Green ECM: The Real Deal

OMG. It had to happen sooner or later. A dating site for treehuggers.

Planetearthsingles.com bills itself as “a Green-friendly dating site for environmentally, socially and spiritually conscious singles!” Where “you can focus on making a difference in the world together, rather than arguing over whether to hug a tree or cut one down!” Members have names like “earthstar4,” “moongoddess33,” and “soaringdove”. Really.

Pardon me – but does anyone have an airsickness bag?

It’s not that this isn’t a wonderful thing – bringing like-minded people together, after all, is one of the most generous gifts of the Web-God. It’s just that I’ve been wading through a large pile of supposed Green Goodness for several days, and am suffering from diabetes.

Beware of the Fake Green Frog
Everyone, it seems, is jumping on the Green Bandwagon, some with dubious claims and feel-good “solutions” that turn out to be Fake Green Love (FGL) once you crunch the numbers. Top prize goes to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for its “Environmailist” campaign. USPS is running full-page magazine ads entreating you to mail back an attached card to receive a “free” and “handy guide (in hard copy) filled with tips on how to create Greener mail” as well as a “100-percent organic cotton T-shirt.”

The U.S. has well over 100 million households and businesses, and if each were to order a copy of these goodies, mailing back that postcard, and receiving – through the mail – the hard-copy publication and the T-shirt, how much paper, cotton, and diesel fuel would it consume? I’m seeing whole forests, half of Mississippi, my home state, and a tanker full of crude. And what about total cost: even at, say, $5 per order, that would be more than one-half-billion dollars. Nothing is free; who do you suppose is paying for these goodies? You are – every time you buy a stamp.

I’m also saying no thanks to PR News’ “Going Green: Outstanding Green Business Practices,” a “200+ page guidebook...that includes profiles of blue chip companies, small organizations and start–ups that have reinvented or reconfigured their businesses to be more environmentally responsible,” for $399. Four hundred bucks? I can find a hundred books like this free at my local library. And when I plug the word “green” into the search engine for “books” at Amazon.com, the first one that pops up (out of 711,813 results) is The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time. It costs $10.15. Sounds pretty nifty to me.

A similar “Green-thumb-down” goes to my local electrical company, Dominion power. For just $189.95, I can purchase a “watts up Pro ES” gizmo to learn how much it costs “to run that new plasma television.” How much diesel and paper was consumed in mailing this ad out along with my electrical bill, which increasingly comes stuffed with product pitches?

Dominion serves more than two million customers; I see a pricetag of some $380 million if all were to purchase. Some might find this useful, but in my house? It’s not gonna see much more action than a “Sham Wow” once the novelty wears off, and it’s too expensive. My money is better spent investing in what I already know will lead to savings: Smarter lightbulbs. More insulation. Changing the HVAC filter.

“We were Green before Kermit the Frog”
But enough of the jaundiced eye. Let’s get down to Green Solutions with real chops. “Everybody in the world is talking about Green Solutions; well, AIIM was Green before Kermit the Frog. We’ve been offering Green Technology before the term existed,” says AIIM Chairman Bob Zagami.

“We provide the tools that help corporations, institutions, and companies of every size capture, index, store, manage, retrieve, and distribute information electronically. We are providing the Green solutions that save millions of trees each year – and we haven’t even scratched the surface of our full potential.”

Like many AIIM document management service providers, Zagami’s company, Databank IMX, creates “digital mailrooms” like the ones you’ll read about below, and Zagami sees this as a huge growth market in the coming decade. As these technologies grow ever more affordable, “we will see the continued movement of our solutions down the economic scale to small- and mediumsized businesses,” he says.

Top six ways to go Green with ECM
ECM, in fact, offers so many opportunities to go Green, it’s difficult to keep them all in focus, so AIIM President John Mancini offered the following boildown in AIIM’s April 15 Green Webinar, co-presented with Forrester Research and Oracle, which you can download at AIIM’s new Green Microsite at www.aiim.org/green-ecm:

1.  Save money on paper and shipping – and reduce your environmental footprint at the same time. A study of four customers by Oracle Corporation quantified the direct cost and environmental savings from driving paper out of core processes through deployment of ECM technologies:

Let’s take a closer look at the first customer on that list, Embry Riddle University, to see just how the paper savings piled up. Embry Riddle is an aeronautical university with 130 locations worldwide. Universities are information intensive – applications, financial aid forms, insurance documents, transcripts, housing information, etc. – and admitting and tracking each student generates a tremendous amount of paper.

Embry Riddle formerly kept a copy of each document at each campus the student attended, and forwarded a copy to the central office. Often these documents also had to be duplicated for other offices.

By implementing Oracle Content Management, however, the school was able to use a centralized server to store the information so that any location could access it.

(The Oracle Document Management Green Calculator employs commonly accepted figures: one tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets, and one ream (500 sheets) uses six percent of a tree.)

2. Increase the effectiveness of core processes. Think about the benefits of ECM technologies in just a single core process – finance. Driving paper from financial processes allows an accounts payable group to pay invoices faster, taking advantage of discounts for early payment. It allows an accounts receivable group to improve cash flows and reduce the number of days that sales are outstanding. The cost of processing an invoice can typically be cut by a factor of 10, creating savings that drop directly to the bottom line. These kinds of savings can usually be replicated in other paperintensive processes, yielding BOTH bottom line AND Green benefits.

3. Truly integrate your field operations. The application of distributed capture technologies – using a scanner in a field office to process locally created paper and electronically store it in a central location – is a true no-brainer for most organizations. Distributed capture solutions often pay for themselves just through savings in courier and shipping costs. But taking courier and overnight services off the road also translates into significant direct environmental benefits.

4. Reduce real estate costs. Less paper means fewer filing cabinets means less real estate – which reduces cost, but also significantly reduces your environmental footprint.

5. Improve employee productivity. By digitizing as much information as possible, you set the stage for allowing employees much greater flexibility in their working arrangements and for much more effective collaboration independent of geography. Which also translates into less real estate, less travel, a reduced carbon footprint, and happier employees.

6. Reduce off-site storage costs. Off-site storage of paper is expensive, often requiring rental and maintenance fees as well as significant transportation costs to the facility. All of which represent a significant burden on the environment compared to an ECM solution.

Going Green with Enterprise 2.0
Each of the six content management training solutions offered by AIIM – Email Management, Electronic Records Management, Business Process Management, Information organization and Access, Enterprise Content Management, and Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) offer Green solutions. E2.0, sitting at the very top of the ECM foodchain, offers the greatest raw horsepower, according to Atle Skjekkeland, AIIM vice president for professional development.

AIIM defines E2.0 as “a system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.” Wikis, blogs, tags, RSS feeds, social software, and virtual meetings are all examples of E2.0 tools, which help you find colleagues or information from any point on the globe and connect, share, and work together with far fewer resources, says Skjekkeland.

Corporate employees conduct routine business today with far-flung colleagues across the globe using E2.0, whereas just a few years ago they were spending a small fortune and burning tons of jet fuel to ferry documents overnight.

The German investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort (DKW) started using wikis in its IT department to document new software, which then expanded into the broader workplace environment, according to “Wikinomics” (Portfolio Group, 2006). Former CIO J.P. Rangaswami reported that wikis alone reduced email volume by 75 percent for lead users and cut the company’s meeting times in half.

Is The Cloud really Green?
There are a lot more ways to go Green in the content management realm, but one must approach each “solution” with eyes wide open.

For many smaller organizations, it may make no sense to purchase and support their own servers when they can store information “In The Cloud,” i.e. on the Web by purchasing storage from the many providers – or even by using Google Documents, which is free – and think they’re going Green.

But as CMS Watch analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe notes on his blog, “ECM TrendWatch,” think again. “Cloud computing simply means moving things to big and bigger data centers,” he says, which are “huge, energy-sucking giants” that will eventually pollute the environment more than the entire aviation industry, according to the Uptime Institute.

It was point driven home by INNOVATIONS magazine’s recent cover story on “Power Consumption Crisis: It’s time for data centers to embrace efficiency – or face serious financial and operational consequences.”

At the core of the problem is simple math. “Server computer performance has been increasing by a factor of three every two years, but the energy efficiency is only doubling in the same period. That widening gap means that the cost to power the data center will increase significantly year after year and that will cost business big time,” writes the author of that cover story, Eric Chabrow.

On the other hand, if you are a smaller outfit, and you’re reaping documented savings in energy, money, and other hassles by going sans server, isn’t that a good thing? It can be a tough call. But this one isn’t: Pelz- Sharpe goes on to note that “Good email management” can reduce “your email mountain to less than 10 percent of its original size”– which brings us right back to ECM.

“With email management, your customers get their questions answered more rapidly, because your employees can find the information more quickly both in their own email inbox as well as in emails that were sent to a colleague,” says Alex Visser, manager of AIIM’s Global Education Services. “Your employees will also be happy by not having to work overtime, and not working overtime also means that the lights and computers can be turned off on time.”

Virtualization. If you do decide the go the server route, there is good news to report. Virtualization, made possible by the latest generation of computer chips from both Intel and AMD, enables users to consolidate the functions of a number of actual servers into one, thereby consuming less energy and reducing cooling costs and complexity.

A similar evolution could be happening in PCs. With the help of Linux-based software, a company called Userful (www.userful.com) claims that its “Desktop Multiplier” product can turn one “ordinary” PC into 10 “fully independent” workstations equipped only with extra monitors, keyboards, and mice. One computer, in other words, could work as a virtual server to a local area network of 10 stripped-down “virtual PCs,” saving money, energy, equipment, and complexity.

Software
There are a number of exciting developments in “Green software”. At the high end, a company called Wipro Technologies offers an industrial-strength “carbon accounting tool” known as Hara that enables industries to monitor and optimize reduction of Greenhouse gases. IBM, Xerox, Accenture, Carbonetworks, and many other providers also offer products aimed at helping organizations from small to gargantuan monitor and reduce their carbon footprints.

Users begin using Accenture’s “Green Technology Suite,” a free set of metrics for creating “sound Green strategies with business benefits that lead to high performance,” by answering 300 questions about their IT efficiency.

SaaS. Next comes software-as-a-service (SaaS), which means instead of purchasing, installing, supporting, and upgrading your own software and powering your own servers – in addition to training your staff – a SaaS provider does it all for you, and your people simply login via any web connection.

SaaS – if right for your organization – can save a whole host of resources, including large front-end costs, a lot of time, numerous headaches, and even more raw materials than you might think. I’ll never forget working deep in the bowels of the Pentagon as a consultant some 15 years ago and seeing a vast plethora of rolling trashbins piled high with thousands of discarded Microsoft boxes containing the previous iteration of the Windows operating system, which had been ripped out to make room for the latest version.

For all of these reasons, “We will see a continued movement toward SaaS and Web-hosted solutions in the next decade,” predicts Zagami.

Office practices
When comes to office practices, it seems almost banal by now to point out recycling as way to go Green – except that so many organizations are still doing it so poorly. I’ve found from my experience that recycling programs rarely work well without a “Green Czar” with support from on high who trains staff, makes it easy and convenient to recycle, and gently enforces the policy.

A much bigger hit in Green Office solutions is Business Process Management– again, one of six key areas of ECM. BPM begins with simple, logical improvements, like using multifunction machines to print, fax, and scan instead of standalone devices, but creeps on up to how many machines should be allotted per user and where they should be placed; what kind of printers, toners, and paper best help the company realize savings and lower its carbon footprint, and on up to far more complex equations.

Tracking and reengineering the entire flow of documents – both paper and electronic – through an organization can lead to enormous savings in energy, efficiency – both human and machine – and carbon, while giving a company a real competitive edge.

Transportation
Transportation solutions seem simple but grow complex very fast. One of the most complicated challenges ever thrown at a supercomputer is known as the “Hamiltonian Path” or “Travelling Salesman Problem,” in which you give a salesman a couple hundred locations he has to call upon and throw in other variables common to real salesmen. What is the most efficient route? The guys with pocket protectors believe they have it licked now through a complex set of algorithms. UPS, with the help of some powerful number crunching of its own, “shaved 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes” worldwide by reducing the number of left-hand turns its delivery trucks made in 2006 alone, saving some three million gallons of gasoline, according to a company spokesperson quoted in the New York Times.

But if you work for a small to mid-size organization, you probably don’t need much more than a pencil and paper to figure out some basic savings you can make in fuel and emissions by optimizing the time and mode by which you send and receive your goods.

And what about transporting your people. Is that in-person meeting really necessary? Think about it – and how ECM can help.

Sometimes the Greenest thing to do ... is nothing at all
A key tenet of Going Green with ECM is that the sooner you convert paper documents into digital ones, the greater the savings; and if you can avoid paper entirely, that’s the way to go. On the other extreme, you may have a lot of dead trees in the form of rarely needed yet vital, must-be-saved paper documents, and in some cases the Greenest thing to do is just to leave them as they are.

As Iron Mountain consultant Jim Stephenson wrote in KM World, 2007 storage prices were averaging $5 per box per year, and “At prevailing conversion rates, it will cost between $200 and $300 to convert the documents in one box to digital images. Therefore, the cost of digital conversion is equivalent to the cost of retaining the documents in paper form for a period of 40 to 60 years.”

Which leads us all the way back to Kermit, and his 2006 Superbowl pitch for the new Ford Escape Hybrid: “It’s not that easy, bein’ green...” Yes it is, Kermit. You just have to do the math.

Benjamin L. Herring  is editor-in-chief of Infonomics. He wrote this story with generous contributions from AIIM President John Mancini, AIIM Vice President for Professional Development Atle Skjekkeland, and AIIM Manager of Global Education Services Alex Visser.