» Jarod asks
Aside from the more obvious solutions, can you suggest subtle ways to make my company greener on the IT side that don’t require that I retool my entire IT approach?
- I have an idea to form a collaborative of business owners in my community to team up on IT infrastructure and costs (and staff). Basically acting as one large company with powerful servers, partitioned for our respective businesses. Besides privacy, which I think a pro consultant could set up properly for us, are there any other pitfalls/reasons I should dump this idea? My business is growing but not enough to do the tech expansion I need.
- What tools/software can I use to gather and analyze customer data for marketing purposes? What about tools to manage the effectiveness of my marketing and ad campaigns? I run an e-commerce business that sells children's clothes so I want to understand buying patterns, get ideas for new product categories, inventory levels. Also I do email and mail marketing offers and am not sure how to tell they are effective or how to compare. I am doing this all pretty manually now ... and lucky for me business is growing so fast this just isn't practical or accurate anymore.
- What are best practices for dealing with confidential client information in regards to data storage, back-ups, policies, tools?
- I've found Basecamp to be a less-than-ideal collaborative project management service/software. But I am not sure the alternatives are any better. What are my other options and how do they stack up? (I work for an ad agency, so there is a lot of exchanging files, setting to-do lists, making regularly scheduled tasks, providing group calendars)
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I am going to assume by “more obvious solutions,” you are referring to such ideas as virtualization of servers, improving data center efficiency, and alternate energy sources for your data center. Here are some ideas that might be easy less obvious:
1) Have users turn off PCs/monitors at night: This may seem obvious, but communication is key here. Don’t assume users are already doing this. Plus, you’ll have to keep in mind that you will probably want to be able to wake-on-LAN these PCs to keep them patched/updated for security reasons.
2) Deploy more laptops and thin clients: Generally, laptops and thin clients use less power than desktops. Laptops can also operate on battery of course.
3) Replace CRTs with LCDs: LCDs are more appealing than CRTs for many ways, but less energy consumption is definitely a big plus.
4) Replace older power-hungry PCs with newer PCs: More and more PC makers are offering high energy efficiency power supply options in their PCs. Additionally, components in newer PCs typically use less power per MHz of performance. There are also nice power-saving features available in newer BIOSes and CPUs.
5) Responsible disposal of equipment and recycling where possible: Hopefully, you are already properly disposing of dead monitors and PCs, but if you aren’t, it should be easy to start. Just do some research in your community to find a proper disposal facility. Also, seek out recycling opportunities and think of recycling first before outright disposal.
6) Software solutions to improve power handling on PCs: This may require a bit of research, but there are companies offering software that can be installed on PCs. The software includes a central management system and allows you to set global power management settings are a better than the standard options found in Windows.
A quick search on the web revealed some resources that may help, such as http://cio.ittoolbox.com/research/green-it-initiatives-5857 and http://www.csc.com/features/stories/12386-csc_green_it_initiatives. I hope these ideas and resources help. Good luck greening up!
Consider a trade-in program. You don’t have to change your entire IT approach — just get newer and better models to replace older ones. It may pay off financially.
For instance, I checked quickly at the Sun website and see that they have a trade-in program and even a handy online trade-in calculator. http://www.sun.com/tradeins/calculator.jsp
By trading-in selected equipment here and there, you get a discount on new and more powerful equipment. Plus, newer computers in general are more energy efficient, so you can save money on energy costs if you shop carefully. But it doesn’t necessarily require a major re-work of your existing IT architecture.