Sustainable Solutions For IDMC: An Essay On International Digital Marketing.

Australia is enforcing all Australian companies to be compliant in energy consumption and sustainable workplaces.

Refer to http://www.environment.gov.au/about-us/legislation and http://envlaw.com.au/ 

And ‘National Action Plan.pdf’ from your resource folder.

You are an IT project manager at International Digital Marketing Company (IDMC), and your new project is to lead a small team to ensure that IDMC is fully digitized and online in accordance with the newly proposed sustainability regulations from the Australian Federal government.

Your supervisor, IT director of IDMC, is keen to learn what improvements you can make for IDMC under what resources. He will directly report your work to the CEO of IDMC for immediate action.

These are some details about IDMC:

1. There are approximately 500 computers in 4- storey building.
2. There are 20 digital designers in Sydney office and 50 designers in Brisbane office.
3. There are 50 marketing professionals in Sydney office with only 2 in Brisbane office.
4. The computers are not turned off or in sleep mode during the night time
5. The building is equipped with approximately 200 lights
6. The building is equipped with 2 microwaves and fridges in each floor.
7. The building is equipped with centralized heating and air-conditioning (harder to measure the energy consumption)
8. Operating system and application software were installed on ad hoc manner
9. Desktops or servers are not virtualized
10. Printers are heavily used for colour printing and all business documents
11. Lights are on at night time for cleaners

Sustainable Projects

Environment conservation should be a key consideration when executing plans to undertake an ICT project to ensure the project meets the laid down regulatory standards and industry-based standards. The Australian government came up with the EPBC (Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation) act, to provide a national framework for companies to use in setting up their e-waste policy and environment conservation procedures. This report highlights the various sustainable methods that IDMC (International Digital Marketing Company) can use to ensure not only compliance with the law but also make them have competitive advantages (Sayeed and Gill, 2008).

Suitable Sustainable Projects

IDMC can embark on the following projects that will strategically make the company be sustainable and reduce environment pollution effects,

This project will provide the company with a framework to dispose the wastes from electronic parts including computers and other electronic devices with the view of reuse, recycle and reduce approach (Klimova et al., 2016).

The company can embark on a Project to reduce paper use in the office by ensuring most if not all business documents are digitized and can be filed electronically without printing to help reduce not only the negative impact on the environment but also save the company recurrent cost of rims of paper procurement (Elliott, 2012).

Solid State Drives(SSD) should be a minimum requirement when procuring laptops and desktop computers to reduce not only the energy consumption but also read and write time of data to storage (Park, Kim, and Jeong, 2014).

The company can endeavor to consolidate all the software licenses buy buying bulk licenses online instead of purchasing a license for each computer which normally comes in CD format. The online version is much sustainable as only one license is purchased for the given number of users.

McAfee antivirus has strong email protection using its real-time spam filters reducing energy used in processing spam emails.

Cloud computing is more sustainable since the company will not have to spend money purchasing the heavy infrastructure which is not only expensive but also consumes a lot of power energy. Through cloud computing, the company will only pay for what they actually use bringing more efficiency in operations of the company. Through the cloud, the company is leveraged from having a massive ICT presence on site and let them concentrate on their core business, outsourcing the services of a cloud provider, who in most cases have set up almost failure proof system to ensure business continuity. It, therefore, transfers most risks to the provider (Harmon et al., 2010).

The following online collaboration tools greatly reduce the printing in an office,

This is a nice package offered by Dropbox suited for a company set up to ensure employees can securely share files amongst each. In also provided a secure storage for the company thereby reducing the need to print documents.

This SaaS enables the company to collaborate amongst its employees and run meetings online reducing the need to print and circulate minutes manually.

The designer distributed over different geographical locations can use team viewer tool to collaborate on projects and assist one another in executing some technical designs.

Sustainability In Integration

GitHub is a revolutionary online platform that allows teams to work on a different project simultaneously and control the versioning of the same. This allows the designers in different offices collaborate on a project and have one team lead to manage the versioning process (Harris, 2008)

Impacts Of Cloud Computing

With the introduction of cloud, the budget on ICT infrastructure will be drastically reduced, to say the least. This is will positively impact on the business by saving on cost which was initially used by ICT overheads.

With the cloud, there will be an effective and efficient collaboration between teams of different projects all working in unison to achieve a particular business case.

Additionally, the introduction of the cloud will reduce business downtime since the company will sign an SLA(Service Level Agreement) which normally includes maximum uptime. Most cloud providers have set up infrastructure that aims at achieving this.

Operations such as communication, marketing, and project management will be disrupted by the introduction of the cloud as a more convenient approach is to have them done online (Watson, Boudreau and Chen, 2010).

Looking into our college, the following operation deems fit being migrated to the cloud,

First, The college can seek the services of the platform as a service (PaaS) such as Microsoft Azure to provide a platform where a student can test their solution seamlessly without having to rely on the unreliable one deployed by the college. Second, the communication done via email should be outsourced to a cloud provider other than maintaining the college’s email server which has frequent downtime making communication come to a standstill. The backup process which currently is done in tape should be done via the cloud to ensure minimum downtime and faster recovery during incidences and disasters.

With the growing need to migrate to the cloud, there still remain some core operations that are better suited to be done in-house. The first one being the DevOps who develop and design new marketing strategies for the company. This service is customer facing hence needs direct company scrutiny to ensure the projects undertaken by the Devs are in line with the company strategic objectives.

Secondly, security still remains a concern for the company hence there should be some person who actively involved in protecting the networks and systems in-house. Processes such as audits should be done periodically to assure the stakeholders that the system is secure.

The following technology solutions shall make IDMC enhance their sustainable goals,

DropBox file storage solution shall ensure teams spread across various geo-location are able to work on similar projects are have a single repository to file their project. This shall remove the need to implement a storage solution for every member of the project.

TeamViewer shall enable members of a project to check the work done by members of his/her team and assist one another when the need arises. This shall remove the need of support staff having to physically traverse the various sites seeking to offer support to team members as most support shall be done remotely via TeamViewer (Evans, Strezov and Evans, 2010).

The version control solution shall ensure the team can independently work on part of the project and each solution shall later be merged. To do this, the company needs to set up a GitHub account that shall ensure each team member uploads their changes of a project.

To ensure that IDMC reduce their power consumption, a greener approach to computing is important. The following are some of the proposed solutions that can be considered,

SSDs (Solid State Drives)

The traditional hard disk consumes a lot of power since it is made of mechanical parts. If the company want to go green, investment in solid-state drives which shall greatly reduce power consumptions.

Energy saving bulb has low power ratings which shall greatly reduce the power usage by the company.

There is a need for the company to upgrade its monitors to a more energy efficient LED which will save the company lots of money. With its inbuilt technology, LED monitors generally consumes less power compared to LCDs (Murugesan, 2008).

Every investment requires sacrifices and sustainability projects are no exception. The following describes the CBA(cost-benefit analysis) of the different mentioned sustainability projects that will make IDMC achieve the regulations set by

DropBox; The online file storage shall ensure the company rely on Storage as a service rather than spend money buying each computer a storage device. With the online tool, the company's files can be stored and accessed anytime anywhere thereby increasing productivity and efficiency by different teams in the company. The only cost the company shall incur is paying the monthly subscription fee of USD 25.

TeamViewer; The online remote desktop solution shall make the company reduce the transportation cost used by the support staff, moving about the different offices.

Github; Github allows the different project teamwork simultaneously and share each other’s work online to be checked by others and get approved by the project lead. This ensures productivity and secure version control. It will cost the company USD 25 to set it up.

SSDs; The Solid State Drives shall greatly benefit the company as most read/write operation of data into the storage facilities shall be greatly reduced. In addition to that, the lack of mechanical parts in SSDs means less power consumption from this component. However, the cost is relatively higher compared to HDDs since it cost about USD 49 (Metzger et al., 2012)

Energy Saving Bulbs; This bulb reduces the consumption rate of electricity the company currently endures due to lighting needs. With this upgrade, the low wattage of this modern bulbs means less heat energy is emitted. The bulb costly approximately USD 4.

LED; The Light Emitting Diode(LEDs) screen upgrade means the computers and TV display won’t consume a lot of energy. This will drastically reduce energy consumptions. LED costs USD $15 (Hilty and Ruddy, 2010).

Table 1 Cost-Benefit Analysis

Solution	Cost	Benefit	Availability
DropBox	20$/Month	-Reduced need to have individual storage -Enhanced collaboration -Real-time Backup -Real-time Recovery	99% available
TeamViewer	5$/Month	-Online Collaboration -Remote desktop Connection -Reduced traveling cost by support	99%
GitHub	25$/Month	-Online Collaboration -Enhanced project version control -Quick recovery -	99%
Energy Saving Bulb	4 $	-Reduced electricity consumption by half -Long bulb life	100%
LED Monitors	15$	-Saves Energy -Durable -Eye-friendly
SSDs	49$	-Faster Read/Write Speeds -Long lasting -Saves energy	100%

The following table summarises the calculation for power consumption

The following short-term solutions can be exploited by ADMC to ensure they achieve the goal of going green and comply with the regulatory requirements. They include,

The Heavy printing done by the marketing department is voluminous, making the company’s paper consumptions to skyrocket. This can be reduced by putting up policy for back to back printing for only business documents that must be printed, otherwise, every document should be digitized and filled online and if need be, signed digitally to reduce paper usage in the office and achieve the sustainable goals of going paperless (Verdouw et al., 2016).

With virtualization technology, the company will reduce the number of physical computing machines such as servers and storage as this can be shared among multiple users. When servers are virtualized, the number of server services running on one physical server shall be increased thereby eliminating the need to buy a physical server for each server service. This will not only save the total cost of ownership but also reduce the power consumption by the company.

Their need for the company to upgrade to a more energy saving bulbs to reduce the power consumption caused by the heavy lightning don at the company. These bulbs have the capability to reduce the heating effect of lightning energy by reducing the wattage on them.

The company can opt to upgrade their computer monitors and TV screens to LED which improves not only the visualization of images but also reduce the power consumed by this display unit hence making the company drastically reduce its power consumption.

The company can opt to solve the heavy power consumed by the current refrigerators by investing in the Energy Star rating of the new models which have been approved to use less energy in proving the cooling effect.

Depend On Solar

This principle of sustainable management put much emphasis on the usage of solar power instead of hydro or other methods which are not environment-friendly. It is therefore important for IDMC to consider using solar-powered electronic devices to reduce electricity usage and enhance going green initiates (Curry and Donnellan, 2012).

Biodiversity

The company should endeavor to ensure the plant and animal life on each continues to blossom as they use solutions that do not pose harm to the ecosystem. This is achieved by complying with the regulation of the EPBC Act (Sayeed and Gill, 2008).

This principle insists on reuse, recycle and reduce which targets the total elimination of waste product from computing and other environmental hazards by ensuring they recycle, reuse and or reduce the wastes. This saves the company a lot of money and reduces pollution caused by this non-biodegradable wastes . (Seidel et al., 2010)

Kpis For Optus

The Optus key performance indicators included a reduce overhead cost of running the appliances, reduced power usage, compliance with regulatory frameworks and generally reduced wastes from the company. The following summarises the framework,

Smallest Carbon Footprint

The use of collaboration tools for support staff such as team viewer shall ensure reduced carbon footprint due to reducing traveling on their part.

With most services offered are online, the staff shall be more connected as they will be able to collaborate with each other in real time their by enabling efficient sharing of knowledge and expertise.

The customers shall enjoy the online services such as online marketing which in the long run will improve customer quality of experience which will lead to a more turn-over ratio

The sustainability plans will drastically reduce the cost on expenses such as power and ever buying new equipment with high overhead costs. The environment-friendly sustainable technologies will reduce these costs

The company power consumption will be reduced if the green technology initiative is implemented since the appliance recommended do not have high wattage thereby reduced power consumption.

If the sustainable technologies are implemented, the company shall be certified by the Australian government to have complied with the EPBC Act which focuses on environment conservation (Zucca, Smith and Mitry, 2009)

The reuse, recycle, reduce mantra shall ensure the company wastes products are reduced since most of it will end up in the recycling plants hence not only protecting the biodiversity but also reducing the cost of buying new appliances. (Robinson, 2009)

The following outlines a couple of best practices that can be adopted by ADMC to achieve the going green initiative,

• Turn Off the lights when not in use
• Utilization of energy saving bulbs
• Reuse, Recycle, Reduce
• Power appliances using solar energy
• Run the freezer efficiently and only utilize when they are full
• Swap the current product used for cleaning using environment-friendly ones
• Turn off the computer lights when you leave office
• Print on both paper sides
• Use emails regularly than printing

The following opportunities shall be got from virtualization,

• Through virtualization, there shall be enhanced server utilization and efficiency
• A more robust disaster recovery shall be in place
• Improve the business continuity in case of disasters
• Aids in collaboration on projects
• Reduce total cost of ownership of hardware.

CO₂ emission from the sustainable projects shall be lowered as compared to the current situation since most of the end products are not from carbon element. The calculation yields emission of the gas to be at 10000cm³

When a benchmark was made with reference to Hunter another digital marketing company, From the calculations, the total energy consumption ratio from Hunter to IDMC was at 2:3 making IDMC consumption to be greater than what Hunter utilizes for the same watts. It is therefore important to ensure the sustainable project take effect to be within the set benchmarks.

From the calculations, CO₂ emission from Hunter to IDMC was again rationed to be at 4:7 implying that IDMC currently emits a higher amount of the gas to the atmosphere. This contributes to air pollution. It is therefore in order to implement the project.

1. Invest in virtualization technology to virtualize the available hardware and software. This will cost the company about AUR 100000 to implement.
2. Replace the existing light bulbs with energy saving types. This project will cost about AUR 50000

• Replace the current monitors with LED display types. Cost of the project is estimated at AUR 150000
• Replace the current fridges with the star energy efficient one’s prices at AUR 80000.

Conclusion

With the growing pressure by the regulatory bodies to ensure companies have a sustainable project to ensure environment-friendly, this report is aimed at describing to the board the various approaches that the company can take to ensure they have sustainable projects within the company and join other going concerns which have so far implemented some of the projects.

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