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February 17, 2009
Going Green with BI--Save the Environment, Save Cash
The expression "going green" has become such common currency, we risk forgetting what it really means.
Sure, we all know we shouldn't throw our grocery bag into the sea, lest a baby seal choke on it while a group of third-graders gape from the shore in teary-eyed impotence. Sure, we all know we shouldn't take up parking-lot-building as a hobby, lest Joni Mitchell catch us in our latest creation as we throw wheelies in our big yellow taxi. And sure, as far as good corporate citizenship, we all know we shouldn't start a coal-powered steel mill with a nostalgic brick-and-mortar smokestack belching soot into the air while we wistfully recite Marinetti's immortal Manifesto to Futurism.
Sure, we know all that.
But what does "going green" mean when it refers to software companies producing business intelligence solutions? It is another way to say "manufacturing a product that promotes energy and resource efficiency on the part of the company and its customers." In this context, being energy and resource efficient means reducing consumption to the minimum necessary--on one hand. On the other, it means gradually reducing that necessity itself, so that going forward, more and more energy and resources are conserved, much to the benefit of the environment... which as we all know, is green.
But there's something else green in this equation: money. Someone--either the BI vendor or the customer--has to pay for the resources used up. So, "green is right" on environmental as well as on economic grounds.
When we talk about energy and resource efficiency, what variables are we speaking of, and how can a business intelligence company affect them while going green?
(BTW, there's an excellent LogiXML white paper on going green with BI available for free download.)
BI and carbon footprint
The first element to conserving energy and promoting lower consumption is reducing carbon footprint generated--indirectly, in our case--by the sale and use of a BI product. Although carbon footprint is measured in different ways, let's keep things simple. Let's tie it to the main substance associated with it, the carbon dioxide (or CO2) produced by burning fuel while driving a car or truck, or flying an airplane. Let's get into the specifics.
How much travel is required for BI consulting, training trips?
Go to carbonfund.org and find the calculator. You can play around with it as you wish, but you'll see that, for example, a plane-ride from Washington, DC, to Dallas, TX, generates almost half a metric ton of CO2. Two return trips from DC to Texas will therefore generate a fully-grown hippopotamus worth of CO2. If that image doesn't give you pause, it should. The old model of BI sales involves multiple consulting trips, which determine such things as pricing the new application, helping the customer set it up and troubleshoot it, plus in-person training or professional services. For some BI companies, this is a process that lasts months, with tens of plane- or car-rides back and forth between the vendor and the customer.
Needless to say, this is not the green approach--in both the environmental and the economic sense. It is much better to embrace a BI product that:
- Is priced in a straightforward manner - Why require multiple consulting trips if you can email-exchange a PDF document clearly telling the customer how much the application costs?
- Is simple to set up - Some of the more modern Web-based BI products do not require a small army of IT consultants being present at installation and troubleshooting. This is not only the green approach, but it is also a time-saving tactic because it enables the BI customer to get a much quicker return on their new investment.
- Is easy to build - The better BI products out there today are simple to figure out if you are a report developer or a system administrator. They do not require multiple training sessions before you can build the kind of reports that will endear you to your end-users end earn you solemn pats on the back from the bigwigs. This saves considerable amount of traveling on the part of either the vendor or the customer, depending on where the training sessions take place.
- Is intuitive to the end-users - I remember my former employer flying about 50 of us every year to the other side of the world to learn and keep up to speed with our application as end-users. And that's only one company--our vendor had something around three hundred paying customers all needing training trips. With an easy-to-use Web-based solution users can learn to make the most out of their application by themselves--or at most with a short online session--saving the need for trips.
And now, let's talk about another kind of transportation.
Are you still shipping your BI product?
If you are a Web-based BI company who is still shipping your software in a box, you should seriously consider the alternative. A green BI company can do the planet good and save money by simply making their solution available for download.
Among the many advantages of this approach, here are a few:
- No need for packaging - Think about how much cardboard, paper and plastic you can save by not needing a physical product that ships to the customer both at the time of purchase and at the time of upgrade. If you still ship a physical product, just go to the warehouse, pick up an empty box with all the packaging and collateral that is included in it. Eyeball which part of it is biodegradable, and which part isn't. Then imagine picking up ten. Then a hundred... ok, you get the idea. That's the amount of trash you save the Earth by simply making your product available for download.
- No need for shipping - We are back to carbon footprint here. What I have said before about flying people around to consult, set up and learn the product applies. And from an economic standpoint, neither party has to absorb the shipping and handling charges.
- Letting the customer evaluate the product with no physical transactions -Modern decision-makers shopping for and evaluating BI start with online searches of some kind. No, BI is never an impulse purchase, but there is an impulse element in it, namely, which product a prospect may end up trying out. Ready availability on the Web is a big factor. If to try a product you need to wait a week for a FedEx package containing the software, you're much more likely to try one that just says "download for a free 30-day trial."
As you can see, making your Web-based product available for download is smart--from a green, economical and marketing standpoint. And now, let's touch upon another very critical aspect of this discussion, which is the relation between BI adoption and paper consumption.
Adoption: directly proportional to intelligence, inversely proportional to paper consumption
Adoption is to a BI solution what location is for real estate: repeat the word three times and you will have listed the most important things determining its true value. But there's also a green component to this. Since we are talking about Web-based business intelligence, the more widespread the solution is adopted, the less paper will be consumed to print and distribute hard copies of reports.
And what does a BI solution have to have to be widely adopted? Here are a few important considerations in this regard.
- Ease of use - Easy-to-use products are not intimidating and tend to become a preferred tool in one's arsenal. A Web-based BI product that mimics the navigability of the Internet, for instance, will be instantly familiar to end-users and much more likely to be adopted quickly and by more people.
- True usefulness - This is something that goes hand-in-hand with the ease of use argument I have just made above. No matter how easy to use something is, it won't be adopted if it is not useful, i.e. if it does not reach its purpose directly and efficiently. A Web-based BI solution should have all the tools to make end-users see, understand and act upon their data in a timely and efficient way. Ability to connect to multiple data-sources, full interactivity with drill-down and drill-through capability, dashboards, ad hoc reporting, heat maps, geographic maps and other rich visualization tools--all at the click of a mouse--this is what makes a BI solution highly useful and easy to adopt.
- Licensed to be distributed to many, not few - If you charge thousands of dollars per year on user licenses, you can rest assured--especially in this time of recession--that your clients will be cautious, and in the end only relatively few among their personnel will have the luxury of using Web-based BI. On the other hand, vendors who charge server-based and who impose no user costs free their client to empower as many users as they need--and many signs in the industry point to a "the more, the better" philosophy with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Therefore, you can see how ease of use, true usefulness and the right licensing model will garner higher adoption rates and therefore help the company move away from paper consumption and the wastefulness that surrounds it.
So, in summary?
In summary, going green in BI is not only beneficial to the environment, but it is also healthy to the bottom line and to the way vendor and client interact with one-another. See, going green is ultimately about efficiency--using fewer resources to achieve an even bigger result.
If you can use BI to lift your company to a higher market share without needing the weight of several hippos on the opposite side of the lever, you will have reached your purpose without waste, and you'll be able to call yourself a model company in more ways than one.
Posted by Hound of the BI-skervilles at February 17, 2009 8:30 AM
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Posted by: Anethythymn at May 16, 2011 12:06 AM
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