Go for the Green ‒ Realize Both Cash and Environmental Savings across the Enterprise

Go for the Green — Realize Both Cash and Environmental Savings across the Enterprise By Laura Mooney, Metastorm There is much debate about the future of our environment, and while no single solution exists, it is clear that future change and "green" improvements must be driven by organizations across all industries on a global basis. In the past, manufacturing firms have been targeted due to the emissions and by-products that often result from product creation; however, now the need has emerged to expand beyond the obvious pollutants and focus more creatively on achieving environmentally friendly and sustainable business operations across the board. In its December 2007 report, "Green IT: The New Industry Shock Wave," Gartner looks at how IT organizations can take a leadership role in driving initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint, establish more environmentally sustainable business practices, and support a greener supply chain. While one definition of greener IT may be reducing the amount of power consumed by systems, there are other ways that IT organizations can more creatively drive change to support the environment — while at the same time also generating significant cost savings for the business. To do this, IT and other corporate stakeholders need to re-examine the fundamental processes and practices that drive the business on a daily basis. Think about these basics: • Paper: How much paper do you consume as an organization? • Fuel: How much fuel is wasted on inter-office location mailings and paper mailings to customers and suppliers? • Hardware & Software: How often do you bring on yet another specialized application or system to support a single business process or business function? As an IT organization, you have the power today to leverage technology to significantly reduce consumption across all three of these areas. 1 | Go for the Green — Realize Both Cash and Environmental Savings across the Enterprise www.metastorm.com In 2008, the City of New By adopting and standardizing on a common Business Process Orleans will use Metastorm Management (BPM) and Enterprise Architecture and Modeling (EA) technology platform throughout your organization, you can have an BPM software to take its immediate impact on both cost saving and environmental contracts management improvements and deliver a platform for ongoing improvements and process online. "This year, long-term sustainability. At the same time, you can also drive the city will process strategic business process improvement that will ultimately help you between $1 billion and $2 gain significant operational advantages. billion worth of contracts. Each contract moves by manila folder through approximately eight offices. So it goes from my desk to What are BPM and EA? your desk, and if you put it under a stack of papers, Business Process Management is an approach to business process you may not find it for two improvement that focuses on modeling and understanding how you do business, looking at ways to improve the efficiency of key months. In the meantime, business processes, automating processes, and measuring, people are calling the mayor monitoring, and fine-tuning processes for ongoing improvement and saying, 'Where's my across your operations. A BPM suite is a set of technology that contract?'" allows you to achieve effective business process management and support continuous improvement. The best BPM suites are designed — Government Computer News, to provide a platform for deploying an unlimited number of March 17, 2008. processes of all types on a single technology platform. This reduces the need for multiple applications to support various business needs. Enterprise Architecture and Modeling are functions designed to understand the current assets (systems, information, people, products) in an organization and their interdependencies and to plan new models and asset acquisitions to support future growth. EA and modeling technology allows for the graphical modeling of the enterprise, collaboration on models and enterprise strategy, and the management of enterprise asset portfolios. Together, EA and BPMS technology provides a common framework of understanding that helps organizations align strategy with execution and foster collaboration between the business and IT functions in an organization. A common platform for BPM and EA provides significant short-term and long-term benefits in the form of greater visibility, lower costs, increased productivity, enhanced agility and response time, and numerous other positive benefits. But BPM and EA technologies also have the potential to deliver a lesser known value proposition — greener operations. 2 | Go for the Green — Realize Both Cash and Environmental Savings across the Enterprise www.metastorm.com Tetra, a global manufacturer of aquarium products, used BPM and EA as Green IT Metastorm BPM to move its engineering change request Initiatives (ECN) process online. The Reduce Paper solution allowed the organization to eliminate In the quest to eliminate paper, BPM software proves to be a paper and costly mailings highly effective solution because it not only allows both between offices and to allow commercial and government organizations to create online forms engineers, scientists and and documents, but it also allows organizations to incorporate other knowledge workers to those online documents into automated processes that remove collaborate on product the need to manually route and track paper. As a result, BPM eliminates the cost and environmental burden of paper, while at changes online.