So one of the biggest changes that has occurred this year is the number of companies that are going “green”. But what irritates me beyond all reason is the fact that going green doesn’t have a standardized meaning and utilization amongst all parties. For instance, I think that companies can achieve a more green status by:

1. Making use of ecologically friendly servers, i.e. servers that have lower power utilization and green manufacturing processes. In searching not that many companies have invested in this type of technology for their servers–it is my guess that people would consider servers to be like any other electronic hardware, turn it on and it works without any regard for how it works or what consumption is made on the post side of things, or what can be done to improve things on the pre and production side of things. My hats off to Dell for starting this, and I would say that I am looking for other companies to also follow suit.
1. Dell
2. Now that you are running green servers, you can utilize virtualization to reduce the over-all foot print of your server infrastructure to consolidate systems that can share hardware. Obviously you will have systems that cannot share hardware, such as database servers or web-servers, but if you are a small to medium size business, you can probably share things like your Active Directory server or LDAP server and email server on the same box. Also you can put virtual servers for your demo environments or staging environments on the same server. Potentially 4+ servers on one piece of hardware. Companies are leary to go to virtualization in their production environments, but when we consider how much of the server is being used at any given time, having more than 1 server hardware for these types of situations is a bit of an over kill if you ask me. I know from experience, that companies look to servers are a dime a dozen, instead of looking at ways that they can be consolidated or utilized in better balance, i.e. moving services from server to server and combining them with other services that have a better balance in server resources so the two services aren’t always fighting for processor time or RAM, etc.
3. Companies typically have different type of employee’s with different requirements in terms of hardware. But one thing that I haven’t seem occur that often is virtual workstations. This can be achieved by using hardware solutions, such as the solution offered by companies like NComputing. What’s really interesting about this type of solution, is when you put it into a contact center environment, where you have agents working at different times and maybe at different stations, the solution offered by NComputing offers both the portability that a user can move to any workstation (to play my own devils advocate, you can also achieve this by using network services on most major OS systems) but also you can reduce the over-all footprint of your hardware, as the need to have a workstation, monitor, keyboard, and mouse is reduced to just a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Also when it comes to the workstation footprint, you can have several agents share one physical computer, and this makes it easier to both manage the OS and users, as well as reducing power consumption, ability to have user’s plug in their own devices, such as USB or Firewire devices, and because you may pair agents on nodes based on their work schedules, you can balance the load on the servers to maximize your over-all productivity and resource availability. Ideally you want the systems to be working at 50% all the time (or higher), instead of having drastic peaks and valleys or periods where the system is just sitting there at 99% idle.
4. LCD’s vs CRT’s. With the reduced cost of LCD’s nowadays, companies should be getting rid of those bulky old CRT monitors and replacing them with Energy Star, high efficiency LCD screens. That is just the first part of the puzzle. The second part is more of a behavioral change, that is to change the behavior of each employee to make sure that they turn OFF their monitor at the end of the day. How many times have I been one of the last out of the office, and I walk by desk after desk where their monitors are left rendering the screen saver or some other silly thing. It’s a major change I grant you that, but if user’s do not get into the habit of being green themselves, then it is a single sided effort that rests on the companies shoulders unnecessarily.

In addition to the technology changes, companies should also make changes such as:

- Eliminate non-biodegradable cups and invest in getting employee’s reusable cups (microwavable) for their hot beverages, and water bottles for their cold beverages. This could also be an opportunity to slap the company logo on a few more things, as employee’s are generally open to getting more company labeled stuff, especially the free kind.

Granted these are simple things and there are tons more, but I think going through these types of exercises will only help to create a standard so that if a company saids that it is a green company, there is a lot of visibility as to what that means.