Innovation and IT – Paths to Success

Getting the most value from your information technology investments today is more challenging than ever given the break-neck pace of evolution in product and service choices. Keeping ahead of developments in infrastructure, software, data systems and Internet applications absorbs increasing amounts of time and energy. Not only can missed opportunities cost businesses dearly in forgone revenues and customers, but inadequately assessed security and privacy-related risks can consume significant amounts of management resources when troubles crop up.

Knowledge@Wharton takes a look at some of the key opportunities and threats in these areas, including cloud computing, data storage, social networks and Internet marketing.

This downloadable PDF contains articles with insights from Wharton faculty on the following topics:

• No Man Is an Island: The Promise of Cloud Computing
• Time for a Data Diet? Deciding What Customer Information to Keep — And What to Toss
• Leaving ‘Friendprints’: How Online Social Networks Are Redefining Privacy and Personal Security
• Privacy on the Web: Is it a Losing Battle?
• Betting on Betas: How Internet Entrepreneurs Are Creating New Paths to Online Revenue

Download article packet from Knowledge@Wharton

Greening Your IT

Computer networks and the Internet have freed businesses of all sizes from many of the visible costs associated with intra-office communication. Gone are the days of fax machines and couriers. Today, a user at his desk can instantly send a 300 page report to his colleagues on the other side of the planet for next to nothing. Almost nothing, though, isn’t the same as free. There are real costs associated with transmitting emails, both in dollars and cents and in greenhouse gases.

McAfee, Inc. and the climate-change researchers from ICF International have calculated the amount of energy required to transmit, process, and filter all of the spam email sent worldwide for an entire year. Their results are astounding:

[the annual energy] totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same green house gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

Each spam message is responsible for, on average, 0.3 grams of CO2. That is the equivalent of driving your car three feet! Multiply that by the 358 spams I received yesterday and you’ll see the enormity of the situation. Non-spam email doesn’t have quite the same costs associated with it, because much of spam’s energy consumption comes from users deleting it and trying to find the legitimate email mixed amongst it. But, it does cost something.

Green computing is an effort to make networks and computers more energy efficient. Because corporate computer systems rely on wide variety of computers, networking equipment and employees, there are many techniques available to green up your IT infrastructure. One of the best options for greening your computer systems is to take advantage of virtualization technologies. Virtualization is the process by which software running on a computer is separated from the computer itself.

Cost of corporate desktop power mismanagement: $2.8 billion

Over the past several years, the companies that run large data centers have become extremely energy conscious, as the price of electricity has forced them to measure and reduce the amount of power they burn through. Server farms are obvious targets for efficiency measures, as the energy use occurs in one place and the hardware is relatively easy to manage. But data centers are far from the only place where organizations host their computing equipment; although individual desktops may be widely distributed, they’re often quite numerous. A new survey attempts to put a price tag on the lack of energy-management practices in the desktop computing segment and comes up with a figure of roughly $2.8 billion wasted in the US alone.

As in many cases where there’s an eye-popping dollar figure involved, the report is using the figure to try to convince its readers to take the matter seriously. In this case, the data was crunched by 1E, a company that sells energy management software for corporate PCs. The company is using it as part of an energy awareness campaign that it is undoubtedly hoping will increase the use of its products. Most of the figures, however, like average price for power in the countries involved, are pretty easy to check, so 1E has little to gain by massaging its numbers. The report is liberally sprinkled with footnotes that describe where its authors obtained various figures as well.

What is more likely to be problematic is the source of employee-behavior data when it comes to desktop computer use. Those numbers come from an online poll performed by Harris Interactive in the US, the UK, and Germany. Harris focuses on this sort of polling, and presumably does it well, but the method will inevitably involve a degree of self-selection and demographic skewing within the population that responds. With that caution out of the way, none of the self-reported behavior derived from the polling looks unreasonable, or even unexpected.

The most basic numbers indicate that a significant majority of employees use a computer at work–just under three-quarters in the US, and nearly 80 percent in the UK and Germany. Of these users, only half shut the computer down when they leave work at night (the rates are slightly higher in Europe). Based on these figures and typical energy use and prices, 1E generated typical numbers for a 10,000-employee company in each of the three countries it surveyed: $260,000 for a US-based company, £168,000 ($244,000) for the UK, and euro-285,000 ($386,000) in Germany. That’s a lot of potential savings left on the table.