The OwlPoint Blog - Insight into Sustainable IT

Strategic Project Management Transformation

2011-11-02T11:00:00.003-04:00

Marc Resch, who is a member of OwlPoint's consulting team, recently published a book called "Strategic Project Management Transformation: Delivering Maximum ROI and Sustainable Business Value". He has assembled a wonderful resource which helps strategic business leaders, executives, and project managers better structure and evaluate projects to provide maximum business value.

Marc summarizes the current issue with projects and project management in his opening chapter…

Take a second and think about the key success criteria of any project. What are your thoughts? Did you say, "On-time and within budget, hit the deliverables, or even obtain stakeholder sign-off"? Are you surprised when I tell you that the CEO, corporate executives, and shareholders would say that you're wrong? If you said, "Business value," you're on the right track, and if you said, "Profit," you're thinking like an executive. In today's competitive environment, every dollar spent needs to be tightly tied to the bottom line: a company's overall profitability. Every project needs to be viewed as a strategic investment that demands a return. How much money did the project make the company? If the project didn't drive profit or cost savings, then why spend valuable and finite resources on it? It's become abundantly clear that projects are strategic investments, and a project that makes money for the company or ensures value continuity is a good investment; if it doesn't make the company money or provide value continuity, it is a bad one.

With shareholders' insatiable quest for profitability and returns on their investments, corporate leaders are accountable for demonstrating these returns in all areas of the business. At any given moment within an organization, the portfolio of projects can be immense, consuming invaluable corporate resources; namely time and money. It is imperative, therefore, that the utilization of time and money is well spent and that project efforts directly contribute to the overall benefit of the company.

In the book Marc addresses how to create valuable projects including details on how to put together the business case, appropriately determine business value, define metrics, and assemble the financials surrounding a project. Marc provides good examples and specific guidance on how to transform or enhance your current project management practices.

So if you are looking for ideas on how to improve project management and more importantly improve the value you are receiving from your projects, read the "Strategic Project Management Transformation". Marc's book is available on Amazon here.

Annual Planning

2011-10-25T13:30:00.001-04:00

It's that time again in business where you start planning for next year. Trying to figure out what projects you need to work on in the coming year and which projects get priority is probably not too difficult for most people. However, identifying what project goals to establish with limited time, budget and other resources is often the real challenge. Unfortunately, all too often we put together our annual plans and are unable to successfully complete the objectives for the year. We either fail to complete all the projects or go over budget, and, sometimes, we do both.

Annual plans fail for a multitude of reasons. One of the classes I took while completing my Master's Degree was in project management. We often had to review case studies to determine what the underlying issues were for failed projects. To this day you will still hear some of my classmates/friends yell out "Poor Planning" or "Poor Leadership" when something doesn't go well. It was "Poor Control" when one of them broke the lights in the hallway, but that is a story for another day. J In all seriousness, most project failures can be attributed to one of four factors: Planning, Leadership, Control, and Organization.

More often than not Poor Planning was the underlying cause of missed project goals when we did our cases study evaluations. In the 15 years since I completed that course, I can tell you that Poor Planning is still a significant contributor to most project failures. However, when it comes to annual planning, it's not so much the development of a single project that causes problems, but the understanding of the big picture that contributes to the issues. Many outside influences can affect the outcome of projects, such as overall corporate goals and events, reliance on external resources, and changing priorities.

You should ask yourself some questions. Are you prepared for additional requests that are going to happen during the year? Do you know what business decisions are being made that will affect you? Will you be able to get the support and resources from the business? Do you truly understand what the priorities of the business are versus what your organization would like to work on?

I'm all for working hard and accomplishing great feats, and I hate seeing stagnant organizations that seem to work hard, but don't have much to show for it. So when I say this, I am by no way preaching mediocrity. When planning for the year, don't be overzealous and try to take on too much. Be realistic about what can be accomplished, keeping in mind what situations might arise during the year and what issues might occur. Also, make sure you have properly understood what the goals of the business are and are in-line with those objectives. It is easy to fall into the trap and think everything will work out perfectly for the coming year.

Take a look at previous years and understand why projects haven't met their original goals. If you are seeing the same themes, then there is probably something you can do about it. To give you an example, a client of OwlPoint required projects and initiatives to go through an extensive set of committees for various approvals. This often caused significant delays. However, when projects were developed, there wasn't enough time and effort allocated for preparing for and participating in these various committees. Some committees only met once a month, which meant you could have a delay of over a month waiting for a decision. Although I would suggest streamlining the decision making process at this client, for project planning purposed at least the project managers and leaders could ensure their projects were prepared for the various committees and that enough time was built into the project plans to participate and wait for approval. This better sets expectations and establishes more realistic resource requirements and completion dates.

So now it is time for me to work OwlPoint's 2012 plan. If you should need help with your planning, give us a ring.

ITIL 2011

2011-10-14T17:00:00.001-04:00

The past few weeks I have been reviewing the latest update to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), the IT Service Management best practices. The ITIL Refresh Board and the ITIL Advisory Group have been working on an update to the current V3 version of ITIL for a while now and this summer the new version was finalized and published. It is being called ITIL 2011 and is supposedly only a minor update to the processes and best practices for implementing Service Management.

Interestingly, for what is supposed to only be a minor update, there are some major changes to ITIL 2011. The new guidance includes 4 new processes, a change in a process's name, significant modifications to the Service Strategy book, and enhancements to many of the processes. Since the 5 core books remain the same, and there wasn't anything fundamentally different in ITIL's structure as there was when ITIL progressed from version 1 to version 2 and then from V2 to V3, I guess the folks behind ITIL didn't want to name it Version 4. I gather then the name ITIL 2011 was better than calling it ITIL V3.5.

One of the updates I had been told about and noticed immediately is the consistency of the process definitions across all of the processes. In V3, the process descriptions varied from book to book. Most significantly, the processes in IT Strategy were not described in the same fashion as the other books. Also, there were a lot of inconsistencies in the process references across books, and although I haven't read everything yet and compared it word for word between the two editions, I expect that many of these discrepancies have been fixed.

Here at OwlPoint we are working on our next newsletter, usually published once a quarter. Included in the upcoming edition of the newsletter will be an article providing more information on ITIL 2011. So if you are interested in finding out more about the 4 new processes and some of the other changes, keep a lookout for our newsletter in the next couple weeks.

Steve Jobs – You will be missed!

2011-10-07T15:32:00.001-04:00

This has been a sad week with the passing of Steve Jobs. The world has lost a great visionary and someone who has impacted most of our daily lives.

Ironically, I had been talking to a client about Steve Jobs on Tuesday evening. The topic started with a discussion about the announcement of the iPhone 4S and progressed to how someone like Steve can take a company such as Apple and lead it to such significant success. While management skills are important, it takes leadership and a special vision to build ideas and develop them into something great. Steve did just that, multiple times at Apple.

Apple had a big impact on me and my career. My first experience with a computer and a computer game was on the Apple II+ playing the game Lemonade. While a lot of my friends had Atari's, I chose to pursue the Commodore 64 (after my Timex Sinclair 1000 J) and later as I went to college I used the Commodore Amiga. However, I used Apples frequently in school and in my senior year of high-school took a co-op position working in a school-support organization that provided computer resources to area school districts. This is where I got my first experience with the Macintosh and fell in love with its simple and intuitive interface and word processing capabilities. Microsoft Word was incredible, and it would be several more years before I would see it on a Windows/Intel based computer.

When I went to college, one of my many jobs was working in a computer lab for the School of Education at Temple University. We had a lab of Macs, Apple IIs and IBMs. I felt privileged to work in this computer center versus the main one on Temple's campus because we had the Macs. I loved my Commodore Amiga, but the Apple Macintosh was much better to use for word processing and it was also great for publishing newsletters. I started free-lance consulting and helped a few businesses with their computer environments, including their Apple Macs.

Unfortunately in the early '90s the Mac's began to decline in popularity and the Windows platform within the business environment was taking off. While Mac's were popular in the education and publications areas, and Amigas and Silicon Graphics were well used in the arts and graphics industry, main stream business was almost entirely moving to Windows. With Steve Jobs no longer at Apple, it seemed like the excitement of the Apple products was gone. New versions of hardware and software were coming out, but only the faithful were following. After several years of really not using the Mac much, I lost interest and the need for Apple products.

Insert Steve Jobs back at the helm of Apple and somehow, the letter "i" becomes the secret ingredient in widespread success. The iMac brought some magic back to the consumer level PC world and the rest seems to be recent history with the iPod, iTouch, iPhone, iPad and more.

Apple and Steve jobs pursued the consumer market and made all of us want their products. The Apple products are easy to use, look sleek, and seem "cool". Now, those of us at work want to use iPhones and iPads and the popularity continues to blossom. Once again I am a fan of Apple.

Steve Jobs was a true visionary and created the means to accomplish what he envisioned. Some will say he was arrogant, relentless, or controlling, but at the end of the day he was true to his vision and created a series of technologies that continue to amaze us.

I compare Steve Jobs to Walt Disney. Both men were extreme visionaries who created products that were important to them, influenced our world, and brought some sort of magic to our lives. While the Disney Company survives today, it never seemed to quite capture the magic that was laid out by Walt. His creation of the Magic Kingdom and the early plans for EPCOT always amazes me, and every time I visit Walt Disney World, I wonder what it would be like today should Walt have lived a longer life. Ironically, it has been the recent acquisition of Pixar, another company founded by Steve Jobs that has infused new excitement and magic into Disney.

So, as I order my new iPhone 4S today I also wonder how Apple will survive without Steve and hope that someone will have the creativity, control and most importantly, the vision, to take us all to the next level of ingenuity and entertainment.

Steve Jobs – you will be missed!

OwlPoint – Attending the IT Service Management Forum’s conference

2011-09-28T09:52:00.001-04:00

Once again I am late keeping up with my blog postings. It has been another busy period for us at OwlPoint and I am happy that we have been able to provide high-quality services to several new customers and expand our partnership during what is typically a quiet period during the late summer.

This week I attended the annual IT Service Management Forum's Fusion conference in Washington DC. For those of you who are unaware of this conference, held at a different location each year, is the official gathering for US-based Service Management practitioners, vendors and interested companies. There are great keynotes and plenty of conference sessions to choose from to learn more about an ITSM/ITIL topic that you might be interested in. It is also a great forum for meeting others who have an interest in Service Management.

I particularly look forward to meeting many of our friends and partners at Fusion, such as ITSM Academy. OwlPoint's first partnership was with ITSM Academy, who provides the best Service Management training and certification in the business. This team is extremely knowledgeable, provide the most up-to-date training, and facilitate interactive training sessions that are led by seasoned professionals who share their knowledge in a thought-provoking manner. OwlPoint offers the full catalog of training delivered by ITSM Academy.

In talking to all of our friends and partners at Fusion this week, I realized how much IT Service Management related projects we helped customers with this past year. To name just a few, we have…

developed Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) for a major telecommunication carrier
assisted a major bank with enhancing their Service Level Management process
provided a governance playbook and the operation processes, including supplier management and service level management, for managing an outsourced data center for a major healthcare services provider
developed and managed the Change Management process for a major hotel chain.

We will be working on putting formal Case Studies together for some of these projects over the coming months.

While many people may know of OwlPoint because of our Green IT services and our work on energy efficiency, IT Service Management has always been a part of our core. It is these principals in driving efficient and effective IT organizations that have allowed us to enhance the practices and drive Green IT and energy efficiency. We look forward to continuing to help IT organizations achieve their full potential with the successful implementation of IT Service Management best practices.

Ensuring Outsourcing Success

2011-08-19T12:47:00.001-04:00

Outsourcing is a common practice in IT Organizations these days. It is not unusual for major infrastructure areas such as the network or data center to be outsourced. Application development and IT Services such as e-mail are also frequently outsourced. The reasons are plentiful, but it usually comes down to one major factor, business value or most specifically dollar savings. However, a majority of outsourcing fails to achieve the original business plan. Too often outsourcing is a major frustration and ends up costing a lot more than originally anticipated or the service quality does not meet the expectations set during the initial planning phases.

Personally, I am not for or against outsourcing in general. I believe it has its place and purpose, which is dependent on the specific situation of a company. A company may choose to outsource because they do not believe that managing that particular IT function is a core part of their business, and the service could be provided more effectively by a company who specializes in this type of service. Others may have organizations that have become too expensive and find it easiest to outsource than to address personnel issues or identify the costs savings necessary to retain the function internally. For whatever reason that is chosen the decision should be founded on a solid business reason, should not add unnecessary risk, and have realistic achievements established. Yet as I said before, most outsourcing deals fail to achieve their desired return on investment.

There are two significant contributing factors to organizations failing to achieve value and benefit from IT outsourcing. One, many organizations fail to properly evaluate the business case for outsourcing and, two, organizations tend to not account for all of the required resources and costs to properly manage the outsourcing arrangement.

I could probably write a white paper on setting up and managing outsourcing, so I will try to keep this brief. When developing the initial business case, make sure it is appropriate. Too often people try to make a business case work. Putting together a business case can require a lot of effort and the expectation is that you will figure out how to make it happen. However, one possible outcome is to prove that the business case is not supportive of outsourcing. It as if the decision was made before the business plan was put together, which may not be appropriate therefore setting you up for failure. When assembling the business case, make sure you incorporate all of the costs, not just the costs paid out to the outsourcing firm. Too often the costs for planning, migrating and then governing the contract are not properly planned. Remember, if you are transitioning a major part of IT, there are going to be challenges during the migration. This costs money. Also, once the contract is in place, you need to make sure you have the oversight required to properly manage the service. Do you have a supplier manager, service level manager, and other governance positions established to play an active role in maintaining the service to the level that is expected and contractually established? Are these costs properly accounted for?

Here are a few other things to keep in mind when outsourcing. Be leery about outsourcing areas that present a major risk to the business. What happens if something goes wrong? Would you have enough control to quickly resolve the issue and restore service to the business? Also, remember when outsourcing that you are still the owner of the overall solution and governing processes. Additionally, be cautious of long-term contracts. Is the costs savings enough to warrant getting stuck with a poor arrangement or paying a large penalty for changing your mind later.

When OwlPoint was established 3 years ago, we were in a unique position to outsource much of our IT needs without having to transition anything. We defined what IT Services we needed and found providers that met our needs. Yes we have had our issues, and for one set of services we changed providers. We have kept our costs down, have technical capabilities that we would not have if we did it ourselves, and we do not have the cost overhead of managing an IT department. Even though we have the technical capabilities to develop, implement and manage our own infrastructure, we have decided to focus our resources on our business and helping our clients.

OwlPoint has helped several different clients with outsourcing challenges. One recent project included creating the governance team and all of the operational process, procedures, and run-book for managing a major IT outsourcing contract. This company is in a great position to have a successful outsourcing arrangement. Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions or comments about IT outsourcing.

Great Example of a Solar Project

2011-07-19T11:22:00.001-04:00

Many of you who know me well are aware that I am a Washington Redskins fan. Although the NFL lockout continues and there are no off-season workouts, free-agency or other off-season activities going on, the Washington Redskins made the news again last week. However, this time it was for something other than football. They announced that they will be installing 8,000 solar panels in their parking lot to created covered parking for 850 parking spaces and generate almost 2 Megawatts of power (when it is sunny).

The project is created by a partnership between the Washington Redskins, who own and operate the FedEx field stadium in Landover, Maryland, and NRG Energy, a major energy company headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey. The goal is to generate enough electricity to offset all of the stadium's electricity use on non-game days and off-set some power during games days.

This project is a perfect example of how marketing, smart-business decisions, and sustainability can create a perfect solution. From what I have read it seems that NRG Energy will install the solar array, probably at their expense and provide the electricity to FedEx field as part of a power purchase agreement through Reliant Energy, an electricity supplier subsidiary of NRG Energy. The Redskins will provide NRG some marketing opportunities at the stadium and will get a significant reduction in their energy costs.

At OwlPoint we often talk about the need to make sustainability decisions based on solid business decisions. Being "Green" is much more than marketing and great intentions. It is about minimizing the use and waste of natural resources and providing a business advantage for doing so. The Washington Redskins organization will significantly reduce their demand on the national grid and will reduce their energy expenses, a win-win situation. I think this will only be the first in a series of these types of projects.

I am eager to see the solar array in place. Go 'skins!

Update To ITIL Coming Soon

2011-07-05T10:59:00.002-04:00

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) will be getting an enhancement at the end of this month. It is being touted as an update and not a new version, so we are not talking about ITIL Version 4, but rather ITIL Version 3 2011 Edition (AKA ITIL 2011). ITIL Version 3 was released back in 2007. I still cannot believe it has been that long ago, but that seems to be my issue about a lot of things these days. ITIL Version 3 demonstrated a significant shift from Version 2 when it was released, whereby the Service Management best practices became organized by lifecycle of an IT Service and many of the processes or concepts that were included in the Version 2 books other that Service Support and Service Delivery, which were often ignored, were better integrated into the Service Management framework/lifecycle. ITIL Version 3 also introduced many new concepts, processes, and enhancements, without significantly altering the core components that have made ITIL version 2 so successful.

However, ever since ITIL V3 was released, there have been some discrepancies. Certain terms and concepts seemed to be handled differently between books (or phases). Some of this is caused by there being different authors of the different books and some of it was because it was the first version of new concepts and they had not been fully vetted across different types of organizations or implementations. The 2011 update aims to address a lot of these discrepancies and make minor enhancements, such as improvements to some of the process flows and additional content for several concepts such as Service Asset and Configuration.

The new publications are being released on July29th, 2011. Personally, I am looking forward to seeing all of the changes. I hope these enhancements will be helpful for our clients and useful for our own implementation.

If you are interested in more information on the ITIL 2011 update, the OGC recently released a FAQ - ITIL Update FAQs Summer 2011

Valuable Governance

2011-06-29T16:06:00.001-04:00

It has been a busy time for us here at OwlPoint. Once again I am behind on keeping my blog up-to-date, but hopefully for good reason. We have been talking to many of our current and prospective customers about their needs, and I find it interesting that Governance is on the top of the list. Now, I may have a broader definition of Governance than some and I also may have different expectations. My belief is IT governance is a way to ensure that IT is working on the right things and that it should be the link between what the business and customers of IT have voiced is important and what IT actually works on. Governance is also the methods used to ensure that the organization is functioning well by measuring processes and other key indicators.

Governance to me includes all of the development and oversight of policies, processes, and some procedures. It can include things like Project and Program Management, IT Security, Vendor and Supplier Management, Change Management, and Business Relationship Management. Even roles such as Service Delivery Managers, Service Level Managers, and Business Relationship Management can fall under governance. However, what is critically important to me and what I think IT organizations out there desire, is an IT governance approach that is not so much about instilling lots of policies and policing the environment, but being a business enabler and helping ensure that the IT Organization is successful in executing its charter.

In an environment where IT infrastructure is a commodity, outsourcing is prevalent, and offshoring development is common practice, IT organizations need to make sure they are providing value to the business. There are a couple key parts to this. Are you completing the projects that have clearly perceived business value at the right time and for a reasonable cost and are all of the costs of IT properly packaged and understood by the business? These are foundational to two major mistakes made by most IT organizations; they do not clearly show the value of IT to the business and IT does not always provide a high-enough priority to IT projects that have significant business value (or at least perceived value). When the value of the IT organization is not understood, the funding isn't provided and the organization is susceptible to being partially or wholly outsourced.

Governance, if done well, can ensure that the IT organizations have their priorities established well. Governance can also help make sure the right projects are staffed properly, that requirements are well understood, and that information is flowing back to the business well. Sometimes additional funding is necessary to get projects completed quicker, but IT is often afraid to go ask for more money. If presented well and the value is well understood, the business may very well pay more for a project or IT in general.

Governance is also critically important in managing outsourcing and out-tasking. There should be clear processes in place, with metrics being measured, productivity and quality being confirmed and, where necessary, adjustment to contracts made. More often than not IT outsourcing fails to meet expectations, and a majority of the time it is because the outsourcing arrangements are not managed and monitored well.

So something to think about… Does the Business understand the value of the IT organization, and would they pay more for something they saw as meaningful for the business? Think about how your governance, processes, and project management drive value to both the Business and the IT Organization. Maybe you can help show more value to the business with better Governance.

People Are The Key To Success

2011-05-16T19:00:00.001-04:00

Today OwlPoint announced our new partnership with Partner's in Possibility. At OwlPoint, we have always promoted the importance of people within the IT environment. Too often IT organizations focus primarily on technology. More mature organizations may promote solid processes and establish process improvements programs, but at the end of the day it is the people that make an organization function well. You can roll out the best technology and establish thoughtful processes, but if you do not have the right people with a good attitude, morale and skillsets, the chances are your organization will not be as effective as those with a well-managed and enabled workforce.

OwlPoint decided to establish a relationship with Partners in Possibility so that we could offer more services to help our customers with the people side of IT. This partnership enables us to immediately offer services such as executive coaching, team building workshops, 360° Feedback, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). We have also leveraged this partnership to enhance some of our other services, such as improving the people assessment component of an IT Operations Assessment or IT Strategic Planning.

Throughout my career I have had the opportunity to leverage many of these types of services and have found them to be very helpful to develop a cohesive and highly-functional team. I recall at a previous company I worked when we all took the MBTI followed up by a team-building workshop. It was interesting to see that the four practice leaders in the organization were all the same personality type. Aside from being fun and interesting, it helped the larger team work better together and highlighted some of the personality traits that were helping people be more successful.

We look forward to helping CIO's and their direct staff be more effective through coaching and helping enable their teams to be more effective. In the coming days and weeks we will be announcing more information on these services. In the mean-time I ask you, "What would make your team more effective?"

Green IT Lecture

2011-05-11T16:25:00.001-04:00

Last week I had the wonderful honor of being a guest lecturer for a class at Baruch College in New York City. The class, taking a course on Green IT, has been studying different areas of sustainable IT as well as investigating what types of Green IT jobs exist in the marketplace. My lecture focused on OwlPoint's definition of Green IT, our view on how efficient IT is Green IT, and the application of Service Management to drive process improvement and efficiency.

I love to see the enthusiasm in people as they learn more about Green IT. Many people seem surprised when we explain our process improvement approach to driving efficient IT. It is quite a logical approach and uses best practices that have been proven over decades. One important aspect of taking a process improvement approach is to make sure that you are able to measure your successes. By defining a process and establishing a baseline, you are able to track the improvements made and ensure that the changes that are implemented reaped the reward they were supposed to. This is a great way to evaluate a return on investment and help fund further improvements.

I want to thank Dr. Abraham for the opportunity to present to his class and for the warm reception from everyone at Baruch College.

Preparing for Summer

2011-04-11T21:58:00.002-04:00

Here in New Jersey today and all across the eastern seaboard it was a warm one today. I do not think too many people are going to be complaining. It has been quite the long and cold winter in this region. I know I made sure I went out at lunch time to enjoy some warm spring air. As I was watching the local news this morning and saw that temperatures were going to be in the 80s, I wondered how many people were going to turn their heat off and flip their air conditioners on. Fortunately it is not going to be as warm as some people had predicted and we can get away without turning the AC on at home. However, major buildings are a different issue. With the warmth of people, computers and other equipment, Air Conditioning can be running all year round, even in colder climates. Not necessarily every day, but as we enter the later spring and then the summer, Air Conditioning will be cranking everywhere and our use of Electricity will start to sky rocket.

Those mid-summer months truly demonstrate our need to reduce electricity where we can. The electric grid, where the local utilities connect to buy, sell, and distribute electricity, will be dealing with allocating enough electric generation to regions that cannot produce enough. With the higher demand by businesses, many people will be paying higher utility rates due to multi-tiered rate structures and demand charges. So there is no better time to start working on reducing your need for electricity than today.

Your building represents a major consumer of electricity, especially as the Air Conditioning starts to engage significantly. However, there are several things that can be done to reduce how much electricity your building is using, especially as you understand exactly why your building is using so much. It is one of the reasons we started selling the Smart Energy Suite service. It allows our consultants to truly understand how a building is using electricity and determine the different areas that can be addressed. Sometimes an air-side economizer, which uses cool outside air to assist cooling the building, is improperly tuned and can cause you to use more electricity instead of less. Other times something is running when it should not, resulting in quite the unnecessary expense.

So as you prepare for the summer and are looking for a way to keep your costs down, take a look at your building. There could be lots of opportunity there.

New Partnership – Corporate Sustainability, Inc.

2011-04-05T10:59:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been working very closely with our partners to enhance our service offerings. A little over a week ago, OwlPoint officially announced our partnership with Corporate Sustainability, Inc. This is an exciting partnership for OwlPoint, since it enables us to provide a more comprehensive set of sustainability service offerings.

OwlPoint has been continuing to grow our IT Efficiency and Energy Efficiency capabilities. However, often our clients need a comprehensive plan that establishes a corporate-wide sustainability program. Instead of attempting to create our own methodologies and train our consultants in this specific area, we decided to partner with a firm with this specialty. What has made Corporate Sustainability and their people such a good compliment to OwlPoint is we share a common vision and approach. Corporate Sustainability believes that there is an inherent business value and tremendous strategic advantage by implementing sustainable practices, if done right. This is much more than just helping save the environment; it is an ability to significantly improve the financial health of the company by reducing costs and enhancing revenues. Their experience includes helping fortune 500 companies and meeting their executive's needs for laying out strategic plans.

OwlPoint will continue to assist companies reduce their dependency on energy by driving efficiency within IT Organizations and Commercial Buildings. However, to be even more effective and ensure better returns for our clients, OwlPoint will now be able to offer strategic sustainable planning at a corporate-wide level. These corporate-wide plans help tremendously when working across organizations to achieve significant energy savings. At OwlPoint, since we work with both IT organizations and Facilities groups to reduce the use of electricity, we often run into an issue with organizations having conflicting priorities. To give you an example, in most cases the facilities organization does not report into the Chief Information Officer. Usually facilities will report up to the Chief Financial Officer or a Chief Operating Officer for a major corporation. This often presents an interesting dilemma; the organization which pays the electric bill is not necessarily the organization that can drive the most energy savings. To sum it up, why should the CIO spend money in his budget to drive cost savings in the COOs budget? With a corporate-wide plan and buy-in by all C-Level executives these issues are easily worked out, if not planned out and proactively addressed.

We look forward to working with Corporate Sustainability, Inc. and hope that our firms can help you with your sustainability planning in the near future.

OwlPoint Partnerships

2011-03-23T21:48:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the limited postings to the blog recently, but a lot has been happening! Some very exciting things are taking place at OwlPoint.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have met with most of our partners to discuss our service offerings and continue development of our next generation of services. Partnerships are an important component to our company and the services we offer. It allows us to work with other companies that have unique and complimentary capabilities which we can offer to our customers. It also provides a great forum for entrepreneurial leaders to work together to innovate and lead the industry toward new capabilities and offerings, further benefitting the marketplace and our customers.

I am extremely excited about what we have been working on recently. Often, we work with a partner for months before we create new services, announce our partnership publicly, or start co-marketing services to customers. For instance, Green 20 Now has been a partner of OwlPoint's for over a year now. When we initially started working together we did not issue a formal press release, since there was a lot of work to be done to start offering the Smart Energy Suite service. We have a very strategic partnership with Green 20 Now and we have become Green 20 Now's Northeast Channel partner for the Smart Energy Suite service offering. We also provide feedback on enhancements to the Smart Energy Suite service and offer consulting capabilities to enhance the service offering for both OwlPoint and Green 20 Now customers.

We have been busy working with a few new partners recently to continue to enhance our capabilities in the sustainability arena. I am very eager to announce some of the new partnerships and what they offer to the marketplace, and more specifically, our customers. Over the coming weeks, we will be issuing some press releases regarding these newly developed partnerships and I will describe more in my future blog postings.

A Day To Think Green

2011-03-17T18:55:00.001-04:00

It is March 17^th and many of us have been thinking green today. Some are pondering the green flowing Chicago River or the green gushing fountains on the White House lawn. Others are attending parades or partaking in a pint of Guinness. Well here at OwlPoint we often think about "Green". However, we are usually focused on how to make green by going green.

As I talk to people every week, I realize that so many people still think going green means making expensive investments to be more environmentally friendly and that at the end of the day it is a costly marketing exercise. While there are lots of examples of this, the tides have turned the past few years, and going green is a great way to help the bottom line. There are numerous ways to save money by reducing energy. These energy reductions can be done in such a way as to have no negative consequence on the business operation. Equipment is becoming more and more energy efficient as vendors compete for efficiency as a competitive advantage. There are also several techniques that business can apply to reduce waste – and waste is often a symbol of throwing money in the trash.

One issue for many business leaders is finding the right types of green initiatives that provide a return on investment in a short enough period of time. Many green investments can have returns in months and therefore begin to pay for the investment quickly, with the possibility of fully repaying the costs of the project before the end of the fiscal year. Other more significant green initiatives could take a few years to pay off the investment, but most of these types of investments have long-lasting financial benefits that will provide a return for many years to come. For instance the installation of a solar renewable energy solution may not have a return for 4 or 5 years, but the typical life of a solar installation is 20 years. Therefore, the business will be provided an ongoing financial return for years 5 through 20. There may also be tax incentives and other funds available to help offset these types of significant green investments.

So as many people celebrate Saint Patrick's Day today and deck themselves out in all sorts of green garb, I recommend spending some time in the near future contemplating green in a different fashion. Help your business create a strategic advantage by being efficient and spending less money on energy while reducing your impact on the environment.

Governance – Business Enabler, Not Bureaucracy

2011-02-23T16:10:00.001-05:00

Over the past several months I have had numerous discussions with customers, potential clients, and partners about Governance. Governance may be a different topic than the ones I normally discuss in this blog. However, it can be used to ensure the return on a Green IT or Sustainability initiative. Unfortunately, Governance usually has the connotation of being the rules, laws, and the controls that everyone must follow. This somehow translates to being bureaucratic, having to follow complicated processes, or being an inhibitor to getting things done. If done properly, governance should be the exact opposite. It should be the structure you follow to ensure you are working on the right things to achieve business goals and that you are being successful in the initiatives you choose to pursue to meet these goals.

Governance needs to be aligned with your business objectives. Yes, things like project management, change management, and metrics reporting are all a part of solid governance plan, but there is a way to make sure these controls are developed and implemented to help your business. How often do we implement change review boards who forget why we are reviewing changes, or implement project management methodologies that do little more than force us to fill out some standard templates.

One of my biggest concerns today when I talk about any sort of efficiency improvement, whether it is energy efficiency, process improvement, consolidations, etc., is that the approach is done in an ad-hoc manner. Too often an organization jumps into doing some "low hanging fruit" projects to get a quick return. Yet, there probably is no governance that tracks and reports on the actual return of the quick fixes. Secondly, without solid governance, it is too easy to revert back to the way it was and lose any return that was achieved by these projects?

IT Governance is meant to help align IT with business objectives, mitigate risks, manage performance and resources, and provide a means for reporting progress back to the business. All processes, policies, and defined procedures should be aligned with these principals and should ultimately empower the IT organization to enable the business. I suggest the next time you embark on a project that is supposed to have significant return to ask yourself "Can I measure and prove the benefit of this project and is this important to the business?"

Done right Governance can help you achieve your targets, avoid big issues, and help the business achieve their goals. Overdone, it can be a big inhibitor. Take a good look at your organization and see whether you have the right governance in your organization.

New Presidential Message on Energy Efficiency

2011-02-07T19:28:00.001-05:00

Last week President Obama announced his "Better Buildings Initiative", targeting all commercial buildings to be 20% more efficient by 2020. According to the White House's press release, "Last year, commercial buildings consumed roughly 20 percent of all energy in the U.S. economy." I started to compute what that really meant in energy and dollars, but I realized the statement is not entirely accurate. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 19% of energy used in the United States is by the commercial industry, including its buildings. I'm not arguing over the semantics of the 1%, I am highlighting that this number is more than building efficiency; it is about the efficiency of the building and everything inside of it.

This is an important factor to look into. The cooling, heating, and airflow of a building can be a tremendous energy load depending on the geography and season. However, the contents of a building also represent a significant energy load. For larger commercial non-retail buildings, the contents are mostly IT related. Data Centers and computer rooms are concentrated loads and are a wonderful opportunity to find energy savings.

I agree with the President that we should be looking at energy efficiency, but I disagree that the country needs to invest lots of money to make this happen. Most larger buildings have the opportunity to reduce energy use by 20% today simply by changing habits, fine-tuning current operations, or in some cases implementing technology upgrades. OwlPoint has been focusing on this for the past several years, and we have helped several clients achieve significant savings. One of our customers increased energy efficiency of their data center by over 50%. OwlPoint's Smart Energy Suite™, which helps monitor and measure energy consumption and provide recommendations on energy efficiency improvements, typically helps save our customers 20% on their energy costs. One customer of the Smart Energy Suite™ service, who already had a highly efficient building, identified a $100,000 in savings in the first 30 days.

I'm passionate about energy efficiency and have been promoting 20 by 2020 for several years. I'm glad the President is promoting this, but if you want to know how to save money today, contact me. I'll be glad to show you how to save money on energy costs and get an impressive ROI within a year, if not just a couple months.

Green – The Big Picture

2011-02-01T11:30:00.001-05:00

For those of us here in the northeast US, we are tired of the snow and ice. It seems we have a storm every Tuesday or Wednesday and I am starting to rethink planning any future meetings on those days. I'm also trying to figure out a way to get the snow and ice off of my solar panels. Just kidding - Well I do think about it J

As part of our Green Plan, most of OwlPoint's employees work out of virtual offices. It reduces our needs for real-estate, significantly reduces our carbon impact, and it provides for a less stressful environment especially when not having to commute. One additional benefit, our business stays open and our employees productive when we have inclement weather.

It is these types of double returns that many Green strategies and practices can have for an organization. Not only can you devise ways to help reduce costs or improve your business capabilities, but you can do it in a manner that reduces or minimizes the impact on the environment. It's all about efficiency. There is electrical efficiency, organizational efficiencies, or even technological efficiencies. However, it is these business efficiencies where a Green strategy matched well with business goals and objectives can have the most benefit.

When pursuing your Green strategy or plan, don't forget to look at the big picture. If you need some help, talk to us here at OwlPoint and we can help identify ways to make your business be more effective while also being Green.

Adapting to Change

2011-01-26T11:29:00.001-05:00

On my way up to Boston this week, I was reading the airline magazine. The editor's article was talking about how 90% of Americans don't keep their New Year's resolutions and 45% fail to keep them by the end of January. I've heard similar statistics before and it really proves the difficulty humans have with change. I think we all have good intentions but for varying reasons we fail to follow through on our plans.

The reason I bring this up is this applies to the work environment, too. Change is a difficult item to deal with especially for an organization overall. OwlPoint is often engaged to help organizations change for the better; whether it is to be more efficient or pursue a new IT Strategy to help an organization achieve its new business objectives. The biggest challenge I see with organizations is not so much coming up with the implementation of the latest technology or finding how to improve a project, but more so in the organization's ability for its people to adapt to the change.

If you are planning on implementing some Green IT best practices in your organization, many of these best practices require people to follow a new procedure or process. While everyone might be supportive and interested, a large majority of people may only do it for a short while, like a New Year's resolution. It is important to keep educating and reminding people of the new practices and report publically on how the organization is performing against its new goals. A constant pleasant reminder of new procedures, positive rewards for achieving goals, and defined methods on how to deal with non-compliance will go a long way to becoming a better organization.

Creating Your Green Plan

2011-01-18T13:16:00.001-05:00

Having a Green Plan can be an important advantage to a company, especially a smaller one. All too often Green plans are more marketing than strategic asset. However, if you can develop a green plan which identifies how you can be more efficient, drive costs savings, and have less impact on the environment, you can drive real business value.

I believe one of the keys is efficiency. Whether that is electrical efficiency, real-estate efficiency, or printing efficiency, efficient use of resources has the greatest financial return. OwlPoint focuses a lot of attention on reducing electrical consumption and for good reason. There are tremendous inefficiencies around electricity use within organizations today and energy prices are going to continue to rise. I'm sure you'll find this to be true with many other resources. For instance, real-estate may be relatively cheap these days, but as soon as the economy picks up, real-estate prices will rise, and depending on your location, could jump significantly.

OwlPoint, being a company who focuses on helping others with sustainability planning, incorporates "Green" goals and plans into our standard operating practices. Many of our IT practices, such as using virtualization and software as a service, are based on efficiency goals. Our people primarily use virtual offices and we incorporate many other practices which not only have a minimal impact on the environment, but also keep our costs down. Our "Green Plans" are such a competitive advantage for us that I will not share everything publicly.

You may call your plan the "Green Plan", the "Sustainability Plan" or the "Super-Secret Blue Plan". Yet, no matter what you call it, it is important for you to help your organization identify sustainability goals and practices that can be incorporated into your daily work which helps create a strategic advantage for your business.

Monitoring Electricity Usage

2011-01-11T11:49:00.004-05:00

I recently added an electricity monitoring system to my home to see how much electricity I am using and how much my solar-panels are producing. Yes, I get a bill each month, but I'm not always certain that it is correct or that my solar system is producing as much electricity as I expect. At some point it is possible that a panel or two stops producing properly or one of my inverters could malfunction. If this were to occur, how many months would go by before I noticed and took action?

While this may seem as a trivial issue being that I am a single residential user of electricity, for commercial customers this can be a significant issue. Do you really know how much electricity you are using and when? If you have taken actions to reduce electricity or implemented a renewable energy system to generate electricity, are you certain that you are continuing to reap the reward of those investments. All too often changes are made such as changing the schedule of the heating system of a building saving thousands of dollars a year, but then someone innocently makes a change and those savings are lost. Without a proper monitoring system how long would it take before you noticed? Would you have lost thousands of dollars in savings, probably more than a monitoring system would cost?

Well my wife and son think I am a bit crazy as I walk around the house now saying we're using too much electricity. January's typically my worst month of the year with February a close second. Now with some real-time feedback and some proof, I can start working on changing habits, a much harder thing to do. I'll probably talk about that some other day.

Using Outside Air For Cooling

2011-01-07T09:47:00.001-05:00

New Year's 2011 started off on the right foot! I was quoted in Processor magazine again in an article about data center contaminants. The article focuses on using outside air to help cool data centers. I've been a big proponent of this since it can have tremendous savings over having to air-condition a building, especially in the winter. It always bothers me when the air conditioning kicks in and I know it is 20° F outside.

When thinking about how to spend your 2011 budget, remember that not all data center environments are going to benefit significantly by using unconditioned outside air for cooling. Geographic locations will be the most significant aspect to using outside air. Warmer climates with higher humidity such as Florida and the Coastal Southeast US will not benefit as much from use of outside as cooler and dryer locations.

In humid and warmer climates, too much moisture may be introduced into the environment, causing the air conditioning to have to be engaged to reduce the humidity. If this happens too frequently, then the energy efficiency is eliminated and so is the cost savings.

The use of outside air for cooling is not limited to the data center. Many buildings in cool and temperature climates can incorporate an air-side economizer which uses outside air to assist the HVAC system cool a building. However a poorly configured air-side economizer can lead to higher electricity bills.

Read the full article here.

Green IT for 2011!

2010-12-30T13:31:00.001-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great honor to be quoted in Processor magazine again. It has been a wonderful opportunity to be able to share some of my thoughts and insights in Data Center efficiency, and I thank Christian Perry for reaching out to us at OwlPoint to provide him some insights. This past article focused primarily on how to get needed investments in the data center approved. The timing of the article was perfect, in that many of us are finalizing our budgets and beginning to kick off our projects for 2011. Our investments in technology need to provide business value, and one way to improve your chances of getting projects approved is by achieving multiple objectives with a single project. This is not always easy, but it is one of the things I love the most about Green IT. By slightly modifying some of your purchases, or implementing things slightly differently, you can achieve significant savings in operational costs.

It is important to understand the impact a project truly has, and by looking at real-estate costs of your data center, cooling, and operational costs such as support staff, there are many ways to enhance a projects business value with a minimal increase in planning and funding.

In the future I will post some ideas for Green IT projects that you can include in your organization.

OwlPoint's New Blog!

2010-12-23T13:35:00.003-05:00

For a while now I have been wanting to start a blog to provide some insights into OwlPoint and our services as well as to share thoughts about things that are happening in the industry. The other day I got asked “What made you start a company that has such a positive impact on the environment?” It was asked to me in such a pleasant manner that made me sound like I was some sort of angel on a personal cause for helping the world. I answered the person, and thought this would be a great start to my new blog.

OwlPoint is what is known as a Triple Bottom Line Company. We are interested in making money while impacting positive benefits on the environment as well as providing significant value to our customers and employees. I love my job, and there is no better reward than to know that what you do has such a positive impact on the world we live in. I know OwlPoint’s employees and partners get a personal satisfaction doing what we do, and although it is hard work, it is great to know that we can earn a living by achieving such great accomplishments.

I look forward to sharing my thoughts in the future. If you ever have a question about OwlPoint, our services, or something that is going on in the sustainability or IT industries, please feel free to reach out to me and maybe I will incorporate that into one of my future Blog postings.