Making a Difference with Digital Sustainability Practices: Your Actions in the Workplace Matter.
In today’s rapidly digitalizing world, the environmental impact of our online activities cannot be overlooked.
For IT and business leaders in 2024, prioritising digital sustainability practices is crucial to mitigate this impact, blending technology with eco-conscious habits. This exploration underscores the importance of digital sustainability, demonstrating how strategic changes in our digital routines can drive substantial environmental benefits and positioning it as a key responsibility for forward-thinking leaders.
This week, sharing several articles on why IT sustainability matters and strategies for improvement. It’s a must-read, offering quick, impactful insights. 👍
This Week’s Top Reads:
Featured Article:
Top 6 Claims Technologies in 2024: The Ultimate Watch List
Explore the leading claims technologies in 2024.
5 ways to reduce an organization’s digital carbon footprint
From optimizing video conferences to minimizing unnecessary data storage, learn practical strategies that can help shrink an organization’s digital carbon footprint.
Article featured in TechTarget
Even sustainability-minded people can forget the environmental impact of digital technologies.
But all tech and the processes to power it have a digital computer footprint. That goes for obvious areas, such as computers and servers, as well as less obvious ones, like networking and software engineering.
Here are some practical tips companies can use to lessen the organizational digital carbon footprint.
1. Adopt a solid information governance strategy
As data has grown, so too has indiscriminate information and data retention. That can drive up the digital carbon footprint.
Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy and research, and Tom Jackson, a professor of information and knowledge management, at Loughborough University in Loughborough, U.K. are developing the Data Carbon Ladder.
This tool helps organizations determine how large data sets should be for projects and where to store them. They argue that to reduce the digital carbon footprint, companies need to practice sound data retention policies.
IT sustainability is rising up board agendas across all industries. Regulators, the press, consumers, and employees are all putting pressure on companies to reduce their carbon footprints and IT is being chosen to lead the way.
Since computers run on electricity, the onus falls immediately on IT leaders to find ways to cut back on energy consumption without reducing productivity. How can you cut the carbon footprint of your organization’s technology use while continuing to empower it with innovative technology?
Let’s look at five potential approaches to optimizing the sustainability of your IT landscape.
IT Sustainability Approach 1: Cut Back On Your Electric Waste
Why does the responsibility for improving sustainability fall on IT? Well, around 2% of the world’s carbon footprint is generated by IT, which is the same amount as the entire aviation industry.
IT runs on electricity, so takes more than its share of your organization’s carbon footprint. As such, the obvious first step in cutting your carbon production down is to reduce the amount of electricity that you use.
Success in Application Delivery Management (ADM) hinges on the ability to adapt to evolving technologies and methodologies. As we get into the swing of things in 2024, three key strategies emerge as essential for thriving in this area: embracing automation, prioritizing performance monitoring, and cultivating a culture of collaboration.
Let’s dive into each of these tips and explore how they can empower you, as an ADM leader, to excel in the year ahead.
1. Embrace automation.
In application delivery, automation serves as a force multiplier that can enable you to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and drive innovation. By leveraging automation tools and frameworks, your team can automate repetitive tasks such as code deployment, testing, and infrastructure provisioning, freeing up valuable time and resources for strategic initiatives.
Automation not only reduces the risk of human error but also accelerates deployment cycles, allowing your team to deliver features and updates to end-users faster. Moreover, automation fosters consistency and repeatability, ensuring that deployments are executed reliably across different environments.
In 2024, the importance of automation in ADM cannot be overstated. Whether it’s through the adoption of CI/CD pipelines, configuration management tools, or infrastructure as code practices, your team must embrace automation as a cornerstone of your ADM strategy to remain competitive in today’s fast-moving digital environment.
In the relentless pursuit of innovation and securing a competitive advantage, businesses are progressively harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) as a transformative tool. The promise of AI to streamline operations, elevate decision-making processes, and unveil concealed patterns within data has spurred its swift integration across industries, especially in retail, manufacturing, and distribution.
However, despite the compelling possibilities, achieving the maximum benefits of AI hinges on a robust groundwork of data maturity. Unfortunately, numerous enterprises encounter challenges in attaining this maturity due to various factors. These challenges often encompass:
- Fragmented data silos
- Poor data quality
- Limited transparency about data assets and skills
- Organizational inertia toward reestablishing a balance between technology as an enabler vs. provider of business data needs
In this article, I will highlight prescriptive strategies to overcome these challenges toward establishing a robust data foundation for scaling differentiated AI capabilities.
As enterprise architects, it’s easy for us to focus on the application portfolio and lose sight of the technology that runs those applications. To ensure your applications support your business strategy, you need to empower them with functional IT components.
If your IT components reach end-of-support, you could find yourself losing value from your exciting, innovative applications and falling short on your strategic goals. As such, tracking your IT component lifecycle is essential for enterprise architects concerned with technology obsolescence risk management.
Before we look at how you can do that, let’s consider the dangers of ignoring technology obsolescence risk. Below, we list the five biggest issues that you face from technology obsolescence.
Technology Obsolescence Risk 1: Failure
On November 7, 2015, Paris-Orly airport was forced to shutdown for seven hours due to a network failure. Air traffic controllers explained that this was due to the airport running operating systems that were over 20 years old and long out of support.
Feature Article
Enhancing Digital Sustainability Practices: A Comprehensive Guide
Discover how to transform your digital habits for a greener future with Carrot Connect’s guide on Digital Sustainability Practices.
Article featured in Carrot Connect
In the digital heartbeat of our modern world, the invisible ripples of our IT practices touch more than just the bottom line; they reach deep into the fabric of our planet.
At Carrot Connect, we’ve turned our lens towards an often-overlooked sustainability frontier: our daily digital activities. We’ve found both a challenge and an opportunity—a chance to lead in shaping a greener, more efficient digital footprint.
A Moment of Reflection
Did you know the average office worker’s daily email traffic has the same carbon footprint as driving their car for 10 kilometres?
Eight years after spotlighting the productivity pitfalls of email, we’ve unearthed a deeper, more profound impact—its environmental toll. This revelation isn’t just about emails but our holistic IT practices.
At Carrot Connect, we invite you on a journey through the unseen ecological cost of our digital world and share actionable insights to foster sustainability from the keyboard up.
THE DIGITAL EYE
I hope these articles are valuable.
I am passionate about technology, and I want to share that passion with you. I believe that it’s essential for everyone to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, so I’ve set out to cover all aspects of the industry – from data analytics to blockchain and AI.
Please let me know if you want to see any other topics covered, and I would appreciate your help sharing this blog with others who may be interested.