Greening Your IT - Dispelling the Paperless Office Myth

Printing and the consumption of paper, ink, toner, and electricity are one of the easiest ways to raise awareness and lower costs in your organization. But can any office go paperless? I think time has dispelled (or “busted”) this myth. So accepting that printing and the processing of paper will never disappear completely the emphasis turns to responsible use of printing and print technologies.

So what we are after are the easy wins in this area. Growing in popularity recently has been having a social-engineering approach of people tagging comments to the effect of “do you really need to print this?” attached to their emails. Having management reiterate the importance of reduced paper use in meetings is also helpful. But these are not methods that can necessarily be objectively measured for results unless you know how much printing is happening in your organization today.

All corporate network printers should support the ability to centrally draw back and report on the volume of printing they have completed in a given period of time. A small amount of legwork can have this functionality setup and working in a short timeframe, and then this data can be used to objectively measure the results of any further printing reduction activities. Having a place to store all this data (as configuration items) for the purposes of measurement is yet another reason for your organization to formalize the CMDB.

With an understanding of how many pages your organization prints daily/weekly, you can start to measure any reductions. Following the “reduce, re-use, recycle” mantra, other ways can be instrumented to reduce printing volumes. By leveraging Active Directory group policies for providing access to networked printing resources, you can control what users have access to which printers, at what times. This will prevent employees from printing volumes of paper for personal use before and after core work hours.

The more difficult questions arise around how to control the size of print jobs, the content of printing (printing only what’s necessary), and the format of the print jobs. There are means for accomplishing all of this via various new technologies (foremost amongst newcomers in this arena is software development company GreenPrint - http://www.printgreener.com ) but the most important point is to understand where you are today, set goals, communicate those, and reward those who assist in achieving them.

Quick wins to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint in the area of printing would need you to start measuring your printing and reporting weekly or monthly (please don’t print and post the reports!). Accountability and recognition will be some of the keys to success in this area.

Some of this quick wins would be:

• Ensure you use recycled paper
• Reduce the number of printers (if possible)
• Provide the ability for all staff to “print” to PDF and encourage that behaviour
• Use Group Policies for Windows-based print queues to enforce duplexing and other print saving measures
• Disable printing outside of core business hours for most staff
• Ensure all printers have either “power save” modes or ideally are powered off overnight

Greening Your IT - Power Savings & ROI

Everyone wants to be responsible about their energy consumption, and while from a corporate perspective, it looks great in press releases and marketing materials, it's a hard direction to move in if you can't justify the expense in an objective manner.

So how do you establish the actual return on investment for your energy optimization projects?

The most obvious method, and the best place to start, is by having an objective baseline of your current energy costs related to IT. Make sure not just to include desktop computers and monitors, but any associated peripherals. Include the networked and personal printers. Include the Blackberries and cellphones because of their chargers. How about scanners? Air-conditioning? UPS and power management systems also have a draw and should be measured. Network gear, KVM switches, and the list can go on. For an extensive list contact Tsunami.ca for our whitepaper on Green IT. This audit can take some time (and therefore money), particularly if you don't have a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) in place already.

Incidentally, if you do have a CMDB, or are currently undertaking a CMDB project, have you included energy consumption rates as a CI (Configuration Item)? It's worth thinking about...

Once you have your baseline, you can now consider what initiatives your organization may undertake. Budget the cost of implementing those items, processes, or technologies (and are those costs that can be partially absorbed by budgets other than IT? ) and look at the energy reduction rates to calculate the initial, high-level ROI for the project.

But there's other ways to reduce those costs. In the Province of BC, BC Hydro has joint rebate programs with the Provincial Government that can make significant additions to your ROI calculations. If you are reading this from a location other than British Columbia the odds are that some similar rebates may be available for you as well.