Green IT

Application Design for Green Reporting

Perhaps the phrase “Green IT” and various variations of same is over-used, however I suspect that its prevalence does cause us to think “green”, even if we’re sick of doing so.  When I chose “Application Design for Green Reporting” perhaps you wondered why I might have chosen such a title.  Good question

Seriously though, my reasoning is simple - and that is my belief that we as developers can and should do everything we can to ensure an appropriate use of resources - and in those resources I would include not only the obvious paper, but also disk space  (since inefficient disk usage may result in the need for added disks, and thus more energy used). 

Saving paper is certainly the easiest way to design for green, and we as developers have the opportunity to affect paper usage in a dramatic way - those steps may include:

• Offering on-screen views in lieu of paper
• Offering ability to print to a document such as PDF
• Designing reports using minimal header and footer margins
• Working with users to ensure ALL data printed is used
• Working with different font sizes to reduce paper needs
• Reviewing sub-total lines, are they used or just there because…?
• Reviewing page breaks - Are ALL page breaks required?

Additional Notes:

• Printing to PDF documents is great, but … here is an area where disk usage should be considered and an appropriate way to maintain (delete) out-dated or no longer needed “printouts”
• Margins in general require review with a critical eye.  Header and footer areas should contain only information useful to the users.  Use one liners wherever feasible.
• If a report will be going only to a laser printer, pages required for printing a report can sometimes be significantly reduced by going from two-lines per record to a single line per record - all with the same information only by changing to landscape mode
• A proper mix of font sizes can also significantly reduce paper use, while at the same time ooften producing a much more readable report!
• I have found many an opportunity to eliminate sub-total lines which has resulted in great paper savings
• Page break review might be a situation such as providing an alternative to printing the report with a page break at each customer change - or not.  Providing an option rather than forcing the page break can make a hugh difference.  Make the default to the “green” choice of no page-break.

How many pages have you saved today?

The “Paperless” Office — Myth or Real Possibility?

Let’s face it — paper is not going away!  The “Paperless” office is a myth!  However, what is a real possibility is the office with “less paper” — and there are many indications that it is happening.  I just can’t imagine a time when managers that I’ve worked with will not want their “hard copy” of a report — “just in case…” — of what?  Who knows? …but “just in case…”! 

We who manage IT have a responsibility to conserve resources wherever we can - it is both good business as well as good for the environment.  One need not do much more than watch most offices in operation for a couple of hours to identify wasteful and unnecessary paper usage.  There is much that we can contribute to improve office procedures to use “less paper”.

From the software design standpoint, a critical review of reports which get run regularly might indicate that certain data is never used, and by eliminating the data paper volume may be reduced as much as 60% — that’s a serious savings over time, and probably well worth the investment to change the report.  Also with regard to reports — has the capability to print to disk, pdf or maybe fax been made available for the report?  How many times I’ve seen reports first printed to the laser printer, then brought to the fax machine to be sent!  (Then the report put into the waste paper basket!).  Another IT suggestion may be the investment required to provide duplexing printers — using half the paper per print job!  What a concept!  Yet another possible contribution to “less paper” can be incorporating a document imaging system or scanning into an application.

I suspect there are many opportunites that you can identify in your organization where a little bit of creative IT (Intuitive Thinking) can result in the “less paper” office — but paperless?  Forget it!.

Power and Dollar Savings for IT

Green IT — the very name for me conjurs up images of a lush field in Vermont on a sunny day — the air is clear and clean — just a beautiful sight!  Then from there my images go to the “long green” currencies which I’ve had in my hand, and surely the saving of the “long green” speaks loud and clear to any well managed IT department.  Yes Virginia, there is a green IT — and it can save the green of the fields, and the green cash in the company coffers.

There have been a number of articles published recently about green IT and saving power.  Certainly the increasingly popular use of server virtualization where multiple physical servers are replaced by a single physical server running multiple virtual servers can produce a dramatic energy savings.  I suspect that one possibly over-looked area of potential savings exists by replacing existing “old” computers with up-to-date energy efficient systems.

A recent article in January’s Microsoft TechNet Magazine by Jim Lynch of Techsoup.org got me thinking green again.  The article “What On Earth Is Green IT?” is available on-line.  Available on-line at Techsoup is a useful 1 page list entitled “10 Green Technology Resolutions for 2009“.  Both are worth taking a look at.

Is this Green IT?

I must be getting cynical in my old age — or maybe just cynical when it comes to marketing!  Either way, I just have to say something about the advertisement I recently saw saying to “Make Your Company Greener” by hosting your server with them.  Actually the idea is very catchy (Hey — it caught my eye!).  I even browsed the ad more than once, and now I’m blogging about it!

The claims for their service are nobel, the marketing spin excellent - but is this green IT?  I think NOT!

I think green IT involves much more than virtualizing servers, although that is certainly a step in the right direction.  I think it also involves re-thinking the business processes and how they affect the need for the multitude of equipment which we so readily add.  I think it involves a major shift toward the “paperless office” and all that the concept has promised.  Green IT won’t happen overnight - it isn’t a place to go!  Rather I think “Green IT” is a way of doing business, in fact, a way of life.

On the way to Green IT

Green IT — you’ve read and heard a lot about it recently.  Green (whatever) is the color of the day, week - indeed future.

However, I can’t help but think about all the trees we were going to save by having our computers do all the work for us, and then present results without paper!  Remember the paperless office?  Talk about the paperless society?  …and wouldn’t paperless be a good green initiative?  The paperless office sounded like a good idea at the time, but I venture to say that for most companies efforts to be paperless have gone stagnant - and why is that?

Could it be that perhaps it just doesn’t work?  Could it be that people still want to read or skim over printed pages rather than fuss with a mouse, or read something on a screen limited in its display, and positioned (normally) very differently than say when one reads a book or newspaper?  Have you ever seen someone curled up comfortably in their easy chair reading a computer?  I for one have not!

While I believe we have made great strides in some areas toward minimizing paper use with programs such as on-line libraries of scanned business documents, B2B invoicing, data warehousing and “Business Intelligence - given the increase in data now available because of our faster, more powerful computers I submit that perhaps at best we’re holding our own.  The additional computing power and data analysis has meant mroe computers, which of course means more energy — so we now add in virtualization of said servers - and the cycle starts again.  First we had a prolific growth in physical servers, now it’s virtualized servers - and software wanting to run on its own server spurs more growth. 

Of course there’s also the other green - the long green (aka US $).  We want to do all this “greening” without spending the long green.  Most “green” initiatives don’t save money in the short term, and in the economy of today investment in the long term is limited due to short funds.

Finally there’s the last “green” I’ll refer to — that of the “green” with envy kind of green, also known in a previous era as “keeping up with the Jones’s”.  The Jones’s have something that you perceive as good - so you want it!  So what if it uses up more resources.  While there is a lot at stake for us as a global society by “going green”, I’m seeing much talk, but little action.  Shifting from one resource drain (such as power consumption) to another (such as serving up twice as much paper in printed documents) hardly seems green to me.