ALM software solutions for greener IT

Just how important is environmental awareness and going green today? So much so that not doing anything about it personally and organizationally is going to leave you outside the mainstream.

This is an industry about to take off; green even has its own search engine – Truevert. Saving and sustaining the environment in the 21st century has become a far more complex initiative, which extends beyond reducing smokestack emissions and toxic waste. Today, “going green” is a watch word not only in consumers’ homes, but also in the world’s business thinking.

The data on the dramatic changes to the environment and climate cannot be ignored by either consumers or businesses. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, carbon dioxide emissions or “greenhouse gases” increased by 20% from 1990 to 2004 [1]. Unless businesses and consumers make conscious choices about energy use, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise in the future.

There are many reasons for going green beyond consumer and environmental concerns – each of which impacts profitability and competitive advantage. From an IT perspective, energy costs continue to escalate because the growth in applications and business workloads doubles every two years, increasing the need for the power and cooling of servers and data centers. One watt of application computing power requires more than 30 watts of support power [2]. Within the last five years, the total amount of energy used by U.S. data centers has doubled, with those energy costs representing approximately 10 to 15% of a typical IT budget.

Beyond those traditional energy needs, organizations must also ensure that they manage their energy use more efficiently since regulatory mandates for water usage and carbon emissions have become stricter and are scrutinized more closely by environmental agencies. As they seek out green products and manufacturers who employ green production methods, customers are more closely watching corporations.

Clearly, creating a business case for designing and producing energy efficient products – and doing so in a process using renewable energy sources – is vitally important to staying profitable and competitive as a responsible corporate citizen.

With these factors in mind, technology organizations must build a business case for an environmentally conscious approach to managing their software applications and the processes they support – “green IT.” Traditionally, green IT initiatives have begun with better management of power and cooling in data centers. While this is an excellent place to start, managing hardware resources is not the only way to achieve green IT – there has to be a concerted effort to monitor and increase the scope of abatement for carbon emissions.

Understanding the regulatory environment

Establishing green IT requires a clear understanding of the global regulatory environment, the financial incentives for green business practices, and how independent watchdog organizations act as intermediaries between consumers and corporations. Through the Clean Development Mechanism and carbon credits trading, it is estimated that the value of carbon credits being traded as futures contracts could be worth $3.1 trillion by 2020 [3]. The greenhouse gas emissions industry is waiting for the passage of cap-and-trade regulation in North America, potentially its biggest market.

The independent, not-for-profit Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) publishes information on climate change-related issues and other environmental concerns gleaned from responses to their annual information requests. In a press release dated September 22, 2008, CDP stated that data collected from 1,550 major global companies indicated that the business world is taking these issues seriously and considers them drivers “of risk and opportunity.” The findings also indicated that investors are taking carbon disclosure and climate change reporting more seriously when assessing the “risks, liabilities and opportunities within their portfolios.”

Clearly, organizations pursuing green IT initiatives can benefit by creating carbon offsets through projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as pioneered by the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrialized countries and the European Community to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels between its first commitment period of 2008 and 2012 [4]. Yet, organizations can start making a difference immediately with green IT by pursuing carbon abatement policies that start with smarter software and systems that can help to foster green business practices.

Going green beyond the data center

Although IT equipment and facilities requirements account for only 2% of worldwide carbon emissions, business software applications also create carbon footprints across the supply chain [5]. Making software applications greener is an innovative way to achieve green IT goals.

Therefore, visionary CIOs will want to look beyond the data center to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbons by using innovative software solutions for business process improvement and higher quality systems development. For example, using automated software suites in an application lifecycle management (ALM) environment can help promote achieving carbon neutrality through:

• Automating and modeling core development and business processes to control energy use throughout the lifecycle
• Promoting telecommuting and reduce business travel with online collaboration– as well as bring system development teams together for greater efficiency and quality
• Conserving energy and physical resources through more efficient use of underutilized servers
• Reducing the need for extra IT resources by optimizing applications
• Taking advantage of off-peak hours to schedule workloads when energy costs are lower
• Managing asset lifecycles more effectively
• Creating a “paperless” organization through use of online forms, images, and communication
• Introducing carbon abatement policies in every level and stage of business processes and decision-making routines
• Using embedded software in products to monitor, control and reduce the energy consumed

In addition, business process re-architecture through enterprise architecture (EA) initiatives helps companies in nearly every industry get on the cutting edge of green IT. By helping organizations better understand the current state of their operations, EA can help organizations create a future state that has improved energy efficiency. With an EA in place, organizations can get a view of their integrated business processes, data, applications and systems to determine their optimal state. This enables them to maximize resource conservation by retiring, reusing or repurposing technology and business processes.

ALM software solutions can help organizations achieve green IT by improving efficiencies of people, business operations and products.

How ALM solutions support green IT

IBM Rational provides integrated ALM solutions that support green IT, including:

• Telelogic® System Architect®, which enables green organizational transformation
• Telelogic® Rhapsody®, which supports green application development
• Telelogic® DOORS®, which provides traceability to regulations to prove compliance
• Telelogic® Focal Point™, which aligns business priorities with product and portfolio management
• Telelogic® Synergy™ and Telelogic® Change™ for integrated global systems development and change management

Telelogic System Architect links systems to processes and strategies, so organizations can quickly identify IT infrastructure bloat. System Architect highlights the servers, systems and applications related to organizational business processes, as well as the alignment of these processes to organizational goals and objectives. The analytics and reporting tools of System Architect can help business managers analyze the organization’s operations, and then establish a blueprint for energy impact analysis. They can identify redundant and under-utilized systems and servers by analyzing and visualizing power consumption by location, application, processes, strategies and staff. As a result, organizations can consolidate and decommission servers, leading to lower energy utilization of the enterprise – and cost savings. For example, an IBM Rational customer in the UK credit card industry leveraged System Architect to save $4.2 million in annual maintenance by decommissioning servers.

System Architect enables managers to easily import this information from spreadsheets and other documents via XML or CSV import. They can also customize these properties so that they match what the IT department is capturing. Once this information is represented in the enterprise architecture, they can see its relevance to other parts of the organization, so they can make better decisions on where to cut power or improve efficiency.

IBM also offers tools, such as Tivoli, that automatically collect information on a network’s energy consumption and make it accessible to business managers, as well as IT.

Good corporate citizenship involves the creation of green products for both consumers and industry. Telelogic Rhapsody, a model-driven development environment that addresses the needs of systems engineers can be used to develop more efficient embedded devices that can monitor and control energy use in electronics. For example, Telelogic Rhapsody enables developers to design batteries that are more efficient, take less time to charge, last longer, and have a lower impact on the environment. An IBM Rational customer in the automotive industry is using Rhapsody to accelerate development of a revolutionary hybrid transmission for medium-sized trucks. The new transmission uses hydraulic energy storage rather than electrical battery storage. Developers are using Rhapsody to model and automatically code the embedded software for the transmission control systems.

Telelogic Synergy, for software configuration and release management, is being used by automotive companies and suppliers to build smarter, greener cars by enabling the rapid development of variants and effective delivery of innovative software. Also, its centralized repository model can reduce the number of servers and server workloads for systems development. Other IBM Rational customers are using Telelogic Change for change management to enable electronic signatures, which reduces reliance on paper documents, a key factor in carbon abatement policies. We might be closer to the day when companies will be required to establish ERUs (Emission Reduction Units) or their derivatives on their balance sheets as per FAS (Financial Accounting Standard) compliance. Telelogic Change and DOORS can provide the traceability needed to establish such an asset on the balance sheet.

Integrated ALM solutions also help organizations demonstrate compliance with green regulations. Telelogic DOORS allows organizations to trace green regulations and constraints to their system and software developments to prove that they are compliant. These regulations may differ between geographies, which means that requirements management can be very complex and impossible to track using spreadsheets. DOORS reduces the downtime and risk associated with audits, saving the company money.

An IBM Rational customer in the telecommunications industry uses DOORS and Telelogic Focal Point, a software solution for product management and product portfolio management, to manage the flow of requirements from multiple project stakeholders to product development teams. Both general and specific requirements, including green requirements, are placed in Focal Point for analysis. Through an automated process, the development team can give feedback to the environmental team to confirm that the requirements have been accepted, implemented, verified and delivered. As such, the company has full control of green requirements in their product and can easily continually modify them to comply with changing regulations.

Conclusion

Cutting carbon emissions must go beyond guilt-driven mandates. It is not just a feel-good theme for policing ourselves. There are substantial profits to be derived from developing sustainable products and policies. Every bit of efficiency created by green IT initiatives today will save the organization even more money over the long term. That means less pressure on future IT budgets, and more capital for strategic investments.

Creating more energy efficient data centers does more than just reduce energy costs, though. More efficient servers deliver more computing performance per kilowatt, providing your company with faster throughput and speed-to-market related to decisions based on your data. But saving energy in the data centers is just one step to creating a green IT environment. Energy efficiency can be achieved throughout the business with automated business and development processes driven by integrated ALM applications. From electronic signatures that eliminate the need for paper forms, to embedded software that reduces the carbon footprint of today’s most popular consumer durables, ALM software solutions can play a significant role in creating a business case for green IT.

As governments, environmental organizations and consumers push for greener products and production methods, CIOs must find ways to continually reduce energy use and expense across the entire spectrum of IT operations. Organizations have to ascertain their carbon footprint and establish a policy for reducing emissions. Achieving green IT as a responsible corporate citizen will not only serve the goal of creating a greener, smarter planet, but also result in tangible cost benefits and future competitive advantage.

Learn more about the benefits of global ALM. Go to www.telelogic.com/globalalm and register to download the free white paper, Taking Your Software Process Maturity to the Next Level: Building Better Software with ALM.

Footnotes:
[1] http://www.epa.gov/OMS/climate/420f05004.htm
[2] http://www.springboardresearch.com/
[3] http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2008_May_22/ai_n25450757
[4] http://unfccc.int/files/press/news_room/press_releases_and_advisories/application/pdf/20061026_kyoto_protocol_set_to_help_green_economies-english.pdf
[5] June 2008 "IBM Software: A green strategy for your entire organization"