In a recent post, Heather Clancy, who adeptly covers “green tech” issues for the ZDNet GreenTech Pastures blog, pointed her readers to a new book from Greg Schulz, founder of the StorageIO Group. As Heather points out, the book’s primary focus is on tips and technologies for configuring and deploying IT infrastructure resources (i.e. data centers) in a highly virtualized manager. But, from a broader sense Schultz seems to advocate technologies – like blade servers, cloud computing and virtualization – that are primarily good for the business and also harbor some level of green benefits. Instead of the other way around, which is looking at IT through “green” tinted glasses, or within the scope of a “green IT” agenda.

Process automation and improvement can have a similar effect. BPM and Enterprise Architecture modeling are initiatives primarily used to drive efficiency, reduce redundancies and generate cost-savings, but it can also have significant benefits in reducing a company’s carbon footprint. Consider the environmental damages caused by paper and fuel consumption.

Laura Mooney, Metastorm’s VP of Corporate Communications, recently wrote about this topic in a eWeek article. And more specifically, she gave the following example as an illustration of her point:

United States timber industry statistics estimate that more than 16 million trees are harvested each year for paper production. More specifically, according to the book Natural Capitalism, the average American office worker is estimated to use a sheet of paper every 12 minutes, and to dispose of 100 to 200 pounds of paper every year. BPM software can serve as the common platform for eliminating paper and automating processes throughout organizations. Depending on the number of organizations that reduce paper use through process automation, the environmental savings based on those estimates can be significant—as can the cost savings.

You can read more of Laura’s article here. When discussing Green IT, we generally tend to think about the configuration of physical systems toward the goal of reducing power consumption. But environmentally sustainable business practices and processes can have an even greater impact on a company’s carbon footprint.

Related posts:

1. Going green – top five benefits As the G20 summit took place last week in London,...
2. Another Green customer success story Last week, we had a blog post about sustainable business...
3. Lean process agility breeds green viability The new normal business approach is all about purity, and...
4. BPM and Green technology being showcased at CeBIT 2009 CeBIT, one of the most important global IT fairs, today...
5. Sustainable business and green IT Green issues dominated last week’s headlines in light of the...