Going Green: A Holistic Approach to Transform Business

In recent years environmental and energy conservation issues have taken the central theme in the global business arena. The reality of rising energy cost and their impact on international affairs coupled with the different kinds of environmental issues has shifted the social and economic consciousness of the business community. Hence, the business community is now in search of an eco-friendly business model. This paper highlights the concept of green business and their needs in the current global scenario. 1. Green Computing: A Gate way to Green Business Green computing is the study and practice of efficient and eco-friendly computing resources. Now it is not only under the attention of environmental organizations, but also other business industries. In recent years, companies in the computer industry have come to realize that going green inspired business model is the best for their interest. In other words, the green computing is nothing but the efficient use of computers and computing methods. Recently, the triple bottom line (abbreviated as "TBL" or "3BL" and also known as "people, planet, profit") is becoming a new measure for business performance (Brown, et. al, 2006). These three pillars capture an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measurement of organizational (and societal) success mainly the economical, ecological and social status of the organization. This triple bottom line concept is important when it comes to anything green and the same goes for green computing. Many businesses simply focus on a bottom line, rather than a green triple bottom line particularly in computer industry. The idea of green business is to make the whole process surrounding the computers friendlier to the environment, economy, and society. This means manufacturers create computers in such a way that reflects the triple bottom line positively. Once computers are sold the business or people use the computer in a International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT) Vol.2, No.3, August 2010 23 green way by reducing power usage and disposing of them properly or recycling them efficiently. This idea is to make computers from beginning to end a green product one. In 2009, Technology Business Research (TBR) announced that Dell took the No. 1 position in its inaugural Corporate Sustainability Index (CSI) Benchmark Report. The report measures the environmental initiatives of 40 companies in the computer hardware, software, professional services & network and telecommunication sectors. Scoring 317.9 points, Dell is 52 points ahead of the firm positioned second in the overall CIS ranking index (Round Rock, 2009). IBM also recently launched consulting services, which is based on the Lean Six Sigma principles of efficiency. This consulting service is aimed at examining the use of energy and water and subsequently providing the control measures to conserve the energy. According to the company sources, IBM in 1990 saved around 4.6 billion Kwh of electricity and prevented emission of almost 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. So, essentially a reduction in wastage and recycling of the used materials is required to ensure the green IT. There have been many approaches to green computing suggested by Mike (Mike Ebbers et al, 2009). According to VMware Inc. report the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the data center announced the opening of a new green IT data center in East Wenatchee, Washington. Throughout its design and build out, VMware chose industry best practices to create an energy-efficient facility that utilizes cutting-edge technology and maximizes the use of VMware virtualization software. As a result, VMware has achieved $5 million savings per year from the said data centre (Rakesh Kumar, 2007). According to SUN, Today's modern network economics requires high computing capability for searches, Web services, e-commerce, traffic control, or supply chain management. The said services required high power computing with significant capacity. SUN approached the problem by pushing the physical technology of the CPU frequency namely, the number of cycles that a piece of silicon can do. But it quickly run into the law of physics which states that when the transistors switch-on and switched-off quickly, then there is a corresponding amount of power consumption and the heat generated by the transistors grows proportionately. Considering that networking it has a quadratic effect where the interaction grows geometrically. The industry has reached a point where it has driven power consumption of these products to a point that deviates from what the customer can utilize (MTB, 2009). One of the VIA Technologies’ ideas is to reduce the "carbon footprint" of users i.e the amount of greenhouse gases produced, which is measured in units of carbon dioxide. Greenhouse gases naturally blanket the Earth and are responsible for its more or less stable temperature. An increase in the concentration of the main greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorocarbons are believed to be responsible for Earth's increasing temperature. This change could lead to severe floods, droughts, rising sea levels, and other environmental effects, affecting both life and the world's economy (Greg Horn, 2006). The energy star program encourages manufactures to create energy-efficient devices that require little power in idle condition. For example, many devices switch to standby mode after a specified number of inactive minutes. Personal computers, monitors and printers should comply with the energy star program, which was developed by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the United States Environmental Agency (EPA). International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT) Vol.2, No.3, August 2010 24 Therefore, computers and devices that meet energy star guidelines display an energy star label in all its products (Roy and Bag, 2009). Finally, the paper is organized as follows: The Section-2 discusses the concept and classification of green business. Section-3 discusses the drivers of the green business and the paper is concluded in Section4.