Alfabet for sustainable IT 

Use strategic portfolio management to deliver on IT initiatives for sustainability

Enterprise IT contributes significantly to the world’s carbon footprint. But it’s hard to know where to initiate the changes needed to transform IT into a conduit and driver of a company’s sustainability efforts. Many organizations lack the tools that provide the transparency and change framework needed to evaluate the IT landscape, identify what needs to change and ensure execution of change programs. Alfabet can provide you with the right insights to assess your IT for sustainability, develop strategies for transformation to a sustainable IT, operationalize transformation projects and implement a framework for continual sustainability assessment.

Reduce & rethink

Where to start? What does sustainable IT entail besides the obvious energy consumption and green sourcing approach? It also includes asset and vendor management as well as building the foundation to transform your operating model and its underlying IT in response to business goals. A further aspect is efficiently responding to increasing sustainability regulations and market demands while ensuring business continuity and productivity. Alfabet for enterprise architecture and strategic portfolio management provides you with the capabilities needed to achieve these goals and champion your company’s sustainability initiatives. 
Key benefits
  • Gain an integrated, cohesive view of how your IT portfolio relates to your company’s business strategy and business and operating models as the basis for good decisions
  • Align business and IT by assessing the current state of IT, identifying needed changes and vetting those changes against the company’s business strategy workstreams
  • Understand your IT architecture footprint, vendor reliance, application dependencies and the business impact of change
  • Plan, design and execute your change initiatives to drive green transformation
  • Leverage IT as the backbone of your company’s green transformation for more innovation, new business opportunities and greater cost savings
Software AG’s industry-proven Alfabet provides a complete framework to implement IT initiatives for sustainability

Features

Gain a complete view of the IT landscape for optimal decision making
Build the foundation of your sustainable IT initiatives by capturing your complete IT landscape in one central repository: applications, technologies, locations and vendors as they relate to business capabilities, processes and strategy. Drive your transformation initiatives using a rich and articulate information base. Conduct assessments to understand the environmental impact of your IT according to quantitative aspects such as energy consumption by locations and qualitative aspects such as resource supplier (power, energy, water) and the origin of their products (100% renewable, mixed, non-renewable resources).

Establish an IT portfolio management practice for continuous rationalization of applications, technologies, data and energy consumption
Optimize your application and technology portfolios and eliminate waste by finding functional redundancies, unused applications and poor performing technologies. Build a “green” IT portfolio by identifying energy-intensive applications and technologies and take the necessary steps to either retire, exchange or migrate them.

Switch to a green cloud architecture
Moving from an on-premises infrastructure to cloud computing offers significant energy savings and reduces environmental impact. Accelerate your cloud migration efforts and move to more energy-efficient hyperscalers or enable smarter usage of your data centers. Define and plan your cloud transformation strategy in alignment with business priorities and cloud suitability of applications. Identify focus areas, conduct impact analyses to prevent conflicts down the line and create an action plan for deployment.

Ensure sustainability governance in all aspects of IT, including sourcing and 3rd party vendors
Respond to regulatory demands with the right numbers and answers. Alfabet provides support for definition of compliance inquiries, management of compliance projects and evaluation of target objects. Establish policies mandating the reporting of your enterprise IT carbon footprint and extend your sustainability requirements to vendors, making environmental impact a criterion for contracting. Foster green sourcing of energy for IT demands.

Plan, design and execute your change initiatives to drive your green transformation
Create a comprehensive IT strategy for sustainability with well-defined goals and target timelines derived from your business vision and strategy. Translate your “green” business and operating models into a green IT model and carry out IT projects in alignment with the business. Boost your success rate by bridging the gap between business demands and IT implementation.

Support your green sourcing initiatives with Alfabet

Start your sustainability IT initiative by ensuring that your IT runs on renewable resources. Extend your sustainability requirements and evaluate your current resource suppliers and the products used to provide your applications. Define focus areas based on consumption and business impact. Pave the way for transformation projects with the right insights into your IT landscape, focus areas and dependencies.  
Review progress status for green IT transformation

How far to a 100% green IT backbone

Evaluate the total progress in the transformation to sustainable IT sourcing by evaluating your complete IT landscape based on resource suppliers and their products, and the links to locations, devices, and applications. Understand the footprint of your physical IT architecture by assessing all planned or used resource types (power, energy, and water) for your locations, based on the resource supplier products. Gain an overview of the supply source for all resource products by pooling the information to see if it adds up to 100% renewable energy, mixed energy, or no renewable energy.

Evaluate resource supplier and products

The right resource suppliers and products

Investigate your current resource suppliers and their products you rely on. Understand the product composition and how it relates to your IT backbone. Identify transformation candidates based on their product usage and affected applications. Focus your actions on widely-used, non-100% sustainable resource products. Analyze the planned product usage horizons and timeline for achieving a Green IT.

Identify consumption by location

Main drivers for a non-sustainable scoring

Subsequent to understanding the negative impact of product usage is grasping the contributors to consumption. By evaluating the total resource consumption divided by locations and resource type, you can identify locations with the highest consumption using non-sustainable resources and focus your transformation efforts.

Evaluate locations and determine focus areas

Poorly rated locations affecting your overall sustainability score

Get an overview of all locations, structured according to buildings, rooms and devices to evaluate which locations score poorly in their supply infrastructure. Review the resource suppliers per location and number of hosted applications. Set sustainability transformation priorities and evaluate the business continuity relevance and risk of these priorities. Identify locations with poor sustainability scores and business-critical applications to prioritize for transformation. Understand the planning horizon for the hosted devices and applications and start planning your transformation project.

Plan green supply transformation projects

Manage the change with understanding all dependencies

Create and manage your transformation project for sustainable IT sourcing. Understand the affected architecture (resource product, location, devices and applications) before executing the project. Analyze the transformation plan and time dimension to see which sequence of resource supplier switch is most beneficial. Understand the project schedule and manage and maintain milestones along with the associated project cost, to track your progress and evaluate if you are in budget and in time and achieving desired outcomes. 

Identify risks, potential gaps and future alignment tasks in IT support

Align the impact of sustainable IT projects with business by evaluating your as-is application landscape organized by business processes. Determine whether your most critical processes are supported with applications which fulfill sustainability demands. Evaluate the application target score; conform, not conform but part of transformation project, not conform and no actions planned. Ensure that non-conform applications will be addressed by a future project.

Fast path to value

Alfabet is consistently ranked a leader by analysts for enterprise architecture and strategic portfolio management. Leverage best practices and a proven methodology based on years of experience and expertise. You can start small and grow with Alfabet FastLane, an intuitive, ready-to-use IT portfolio management solution in the cloud. Upgrade easily to Alfabet Enterprise Cloud as your business develops more advanced requirements and demands on IT.
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