How to be a Hero in your Organization

In my last post I talked about power management for PCs being a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t it be? An opportunity to save on average $40-50 per PC annually by simply turning out the lights when nobody is home is a logical choice. Consider this: An average hospital or decent size law firm might have 3,000 computers. Many school districts have 20,000+. Large enterprises often have 100,000 or more. We are talking six and seven figure annual savings potential for these organizations. Who wouldn’t agree that this is a no-brainer, especially when it can be accomplished with little to no impact on the business in just a few hours?

I consult with companies of all sizes and types. I have heard every excuse in the book for why more companies are not taking advantage of this incredible opportunity. The prevailing factor seems to be a disconnect between the stakeholders that understand the capability of power management and those who have a vested interest in the result.

Let’s face it; many “C” suites don’t give IT the respect they deserve. IT is often seen as a business expense rather than a business enabler. In today’s difficult economic situation, companies are slashing IT budgets but still expecting the same or better levels of service.

For IT executives who are feeling the squeeze, I have some suggestions:

A few years back , I was responsible for managing a large national service organization located in more than a dozen cities. One of the outstanding policies of the organization was that it provided profit-sharing bonuses based on performance. Those who received the bonuses were recognized, and the entire company was educated on how their actions contributed to the company’s bottom line and consequently their bonuses.

Simple things like a little wasted labor here a project scrapped there, etc., didn’t seem like big things in context, but let’s take the ramifications of not doing power management for a case-in-point. The average hospital with 3,000 computers can save $150,000 per year by simply putting computers in a lower power state when they are not being used. Do you realize how much revenue a hospital has to do to provide this kind of profit?  With an average profit margin around 5%, a hospital would have to do $3,000,000 in revenue to achieve this.

How many people in your organization make this kind of impact ? More outstanding is that this can be achieved in about 2 hours of work with Promisec’s Agentless Power Management capability.

Take this idea to your CEO and CFO and while you are at it, you might want to consider negotiating yourself an MBO bonus for the idea and execution of the opportunity. In the worst case, you won’t get a bonus, but you have a real chance to be a hero in your organization.

IT and Power Management Should be a No-Brainer

It would seem that implementing a power management policy for corporate PCs is a no-brainer. Energystar has found that organizations can save up to 50% of their power bills on PCs by implementing power management.

Despite an incredible percentage for saving money, Forrester found that only 13% of companies have deployed comprehensive power management companies.  That is an incredibly low percentage of companies.

So what’s the problem? What is holding back  enterprises from implementing power management, especially at a time when every dollar counts and we are all checking and rechecking the bottom line?

First off, many companies believe they can manage PC power consumption with built-in Microsoft tools, using scripts and group policy features. For companies who aren’t planning on investing in serious policy management, these kinds of tools will save some costs on power. However, these are partial solutions, because there is no management console, and inevitably many of the enterprise computers are missed. This tool might be somewhat effective, but not fool proof and 100% accurate.

Users can simply change the settings locally and circumvent the policy. More seriously, using these kinds of tools don’t have a reliable means to wake machines for patch management. I’ll talk more about that in a later post devoted specifically on this topic.

However, one of the most pervasive reasons for not implementing a comprehensive power management policy is that the IT infrastructure department is not responsible for power savings in the organization.

For most IT departments, power management is just one more task to manage. In other words, not only don’t they have budget for power management, IT managers often perceive it as a cost in staff and a low priority.

In that light, it’s important that any power management solution proposed be simple to use, preferably automated and allow IT managers to justify the cost rapidly.