list for the year 2012, IBM is ranked at the 19th position. The major competitors of IBM are Accenture, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Toshiba, Dell and Xerox among others (Yahoo Finance, n.d.). Sustainability at IBM Organizations nowadays are concerned about the environmental and social responsibilities as one of their core strategic goals like never before. A recent survey revealed that the importance of CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility has increased. IBM is one such company which remains highly focused towards the preservation of society and environment. In order to be sustainable, the company is now embracing particularly new objectives. The objectives are mainly related to the optimization of operation that improves the social and environmental outcomes in such a way that it enhances the overall performance of the company. According to the 2011 sustainability report of IBM, the company has managed to save around $43 million in the energy expenses last year. One of the initiatives of the company towards the sustainable development is the ‘smarter Planet’. There are initiatives through which the company strives to maintain a greener planet. With the help of clients and innovative practices IBM tries to maintain an environmental friendly atmosphere. IBM has mainly developed a comprehensive and thoughtful approach towards corporate citizenship: for example, in environment preservation, economic development of the community in which it operates, health, education, literacy, culture and language. Furthermore, it remains extremely cautious in each of its business activities. The global environmental management system of the company ensures the fact that the company remains vigilant in the protection of environment across all the functional activities of the company (IBM, n.d.). Sustainability: Is it really important? The concept of sustainable management can be termed as the long-term concurrent optimization of social, ecological and economical objectives for generating or sustaining a better financial performance of a venture. With increasing impact of information system on the ecology, economy and society, organization which belongs to this industry are trying their best to practise sustainable management (Erek and Zarnekow, Schmidt and Kolbe, 2009, p. 1). The primary rationale behind this practise is to achieve risk avoidance, cost reduction, and improve the quality of information system management. Hence we find a number of IT companies extensively using environment packaging and green marketing for their products. Also, the necessity for a sustainable information system came forward due to factors like waste streams, power demands, and future performance expectations towards information technology. Apart from IBM there are other organizations that remain fully consistent with the protection of environment and society. For example, Google operates with 450,000 servers that consume 800million kWh energy per year. In order to reduce this, Google has taken up a number of initiatives. Now the technology giant uses ‘customized evaporative cooling’ to reduce the energy consumption rates. Nonetheless, the impact of information system is far broader and not only remains constrained to CO2 emission and energy consumption. In addition, with the rapid technological progress and short life cycle of products it leads to high waste stream of these products. According to recent studies, among the IT equipment only monitors make up around 25% of the total generated waste. Hence this has forced IT managers, and CIO experts to refurbish the management of information system. Now the issue is not about whether organizations belong to the IT industry cares for environment, but how the environmental issues can be handled efficiently. Hence through the study it can be clearly stated that indeed sustainability proves to be an important function in the industry. Now the study will go deeper to analyse from the perspective of an organization belonging to the IT industry. The next section will try to underpin whether sustainability acts as a mediator for the success of the IT industry or not. IBM: A step further towards sustainability The Green IT strategy of IBM is probably the most innovative and modernized approach towards the sustainability. The strategy is highlighted as the most appropriate solution to the CO2 emission. It also focuses on improving the efficiency of the operations. With this initiative the company will try to achieve greater productivity by spending less resources and energy. This clearly indicates how IBM thought through to reduce the consumption of energy. Some of the evident techniques practised by IBM to ensure least effect and also to achieve cost reduction are asset management, management of energy and the departmental level, sound space utilization, trend analysis, employment of renewable energy during operations, and also optimization of the weather prediction is carried out. Furthermore, IBM has a strategic alliance with Green Sigma that provides IBM monitoring, building and smart grid solutions. On the whole the primary intention or strategy of the company is to ensure reduction of carbon emission. Benefits of Sustainability The company not only helps the environment to be cooler and greener through these practices, but also gets highly benefitted. Some of the benefits are presented below: To start off with the advantages, it is important to mention that sustainability strategy of a company offers them with sustainable competitive advantage. The benefits from sustainability to IBM are real as well as quantifiable. IBM has been able to achieve higher return on investment by reducing the energy use. Also, sustainability helped them to accomplish various projects and offered them with a competitive edge over the competitors. Addressing the issues pertaining to sustainability and environment in a systematic manner offered the company with new opportunities and concentrate on the central business objectives. It also reduced the employee retention and hiring cost, improved the productivity, minimized the manufacturing cost, increased market share and revenue, reduced environmental risk and thereby increased the profit (Willard, 2012, p. 2). Finally, another important advantage for IBM for integrating sustainability is that a new base of customers can be targeted. Moreover, the existing customers will be also highly satisfied with such approaches. Conclusion The report was focused on evaluating the importance of sustainability in the IT industry. The study was exploring whether sustainability played a major role towards the success of this industry or not. It clearly revealed that although software engineering does not have any direct impact on the environment due to its virtual nature, the procedure employed for creating it impacts the environment. It has social impact, economic impact and also environmental impact. In this study the importance of sustainability was assessed by using IBM as the organization. The evaluation of IBM portrayed that IBM has been highly benefitted for being sustainable. Hence on reviewing the findings from the study and evaluating the benefits offered by sustainability, it can be concluded that that sustainability is indeed the mediator of IT systems success. Furthermore, integrating sustainability in the operations IBM has been able to achieve long term viability of the IT projects. References Erek, K., Zarnekow, R., Schmidt, N., and Kolbe, L. M., 2009. Sustainability in Information Systems: Assortment of Current Practices in IS Organizations. 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