What’s your Unified Communications Sustainability Quotient? In other words, what is the impact of unified communications on your sustainability efforts? And how are you measuring it? There’s a direct relationship between UC and sustainability — and if you’re one of the growing numbers of organizations that have corporate sustainability initiatives, you’ll want to devote some neurons to assessing how your UC strategy fits in with sustainability.
Some background: Nemertes defines sustainability as a holistic approach to achieving a company’s business, environmental and social objectives when it comes to conserving energy and reducing environmental impact. The catch is that you can’t measure what you are not aware of — so we’ve developed a Sustainability Intelligence Quotient (SIQ) methodology to benchmark corporate sustainability practices.
Issues we assess include policy, practices, technology selections and corporate awareness. These can be as broad as looking at manufacturing and supply chain best practices, or as focused as looking at energy costs in the data center. When it comes to unified communications in particular, though, a good place to start is to focus on a few key areas: UC’s ability to reduce environmental impact by lowering travel costs, and the environmental impact of the hardware and software itself.
Turns out that UC is a fine way both to cut costs and minimize environmental impact. For example, reducing travel via telepresence, Web conferencing, presence and messaging lowers both carbon emissions and costs, helping the environment and the bottom line.
Telecommuting in particular can be a powerful tool in reducing travel. And get this: There’s a significant correlation between simply having a telecommuting policy (regardless of precisely what it stipulates) and having greater amounts of telecommuting. Companies that have a telecommuting policy have 37% more telecommuters than those that don’t — so an obvious first step is to develop and promote your policy.
Another place to look is UC products: servers, handsets, mobile devices, and the like. These have direct economic and environmental impact through variations in power consumption. If you can preferentially select low-power versions, you can conserve energy while reducing carbon footprint.
And check into vendors’ recycling policies. Many times, companies fail to take advantage of these, yet they can both reduce costs and minimize environmental impact.
Finally, it’s worth noting that integrating unified communications into your virtualization program — a point we’ll talk about next week. Why is this relevant? Virtualization is a highly effective way to reduce power consumption — particularly when coupled with management tools.
The bottom line? UC can be a significant component of your corporate sustain again simultaneously lowering cost and carbon footprint.
Beyond economics and environment there is also a social component to sustainability. This component reflects how well the company supports its staff and what it’s doing to be a better community citizen. This is an area where UC excels. UC is the perfect platform to support both aspects of social sustainability!
Internal and external collaboration can be a platform on which the company can build its social sustainability objectives. This is underscored by our finding that over 54% of research participants say their organization uses, is planning to use, or is evaluating social networks for internal and external collaboration.
Of course, organizations must want to tie their UC efforts to the social aspects of sustainability. Why? Even in this horrendous economy there is still value in looking beyond economics to the environmental and social component of the UCSIQ. At some point we will recover and organizations that have built a sustainable – economic, environmental and social – business plan will be much further ahead in the new economy than those organization that have just squeaked by economically.
