As compared to the situation two or three years ago, or even back to the twentieth century, corporate managers these days have a lot more tools at their disposal for dealing with the new realities and mandates coming from a global climate shift, and an environmental awareness that is changing how America does business. One such tool comes from SAS, a leader in business consulting, via the category of "SAS for Sustainability Management" ; a software platform that lets humans evaluate their decisions through an interface build to show sustainable results clearly. An SAS site press release and info page shows how this suite is emerging into the workplace to help deliver results.
How does this SAS invention provide for decision support? Well, various aspects are noted in the literature around this software: the program identifies "cost drivers" and their financial impacts (for instance, an out-of-control promotional project might turn up in its own queue as the culprit of a surprising resource allocation). The programs "predictive analytics" (assumedly built on data mining as well as new "fuzzy logic" or neural net technology) come up with "crystal ball" assessments that can help managers navigate away from future problems.
Another part of the SAS system is the Sustainability Management Scorecard: this part of the program uses a visual, chart-based interface to bring gleaned information out and present it to the human user. (The screenshot on-site requires a zipped file download to view.
All of thisk, like other SAS products and parts of this kind industry, is very much conducive to interpretation by the human mind. Those who might take away a lot from these tools explicate their various uses in presentations of how items like the SAS scorecard are used "in real-life" (for an interesting set of responses to the use of SAS scorecard tools and other resources, check out the 'sascom' blog, where analysts trade insights).
What this means for the greening of IT is similar to the old phrase "fight fire with fire": SAS tools like the SMC bring technology to the forefront in controlling the environmental and cost factors of technology. Although this might sound like a vicious circle, in most cases, it's not. Good decision support tools can spot the parts of an IT system that for whatever reason are running up costs. An excellent example is a set of overheated servers from too much data driven communication. The analytic tools may only catch the utility costs - but management can take a closer look and see that their data centers are burning through juice at alarming rates, and fix the problem!
This and many other similar examples measure how the SAS Sustainability Management tools and others in the industry can be useful in greening IT for the road ahead.