manufacturing a pC consumes 10 times the machine’s weight in fossil fuels and
chemicals
In the uK there are approximately 10 million work pCs currently in active service. of
these, around 1.7 million are routinely left running when not in use
This equates to around 1.5 billion kilowatt of electricity wasted every year, carrying a
price tag of £115 million
uK companies dispose of around 1.5 million pCs, equal to 125,000 tonnes of ICT
equipment, in landfill sites every year
processes employed by the designers, contractors and suppliers fastest-growing parts of the software sector. Analyst firm Forrester
involved in its construction Research said that adoption of SaaS increased by a third last year in
• Manage site waste management and other environmental large companies, while specialist investment bank Triple Tree recently
protection initiatives, capturing quantitative data that can be used said that SaaS “has grown beyond a mega-trend to cause major
for regulatory reporting purposes and to meet corporate and disruption to the status quo in the software industry.”
social responsibility obligations
• Consult and keep employees, local residents and other Saas is the term used to cover software applications (and
stakeholders informed about planning and design issues, so that associated data) that do not reside on the user’s own computer
their inputs can be reflected in the eventual finished project or network, but are hosted remotely by the software vendor and
• Reduce the carbon footprint associated with operation and are accessed via a standard web-browser. Externally-hosted, web-
maintenance throughout its working life based solutions mean no (or low) in-house IT hosting, support and
• Recycle materials following demolition/dismantling of the asset. storage requirements – widespread use of SaaS applications could
dramatically reduce the scale of in-house ICT resources, with a
More generally throughout a broad range of sectors, new applications corresponding reduction in hardware, personnel, energy use and
and technologies are emerging that have the potential to revolutionise other overheads.
industry still further over the next decade and beyond, including:
The SaaS approach concentrates all the hardware and software in
• Online meeting tools (eg: Microsoft LiveMeeting, WebEx) – perhaps facilities that makes optimum use of energy to power the hardware,
used in parallel with telephone calls (Webex has conference calling provide cooling, etc - “economies of scale”. Thus, while such server-
built in), and/or in combination with webcams or video-conferencing farm facilities are demanding in their use of power, they will consume
– can help to eradicate travel time and cut costs less energy than customers trying to maintain their own separate ICT
• Web2.0 social applications (eg ‘virtual’ worlds such as Second infrastructures.
Life are already being explored by some architects as a way to
show client ‘avatars’ around design concepts) It is also worth considering the potential impact of web-delivered
• Mashups – online services typically created by combining data applications and data on what type of devices are used by end-
from two or more data sources (eg: linking real-time traffic data users. With software and associated data sitting ‘in the cloud’ (ie:
with Google Maps). hosted on a remote server and accessed via the internet), there is
• Using RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags to help gather in- less requirement for users to have large numbers of applications
service data from assets providing a whole-life cost per m2 or and related files sitting on their hard-drives. Assuming the
similar metrics availability and capacity of broadband connections – especially
wireless (3G, GPRS, WiMax) - continues to grow, then users may
Using electronic tools can lead to dramatic increases in personal start to employ simpler, smaller, lighter and more portable devices
productivity, partly arising from the automation of some previously requiring less power, less maintenance and which become
laborious or routine clerical processes – automating document obsolete less quickly. Moreover, such simpler devices are also
distribution and approvals, creation and management of change more likely to be available for home users – making regular home-
orders, and other forms via extranets, for example, or faster searches working more economically viable.
for information via extranets, intranets, the web, etc. Moreover, the
automation of repetitive clerical tasks has resulted in an improved Sustainability is the major challenge facing not only UK industry, but
quality of work for some staff. companies and economies internationally. ICT has a key role to play.
Electronic construction collaboration systems and other ICT tools
SaaS-tainability have already begun to deliver quantifiable benefits and emerging and
future ICT developments have the potential to extend these benefits
Probably core to the attempt to reduce the overall carbon footprint of still further. In the drive for a greener global economy, the contribution
IT hardware and software is SaaS. It is one of the most exciting and of ICT should not be underestimated. n
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