Technology can increase productivity and foster creativity. Explore some ideas that can help you take maximum advantage of the Internet and IT to improve your business.
Dripping faucets are not only annoying, but they waste a lot of water. 3 faucets dripping 30 drips/minute waste more than 4000 gallons of water in a year.
Your computer workstation is another “dripping faucet” wasting precious power and environmental resources.
Good news! Dripping computers are easy to fix. Simply put your computer in the power-saving hibernate or standby/sleep mode. Here are my power option property settings:
Turn off monitor after 30 minutes
Turn off hard disks after 45 minutes
System standby after 1 hour
Annual savings in power from my workstation alone is $66/year. I can still use remote desktop to telecommute because standby mode wakes upon remote access. Otherwise, I would also set the hibernate option. Here are the numbers:
Computer Power Consumption
Desktop computer: 43W (standby: 3W)
17″ CRT monitor: 75W (standby: 5W)
17″ LCD monitor: 22W (standby: 3W)
Power rate (PGE in Portland, < 5000 KWH/mo): $0.0851/KWH
Annual power usage/cost w/CRT:
$0.010/hr x 365 day/yr x 24 hr/day = $88/yr
Annual power usage/cost w/LCD:
$0.0055/hr x 365 day/yr x 24 hr/day = $48/yr
Using 236 workdays/yr and 9 hrs/workday, office computer on 2124 hr/yr. That is 24.25% of the time.
Annual savings is 75%.
Annual Savings For Each Computer
$36 - $66 savings per year in power costs
345 - 625 pounds of carbon not added to the atmosphere
16 - 29 gallons of gasoline energy equivalent saved
50 - 90 FT2 of deforestation prevented
Your company could be saving money and helping the environment at the same time. For example, a 10 workstation small business with a 50:50 split in CRT and LCD monitors would save $500/year in power costs.
The biggest savings come from turning off your computer monitor. Screen savers do not save any power.
If the only power option you set is to turn off your CRT monitor, you still would save $42 annually. As a bonus, that will pay for 15 Grande Lattes at Starbucks (about 2 gallons).
Update:June 15, 2007 - An easy feel-good way to set up your computer to be a more responsible cybercitizen was made available by Snap.com this week (Snap provides the nifty utility that shows a preview of a page link used on this blog). Their easy-to-download-CO2Saver is a tight desktop utility that quickly sets your PC to responsible power mode. It then shows you how many pounds of CO2 you have saved.
I installed it yesterday, and this morning I have saved 0.61 pounds of CO2 so far. The air feels fresher already.
It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 1018 bytes) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That is more information than in the previous 5,000 years. Zowie!
Michael Wesch, cultural anthropology professor at Kansas State, shares some insight here. This 4½ minute video traces the trajectory of the Internet and how this explosion of data will be organized (the video is not really fuzzy after you click on it).
The surprise answer is: “You (all of us) will organize all this data.”
Web 2.0 allows me to include the above video from YouTube delivered as content on this page. Google, Yahoo, Flickr and MySpace are all examples of this custom service.
These digital personal assistants locate information of interest that you specify and deliver the information directly to you. Thanks to the FeedBlitz widget, you can subscribe to this blog and receive an email when new content is added (see the sidebar on the right). It becomes a useful feature that I don’t need to code or maintain.
The upside: We are less likely to be buried in unwanted information (spam).
The downside: We won’t see important new ideas because we didn’t know to ask. Information may get confused with wisdom if our sources are restricted to our own biases.
The challenge: To leverage technology in our personal and business lives to broaden our opportunities rather than to restrict them.
In recognition that businesses can do more to promote sustainability, we have initiated an EasyStreet Green Team Project to further reduce our overall environmental footprint. As a high technology data center, EasyStreet requires significant electrical and cooling loads. We are examining how to change our current and planned practices so that we can become more green while operating in the black before the world turns brown.
Remember the high school biology experiment of putting a frog in cold water and slowly heating the water? The frog wouldn’t budge as the water gradually became warmer. Eventually, the frog boiled to death. Drop a frog into a pan of hot water and it would immediately sense danger and jump out.
It seems that the AmericusBusinessatrachus Frog is evolving this week and becoming more aware of its environment. The signs:
Front-page article in this morning’s Oregonian (4/6/07) lists the current and probable effects in the Northwest on water and population migrations. (By 2020, between 400 million and 1.7 billion people worldwide will not get enough water.)
The April 9 issue Time Magazine cover article The Global Warming Survival Guide lists 51 Ways to Save the Environment. Three (#13, 16 & 30) are technology/Internet related. An additional three (#3, 29 & 32) are workplace applicable.
Future blog posts will share practices we already have in place and what we are adding. As we learn and adapt, we will share the process with you. Also, we welcome your comments and ideas to help us and other businesses. Together, we can get the Business Frogs out of the frying pan.
