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Forewarned is Forearmed - Levels of Sustainability Information

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I am continuing to rewrite my course on Green IT for Boston University using a new text book, Harnessing Green IT, Principles and Practices, Wiley @2012, edited by San Murugesan and G. R. Gangadharan.  I keep finding gems within the text.  In Chapter 9, written by Edward Curry (Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway) and Brian Donnellan (Innovation Value Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway) entitled Sustainable Information Systems and Green Metrics, they talk about the different levels of sustainability information and what is included in each level.

In the Product Level Information, “Understanding the impacts of a product or service requires an analysis of all potential impacts associated with a product, process or service for its entire life cycle.  This is achieved by using a technique known as life cycle assessment.”  Those of you who are familiar with us (EarthPM) and our book, Green Project Management, are aware of the emphasis we placed on life cycle assessment.  We dedicated a full chapter to it and mentioned it in other chapters.  That is how important we feel it is to that intersection between green business and project management.  Looking at the product level, there are four stages of LCA; goal and scope definition, determining what type of information to give to decision makers about a particular product; inventory analysis, data collection “include all data related to the environment (e.g. CO2); impact assessment, the contribution to selected assessment categories (e.g. energy usage); and finally, interpretation, determining confidence levels of results to communicate to stakeholders.

At the Individual Level, it is necessary to understand all of the aspects of sustainability resulting from impacts by individuals.  It included the life cycle assessment of products and services we purchase, materials we use in various construction projects, operations of our primary residence and “private travel,” especially longer airplane flights. 

The Functional Level includes such things as data center efficiencies, data center power metrics, the standard Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) (PUE = Total facility power/IT equipment power) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) (DCiE = 1/PUE = IT equipment power/total facility power x 100%) and new data center measures like Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) (CUE = CO2 emitted (kg CO2) eq /unit of energy (kWh) x (Total data Center Energy/IT equipment energy).

The Organizational Level Information includes establishing sustainability performance metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) like; investment in environmental protection, GHG emissions, water usage, etc.  One can also get to the Regional/City Information Level taking into account quantitative and qualitative criteria around buildings, transportation, water and waste on the city or regional basis.

We believe that by looking at sustainability in “chunks” or level, it will be easier both to convince people of the “why” for sustainability”, and the “how” once there are logical ways to measure it.


Posted by Dave Shirley on: March 03, 2013 11:17 AM | Permalink

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