Using enterprise architecture to develop a blueprint for improving your energy efficiency and reducing your carbon footprint.

Organizations today face rising energy costs and an increased scrutiny of their environmental impact on our world’s resources. They are under pressure to fnd ways to reduce their short-term energy costs and their overall environmental impact in the long term. Regulatory agencies, environmental groups and even investors are closely examining business operations and investments to ensure that organizations are acting responsibly.

Many organizations, especially those in fast-growing industries, recognize the economic imperatives associated with operating more efciently and reducing their carbon footprint. However, to make smart decisions about being green, an organization needs to develop a shared understanding of its current state of operations and where it wants to be in the future, whether that means in the next month, the next year or in the next fve years. Understanding this evolution opens up a myriad of options for decisions about energy
efciency. Questions that address the long-term consequences of decisions about their energy usage emerge, such as: How does improving the energy efciency of our data center impact the rest of the organization? What processes need to be changed as a result? What is the long-term impact on our customer service? Are the results consistent with our business goals overall? How do we embrace being green as a long-term initiative versus a short-term fad?

That’s where enterprise architecture (EA) comes in. Enterprise architecture is a formal mechanism for analyzing the energy efficiencies throughout an organization in the context of business strategies, goals and processes. EA ofers a central, high-level knowledge source for the analysis of business process, data, applications and systems in the context of organizational goals. EA is both an ongoing process of data gathering and dissemination and a blueprint (or roadmap) that delivers information for analysis, visualization and decision making. A natural result of any comprehensive and ongoing EA initiative can be increased effciency and productivity, leading to a smaller carbon footprint.

The EA repository serves as a shared information source across the organization for determining an optimized state of operations and providing maximum resource conservation. The result is smarter decision making about energy efciency, environmental impact and the subsequent efect on the bottom line. EA analytics and reporting tools, such as Telelogic® System Architect® software, help organizations develop a comprehensive EA program that delivers, among other things, a blueprint for energy impact analysis, which is a vital step in undertaking any organizational change.

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