1a
Optimizing Your Infrastructure for Sustainability | Business Priorities Guide
Normalize corporate
compliance with external
environmental regulations
Unit IT Managers (BUIT),
and Director of IT
Support
creation,
management,
and
monitoring
of
compliance
frameworks
Measure and track internal
resources and environmental
impact goals
Participate in business
opportunities that sustain the
environment
BUSINESS DRIVER
ACCOUNTABLE ROLES
NEEDS
Chief Financial Officer, Chief Executive Capturing the power and passion of
Officer, Chief Marketing Officer
employees to learn, share, and re-evaluate
opportunities to sustain the environment,
so the organization can implement
opportunities that have the highest
potential for impact and profit first
Address the risk of climate change for the
business, supply chain, and target markets
Establish a carbon trading platform to
plan and manage the carbon certificate
inventory
Chief Information Officer, Chief
Financial Officer, Chief Operations
Officer/Chief Operating Officer, Chief
Strategy Officer
CHALLENGES
IMPACTS
Developing a corporate program within the organization to
solicit feedback from employees and socialize creative ideas
among peers
 Missed opportunities from employees who
have first-hand visibility into environmental
and cost reduction opportunities
 Wasted resources due to "re-inventing the
wheel" in development and difficulty adopting
methodologies that sustain the environment
 Loss of revenue
 Suppliers who do not align with corporate
sustainability guidelines and stray from a
holistic approach
 Loss of revenue due to penalties and lack of
participation
 Decreased incentive to participate
Finding sufficient data to make informed risk assessments
Understanding the carbon position, footprint, and liability
Integrating quantifiable carbon metrics from disparate data
sources
Establish resource utility baselines and the Achieving metrics that are equivalent across a distributed IT
means to measure and report
architecture
improvements
Building a consistent, quantifiable infrastructure with IT
equipment that changes over time
Empower customers to make ecologically Meeting commitments to measure and report on the basic
friendly choices based on the reported
carbon footprint
environmental impact of products
Realigning or redesigning the business model to support Green
initiatives
Getting insight into the ecological impact of the supply chain
Track and measure the impact of
Establishing goal-driven performance metrics to help ensure
teleworking
remote worker productivity
Government Officials
Give businesses incentives to comply with Learning what will motivate organizations to change
regulations, reduce carbon, save energy,
Finding ways to fund incentives and drive participation
and have workers commute less
frequently
Chief Information Officer, Chief
Financial Officer, Chief Executive
Officer, Chief Operations Officer/Chief
Operating Officer, Chief Technical
Officer, Department Head, Director of
IT, Personnel responsible for recycling
and other eco-friendly initiatives,
Business Unit IT Managers , Chief
Strategy Officer, Legal and Corporate
Affairs Counsel
Ensure that organizations are informed
and complying with environmental
sustainability regulations
Define and convert to environmentally
sustainable or Green processes that are
agile and adaptable to future regulations
PHASE 1
PHASE 2
 Impact of Green initiatives is not measured, so
it gets marginalized
 Lack of insight into the impact of teleworking
(infrastructure, facilities, HVAC, community
impacts, and more)
 Inability to make ecologically friendly work
practices a high priority
 Continued waste and damage to the
environment
 Poor consumer perception and bad press
 Lack of consistency and perceived fairness
across the industry
Meeting evolving environment-related compliance
 Lack of leadership in environmental
requirements
sustainability
In a multinational setting, accommodating regional variances in  Rising energy costs
compliance requirements and time frames
 Difficulty in providing services within an
Coordinating each business unit
allotted budget
 Criminal prosecution
Managing the potential risk and expense of diverse regulations  Potential future legal impact for nonrelated to sustaining the environment
compliance
Justifying the ultimate cost to keep processes agile, and
 Lack of a strategic plan, increased costs and
achieving adequate return on investment (ROI)
risks, and less time to execute on compliance
Raising environmental awareness to the appropriate level for
initiatives
people to make the right choices
Optimizing Your Infrastructure for Sustainability | Business Priorities Guide
BUSINESS DRIVER
 No accountability for resource usage
 Inability to show improvement to support other
initiatives
PHASE 3
1b
Normalize corporate
compliance with external
environmental regulations
Unit IT Managers (BUIT),
and Director of IT
Support creation,
management, and
monitoring of
compliance
frameworks
Measure and track internal resources
and environmental impact goals
Participate in business
opportunities that sustain the
environment
BUSINESS DRIVER
PHASE 1
PHASE 2
PHASE 3
 Collect employee feedback and knowledge, share best
practices, and learn from each other to protect and sustain the
environment
 Make the knowledge base and portal infrastructure available
to more people within and outside the organization to improve
collaboration
 Provide social computing capabilities within and across the
enterprise, including suppliers and customers, to collect
feedback and gather suggestions for improvement
 Improve access to key operational and resource data across the
organization to identify the regulatory, physical, and general
risks that climate change poses to the business
 Provide the ability to analyze metrics related to energy usage,
carbon emissions, water inefficiencies, and greenhouse gas
emissions to make informed risk assessments
 Enable ongoing optimization and alignment of processes
with corporate sustainability guidelines by analyzing the
carbon footprint and environmental impact of suppliers to
maintain a resilient and sustainable supply chain
 Easily tap into information about carbon position, footprint,
and liability stored in disparate data systems and develop key
process indicators to quantify metrics for managing carbon
certificate inventory
 Enable workers to monitor key performance indicators that are
linked to various systems to help initiate processes such as
carbon trading
 Enable real-time availability of operational information
across the organization and provide the ability to compare
data with competitors and analyze trends
 Pull the right information and present it to executives and
reporting authorities so they can quickly see issues visually
and have an idea of the overall status of operations
 Provide rich visualization of resource metrics to help
executives and reporting authorities rapidly identify trends and
issues for better predictive analysis
 Enable executives and reporting authorities to take proactive
measures when certain trends begin to change to enable
analysis and understanding of the root cause and effects, and
to share details and best practices
 Collaborate on and publish product design objectives,
sourcing policies, packaging and transportation processes,
disposal guidelines, internal models and calculation of value
streams, and product carbon footprints
 Provide collaboration portals for suppliers' approvals and
receiving submission requirements of carbon footprint and
compliance data
 Share and collaborate on product, packaging, storage, and
transportation improvement opportunities internally and
throughout the supply chain, and in business modeling and
simulation tools
 Allow managers to train and monitor employees to promote
and evaluate remote workers’ effectiveness
 Allow for analysis and reporting in near real time to gain
visibility and insight into and control over productivity across
all employees who work from home
 Improve alignment with business strategy by maximizing the
ways resources are used
 Define performance levels for telecommuters and measure
the outcomes in real time
 Assign role-based key performance indicators (KPIs) for key
business metrics that can be monitored for productivity
 Pull together relevant regulatory compliance metrics about
energy consumption, carbon footprint, and greenhouse gas
emissions to identify ways to fund incentives and drive
participation
 Accelerate collaboration and information exchange to share
best practices and learning, to raise awareness for compliance
regulations
 Proactively monitor compliance metrics, triggered events,
and alerts when compliance is compromised, and give
prescriptive guidance about how to mitigate future risk
 Give the compliance and audit team a consolidated view of
environmental regulations, policies, and procedures to make
critical information more easily available
 Enable compliance awareness and adoption while monitoring
compliance and generating alerts to be aware of every noncompliance issue
 Provide advanced data visualization to make it easier for
users to understand and respond to new compliance
requirements
 Introduce consistency into environmentally sustainable or
Green initiatives by driving awareness and making processes
automated, repeatable, and reliable
 Enable business stakeholders to design, interact with, monitor,
innovate, and automate compliance processes and drive
collaboration across the organization
 Optimize compliance processes by managing initiatives,
monitoring risks, and delivering alerts to appropriate people
to raise environmental awareness
Optimizing Your Infrastructure for Sustainability | Business Priorities Guide
1c
ACCOUNTABLE
ROLES
NEEDS
CHALLENGES
IMPACTS
Chief Financial Officer, Chief
Marketing Officer, Personnel
responsible for recycling and
other eco-friendly initiatives,
Chief Strategy Officer,
Human Resources
Representatives
Attract, hire, and retain workers in virtual workplaces
Making infrastructure investments for teleworkers a
tactical priority
Establishing and integrating IT security practices and
policies into business
Controlling the cost of meeting regulations regarding
worker safety in home offices
Providing remote workers with the tool set necessary
to be productive
Keeping IT support mechanisms up to date to support
remote workers
 Difficulty hiring and retaining talented workers
 Difficulty maintaining work-and-life balance
during high-demand projects
 Loss of productivity and collaboration when
working remotely
 Decreased customer satisfaction due to lack of inperson contact
Improve the organization's image related to corporate
social responsibility (CSR) by supporting measurable
improvements in environmental sustainability and
Green initiatives
Measuring the bottom-line value of CSR, especially
during periods of economic instability
Establishing and realizing the return on IT investment
in enabling CSR
Completing a comparative CSR analysis within or
between industries when there are no standardized
proxies
Finding the appropriate level of social responsibility
for an organization when opinions vary widely
Finding the appropriate organizational approach to
social responsibility to avoid complaints about
"Greenwashing"
Building awareness of CSR
Reflecting CSR through the organization's value
chain
 Reduced customer satisfaction
 Lower stock value due to shareholder
dissatisfaction
 Customer rejection
 Loss of market share
 Poor reputation
 Low talent retention
 Unmotivated workforce
 Regulatory conflict
 Inability to influence policy change
Include Green technologies as a strategy that
complements brand image
Navigating politics and exhaustion when building a
Green program that strategically supports the
organization's brands
Controlling public perception of immature or fringe
Green technologies
Managing risk when Green messaging does not align
with all brands
Building a Green program that is equal in value to
traditional programs
Avoiding brand dilution if there is no clear Green
strategy
Managing expectations that luxury brands should
invest more extensively in Green than budget brands
 Reduced brand exposure
 Messaging that is diluted among Green-savvy
competitors
Empower customers by providing incentives to be
more environmentally aware and choose sustainable
offerings
Quantifying value in terms of standardized green
metrics
Raising consumer awareness of corporate
involvement in Green initiatives
Finding an effective call to action that inspires
customer participation
 Loss of eco-sensitive customers
 Lost opportunities to improve customer
relationships
Respond to consumer expectations that industries take a
holistic approach to sustaining the environment
BUSINESS DRIVER
Optimizing Your Infrastructure for Sustainability | Business Priorities Guide
BUSINESS DRIVER
PHASE 1
PHASE 2
PHASE 3
1d
Respond to consumer expectations that industries take a
holistic approach to sustaining the environment
BUSINESS DRIVER
PHASE 1
PHASE 2
PHASE 3
 Hire and retain next-generation workers by providing a virtual
office working environment that has optimized and secure
access to critical applications, documents, and data
 Provide remote workers with the ability to communicate in
real time with peers and customers even while on the go
 Update the infrastructure for next-generation workers by
using the cost-savings gained by enabling remote workers
 Safeguard information when workers access sensitive data
from remote locations
 Increase customer awareness of the "Green code of conduct"
the organization enforces in its core operations such as ecommerce, telecommuting, and other activities
 Strengthen the organization's Web presence by branding
products and services with specific environmentally friendly
attributes such as recyclable or biodegradable, or by
establishing measurable sustainability baselines and
improvements
 Collect customer feedback and suggestions for improvement
to the organization's environmental initiatives
 Standardize the methodology for collection and assessment of
data about energy consumption, carbon footprint, and
greenhouse gas emissions to identify areas for improvement to
the strategy to include Green technologies
 Implement environmentally sustainable business policies and
practices to align Green initiatives with the brand image
 Analyze sustainability performance data, plans, and targets
to increase performance transparency and mitigate risk
 Promote sustainable practices, environmentally preferable
offerings, and ecologically efficient strategies to raise
customer awareness of corporate involvement in Green
initiatives
 Provide customers the ability to share ideas, give feedback,
and suggest improvements to sustainable offerings, including
products and services, to keep customers engaged
 Measure and report on metrics related to Green initiatives
and identify opportunities to stimulate more sustainable
processes to improve customer relationships
Optimizing Your Infrastructure for Sustainability | Business Priorities Guide
1e
BUSINESS DRIVER
ACCOUNTABLE
ROLES
NEEDS
CHALLENGES
IMPACTS
Chief Financial Officer, Chief
Operations Officer/Chief
Operating Officer, Personnel
responsible for recycling and
other eco-friendly initiatives,
Facilities Management, Chief
Strategy Officer, Human
Resources Representatives
Establish and support a secure and continuous work
environment to reduce environmental impact related
to travel and commuting
Finding alternatives to in-person meetings
 Traffic congestion and pollution
 Higher energy consumption, lighting and heating,
ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC)
 Worker dissatisfaction due to lack of opportunities
to participate
 Loss of productivity during commute time
 Increased carbon footprint
Redefining business processes to accommodate
flexible schedules
Motivating workers to use mass transit and lowemission alternatives such as cycling, walking, or
riding a scooter
Reduce the carbon footprint by minimizing the
environmental impact of technology
Deployment and adoption of technology enablers for
remote working
Minimizing the customer satisfaction impact of
practices that sustain the environment
Make data centers more environmentally friendly
Physical constraints of data centers limit options that
sustain the environment
Eco-friendly conversions can be extensive and
prohibitively expensive
 High costs to retrofit old buildings as modern data
centers
 Difficulty in securing servers that are located in
multiple data centers to ensure adequate electricity
and cooling
 Increased carbon footprint
Risks associated with extensive changes can be
expensive if not properly mitigated
Manage utilization of distributed IT resources such as
laptops, printers, and other devices
Standardizing on IT equipment and software that can
be managed remotely
Adopting practices that are sensitive to the
environment may lag deployment because people
don't see the business value
Tracking consumable resources can be an
administrative challenge
 Higher environmental impact due to unmanaged
remote resources
 Low or improper utilization of existing equipment
PHASE 1
PHASE 2
PHASE 3
 Allow workers to reduce travel by working remotely, sharing
ideas, posting questions, and having general discussions
 Securely conduct online meetings and training, and enable
workers to collaborate in real time regardless of geography to
reduce office space requirements and the need for inter-office
and customer-related travel
 Fully integrate telecommuting into the culture and business
practices to reduce automobile and aircraft emissions
 Take advantage of cloud computing to shift and consolidate
resources
 Promote the Energy Star program and Electronic Product
Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), resulting in lower
equipment costs, less electrical consumption for server power
and cooling, and less physical space for servers
 Consolidate multiple workloads onto one platform and make
data centers more environmentally friendly
 Provision servers for application portfolio management to
lower the number of servers by consolidating applications
onto fewer servers
 Develop and distribute applications in the cloud with minimal
resources on the premises
 Enable organizations to remotely monitor and maintain IT
resources, visualize problems, and take proactive measures to
reduce site visit costs
 Streamline processes to improve tracking and control of old
and outdated equipment and to help ensure correct disposal or
recycling of equipment and other consumables
 Proactively perform preventative maintenance and achieve
other equipment improvements through automated alerts that
are linked to more details about root causes, effects, and other
troubleshooting data
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Reduce the carbon footprint by minimizing the
environmental impact of technology
BUSINESS
DRIVER
1f
Version 2.0 | July 2010
Optimizing Your Infrastructure for Sustainability | Business Priorities Guide