- 04 November, 2008 05:47 PM EST
- Greening the Business with BPM
Business Process Management - the design, implementation, management and ongoing improvement of business processes - has the potential to make very substantial contributions to the measurable impact of any Green or Sustainability program.
Green initiatives face a huge task to educate people on the "what," the "how" and the potential relative impact of their contribution to the initiative. Power management and materials innovation will impact the data centers, R&D and the supply chain. What are the rest of us supposed to do - take shorter showers? Turn off our PCs?
Let's take the simple example of travel. The airline industry accounts for 2%[1] of our annual global carbon emissions, or 544,915,160 metric tons of CO2[2]. This is equal to the total carbon emissions for all IT. At least16%[3]of this is business related travel. In addition to this, the average American contributes approximately 22 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year[4].
Historically, we have redesigned our business processes to improve customer satisfaction, reduce cycle time or align process and strategy. There is now an opportunity to redesign our processes to accommodate all of the aforementioned and to balance that with the goals of our Green Initiatives.
The introduction of web-based collaboration tools and social media software gives us an opportunity to leverage e-work and telecommuting and redesign our business processes to add green-friendly business value while improving the collaboration and coordination both inside and outside the firewall.
We still don't have solid numbers for the total carbon footprint for all of the "people processes" in business. However, we can rely on common sense to inform us that by educating people about their role in their business processes' impact on an organization's carbon footprint, we can encourage them to reduce their carbon impact in the redesigned processes and make them aware of other wasteful practices and missed opportunities for carbon reduction both at home and at work.
Systems thinking is a requirement for effective Business Process Management. The global warming crisis is a systemic problem that we will not be able to solve until we can teach a critical mass of people to think systemically about sustainability. This way of approaching business process design is an inherently "Green" approach and therefore has an increased chance of adoption by any company or group seeking to achieve Green goals.
References
1. "Europe Must Abandon 'Tunnel-Vision' on Emissions Trading," International Air Transportation Association (IATA), June, 2008.
2. "Global Carbon Emissions," Wikipedia.
3. "Business travel is 16% of all US long-distance Travel," Bureau of Transportation Statistics, October, 2003.
4. "Public Transportation's contribution to Greenhouse Gas Reduction," American Public Transportation Association (APTA), September, 2007.
