CIOs are being asked to help corporate sustainability efforts. Increasingly, that has them looking outside the data center.

The idea that Shaw Industries Group Inc., a $4 billion flooring maker, could go wasteless, paperless and powerless may sound like the punch line to a politically correct joke. But in fact, the Dalton, Ga.-based company has since early 2002 been on a quest to reduce its carbon footprint, improve volunteerism, and cut costs associated with waste disposal, energy use and water consumption. What’s more, Shaw Industries expects the IT department to help meet these non-IT goals.

That’s keeping Carlton Beard, Director of IT at Shaw Industries, extremely busy. In addition to running the regular IT operations, Beard and his IT department are advancing the company’s “green” goals, in part, by installing software that tracks everything from how much nylon fiber waste is being generated to how much water the company uses to how much energy each of its processes consumes, among other things. “We in IT have a seat at the table,” Beard says.

Beard and the IT team are part of what Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant San Murugesan — he’s also co-editor of a new book, Harnessing Green IT: Principles and Practices (Wiley, 2011) — calls the next wave of green IT, or Green IT 2.0. The IT department concentrates on sustainability efforts outside the walls of the data center and the IT department. Green CIOs help and, in some cases, lead enterprisewide sustainability projects that also improve profitability, competitiveness and innovation. “IT typically contributes only 2 to 3 percent of the greenhouse emissions of a business,” Murugesan explains. “The rest of that 97 or 98 percent comes from inside a company — travel, electricity and heating, manufacturing, supply chain. But IT can help reduce emissions with all of the above.”

CIOs can even use “green” projects to enable the business to change at its very core, says Cynthia Curtis, Chief Sustainability Officer at CA Technologies. “As you start down the path, you find people thinking beyond their job scope to other places and areas across the company that could help streamline processes, find efficiency gains or ways to reduce waste,” she says. “The right software program provides a platform of common ground and common data points for discussion, bringing facilities, IT, finance and other aspects of the business together for greater, more comprehensive results.”

Green IT 2.0 couldn’t come at a better time. Today many countries require large companies to report on their carbon emissions; some also levy carbon taxes. In addition, companies seek to reduce their overhead by targeting such recurring charges as waste removal, electricity and travel. Brand perception and customer satisfaction are at stake, too. Customers — including other large enterprises — increasingly want to purchase goods and services from organizations that share a common goal of reducing, reusing and recycling.

Until now, none of this has affected IT. Businesses have put most of the onus on facilities, real estate and other management functions to track and report on carbon and waste. Manufacturing sometimes has a role, too, as it must track a product’s impact on the environment.

But a new class of software has emerged that positions IT as a key stakeholder in this kind of environmental tracking and reporting. These new solutions can address building management, water management, energy management and carbon management. “Now we’re at a point where the CIO is collaborating with facilities and environmental health and safety managers to make an enterprisewide difference,” says Stuart Neumann, a Senior Manager at analyst firm Verdantix.

Green Software

Wyndham Worldwide, a $4 billion (revenue) hospitality company with more than 55 brands and 26,000+ employees in more than 100 countries, is a good example. The company uses ecoSoftware from CA Technologies to track and measure its carbon and waste footprint. The software was implemented through Wyndham Green, a global sustainability program headed by Faith Taylor, Wyndham Worldwide’s VP of Sustainability and Innovation, and implemented by an internal green council in more than 20 countries.

Before implementing the software, Wyndham tracked its carbon footprint via spreadsheets, but this process was inefficient, says Dave Blodgett, VP of IT and Data Center Operations. For example, comparing different properties was difficult, as was figuring out why a specific location had increased its electricity or water usage.

Wyndham isn’t alone in finding the new green software tools a big advance over yesterday’s cobbled-together reporting processes, especially since many of the new tracking requirements are complex. Tracking carbon, energy and sustainability data requires the collection of sophisticated data from a variety of disparate sources within the business. “Energy data may [require someone] reading from the meter that sits in a basement or office, flight data that comes from the travel department, and water consumption that might come from the facility manager, along with how much waste is going into landfills,” explains Tony Kelly, Director of New Business Services at Capgemini BPO, which provides a managed sustainability data collection management service that incorporates ecoSoftware from CA Technologies.

“All that data needs to be translated into a common currency, and the proxy is usually carbon,” says Kelly. He compares the process to the issues faced when trying to consolidate financial information across international boundaries. “Now the IT person can provide the support so the company can create a constant, repeatable source of energy and sustainability data that meets the needs of compliance,” Kelly adds.

Then there’s the issue of savings — money, manpower and time — that can be realized once the data collection process is automated. Capgemini U.K., a division of Capgemini, saw big savings earlier this year when it outsourced all of its sustainability data management and reporting to Capgemini BPO’s sustainability data management service. Previously, Capgemini U.K. had been manually collecting and analyzing data from approximately 30 data sources each month. The process was enormously time- and labor-intensive.

“It was really challenging from a volume perspective,” says Jon Hampson, Environment Director at London-based Capgemini U.K. “At one stage, I had a person running around trying to piece all the data together, reconciling and validating it, identifying exceptions, and processing it — and that’s before we could even begin to report.  At times, overseeing the project was probably taking up to 50 percent of my own time.”

Today, thanks to CA ecoSoftware and the Capgemini outsourced managed service, Capgemini U.K. estimates it is saving about 30 percent of the cost of manual data management, since much of it is now automated. But even more important, the data and reports coming out of the program are “more robust and consistent,” Hampson says, adding, “With any change program or strategic initiative, you need reliable data to inform decision making, direction setting and reporting. Now we have clear, measurable and quantifiable results — and confidence in the data.”

Wyndham Worldwide has also seen big changes after automating the carbon collection process. Now the company can validate its previous years’ numbers and track its carbon footprint month-over-month and year-over-year, no matter where a property resides, says says VP Taylor. “We can convert other currencies to U.S. dollars, so we have a consistent metric,” she adds. “And we can calculate carbon footprint by region and optimize for differences in weather and other business needs. Having the software will help improve accuracy and will allow us to track to the reduction goals.”

Wyndham is sharing the results with each internal department. Some of the departments have already created internal certification programs that reward employees and managers who achieve certain goals and reduce both consumption and carbon footprint. “When we have a top 10 and a bottom 20, we can say, ‘Why is your property at the bottom?’ People are competitive, and in this case peer pressure is the best motivator,” Taylor says.

Whole New World

In some cases, changes do come at the IT and infrastructure level. At flooring manufacturer Shaw Industries, one of the more visible projects that IT took on addressed the “paperless” part of the company’s mandate. In 1996 the company was creating 100 million pages of printed records annually, with projections that this number would grow to 500 million by the mid-2000s. “Paper is the enemy when we’re trying to increase environmental sustainability,” says Beard, the IT director.

If so, then digital workflow is Shaw Industries’ chief ally. By implementing supporting technology, everything — forms, invoices, approvals and contracts, among other collateral — is captured electronically, then routed via email and PDFs instead of interoffice envelopes. As a result, today Shaw Industries produces fewer than 20 million pages a year, or less than 4 percent of the projected quantity. Now the company wants to reduce that number even further by persuading customers to use an online portal that can house bills and accept payments.

Ironically, because Shaw Industries stores its documents digitally, there’s the possibility of creating additional greenhouse gases, due to the increased need for digital storage and additional servers. But the IT department, led by Beard, has found a way around that. Last year, Shaw Industries began removing digital image file redundancies by using a shared repository for all applications and systems. “Before, if we had a document used by accounting, ordering and billing, each would have its own image of that document,” Beard explains. “Now everyone uses the same document.”

Wyndham has reduced data center power consumption by 17 percent, and it has mandated a zero landfill policy for all desktops and laptops with key vendors. Technology equipment at the end of life is recycled or reused. The company also cuts electricity use in some offices by automatically powering down idle PCs.

There are plenty of other ways IT departments can help their organizations go green, says Murugesan of Cutter Consortium. For example, by streamlining the manufacturing supply chain. “IT can help the business choose the most efficient mode of transportation, ” he says. “A lot of energy is spent on transport, and by using a technology like RFID [radio frequency identification], IT can track a product, analyze how it moves and then find ways to reduce that movement.”

Once a company has a handle on its own carbon footprint, it can help customers and suppliers, too. At GE Healthcare, a research and development team is working on several projects to help end users — hospitals and medical offices — become more sustainable and green. Hospitals, as a rule, generate mountains of waste and use a significant amount of energy. “To think about sustainability, look at ways technology can keep people from visiting the emergency room,” says Dr. Mark Dente, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at GE Healthcare IT. “By better managing our patient’s care remotely, we can eliminate the visit and the associated use of resources.”

At Shaw Industries, which is moving toward a goal of zero landfill, internal systems collect data on manufacturing waste, measuring and tracking how much nylon fiber is left over. Today, instead of sending what was once considered waste to a landfill, Shaw can convert those materials into other nylon products that can be sold to another industry. The company can also “recapture” nylon from old carpeting to do the same.

“Thanks to IT, we’ve stopped calling our waste ‘waste,’ “ says Beard. “Now everything that comes out of the production stream is material.”

Whatever Shaw Industries can’t convert is used as fuel and burned to create steam to run its machinery. That’s a program that should make other CIOs green with envy.