Showing posts with label Sustainability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sustainability. Show all posts

Friday, September 12, 2014

Build a Good Business Reputation Through Go Green Strategy

A growing small and big business needs a reputation, it is like a plant needs water. Evolution in technology and understanding has facilitated the transformation for more cost-effective for businesses to “go green.” Yes, going green does protect the environment, but it can be good for your company as well. You’ll gain customers, which customers? The customers who support and appreciate companies that respect the environment

From adding recycling bins to your office, to reducing your carbon footprint, there are many simple ways you and your business can reduce their environmental impact and can actually help your company’s reputation. In my previous articles I have mentioned that taking steps to green your business will not only help the environment or getting high reputation; in many cases it reduces your costs over time while attracting customers and employees who support environmentally friendly businesses.

Nowadays, business and academic interest toward green product development is rapidly growing. Green product development is receiving increasing attention as means to improve companies’ performance (Chung and Tsai, 2007). In fact, it may be a significant source of competitive advantage when it allows for either product differentiation (Orsato, 2006) or low cost manufacturing.

It cannot be done without clear vision and studied plan, organizations’ leaders are responsible to deliver plans and results to meet the enterprise’s sustainability goals. Therefore, going green will help your company to gain respect in your community. Simply put, it shows you and your organization are care. Individuals and businesses want to do business with companies that aren’t just in it for themselves. By going green, you’re showing others that you’re interested in the world and the planet we live on.

I would say, creating green processes to the workplace make a healthy environment for employees. Also, it reduces the majority of the unnecessary waste. On the other hand, getting employee input can be one of the most effective ways of finding innovative solutions to reducing costs and becoming more eco-friendly. 

As I am interesting in IT industry and digital field, I will input my example about go-green from IT aspect. Green computing strategies challenge the common misperceptions that green computing will cost more; however, these strategies actually improve an organization's bottom line rather than shrink it when adopted. By integrating green computing strategies, organizations have a clear path to create savings that will improve IT, free up capital for other investments, generate goodwill with their constituency groups-all the while exemplifying good stewardship of the economy and environment. 

Now is the time to make a positive impact on your community, on the environment and on your profit margins by implementing go green strategy, less wasteful green solutions in your business, these strategies should be viewed as part of a broader initiative to reduce the cost of doing business.  I would therefore say, green IT takes advantage of cutting-edge solutions that keep you connected and improve reliability, while reducing energy consumption.
 
For instance, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is also something to be skeptical of when it comes to green IT. So moving 50 desktops from 250-watt computers to a single 2,000-watt computer might seem like a 10,000-watt energy savings, unless of course you’re going to keep those desktop computers to use as VDI endpoints. If you are, then you’re actually adding another 10,000 watts of energy consumption and working toward the opposite of green IT.

In American University of Sharjah (AUS) we have adopted Citrix (A new approach to desktop deployment) in all AUS colleges and schools which is also VDI technology to improve business continuity and data security, reduce university power consumption; the result then AUS can be greener. 

In AUS IT data-center, we have created new virtual machines. The plan is to select machines that provide the most computing power for the least amount of energy consumption. The strategy is to ensure that every watt is being used to full advantage by moving older, lower-efficiency servers into virtual machines running on newer, higher-efficiency ones.

Going green is important for the future of the economy and our civilization. Companies going green can provide necessary leadership in the green movement, work wonders for the environment, significantly improve their bottom lines and show they are excellent corporate citizens

Saturday, September 6, 2014

How KPI Can Keep You Ahead Of The Competition

I attended Computing Technology and Information Management Conference this year, and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel with one of educational institution participant who was one of Keynote Speakers and he is working in (Rochester Institute of Technology) to discuss some approach to defining and measuring attribution, a practice that leads to sustain educational sector in terms of different aspects. While we covered a variety of topics, one of the most fundamental attribution challenges that we discussed was that many services in universities do not define, own and measure their key performance indicators (KPIs). It seems that many organizations are thinking about KPIs, but don’t really know how to begin defining them. 

In fact, I have been asked by some of participants there, “What should your organization KPIs be?” As a believer in letting the data drive decisions, the fact that KPI definition is a question scares me to my core. 

I had refreshed my memory and reached a point says whether we are using loosely defined KPIs or established ones or not using KPIs at all, I have talked about reviewing the requests and metrics that drive university IT services was a great exercise and example. Creating IT helpdesk Ticketing System was my input in KPI discussion and the valuable contribution to the bottom line.

What are KPIs?
Key performance indicators are things that we can measure in our business or organization to evaluate the success of either the business as a whole or a component or activity within the business. "KPIs, or key performance indicators, help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. 

Therefore, tracking performance is a vital way for service providers to ensure their businesses are moving in the right direction. However, identifying the right KPIs for your organization isn’t that straightforward. The reality is that there isn’t one single metric that a business can look at to measure success. Further, there are a lot of measures to consider, and no single metric or set of metrics is going to be right for every service provider. I would say considered time, cost and quality as the predominant criteria for measuring project performance.

For instance, at AUS - IT Department and Media Department have developed and created a set of Key Performance Indicators for multiple Information Technology Services areas in order to best provide reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) metrics.  These areas currently include Help Desk, Web Services, Network and Systems Availability, and Educational Digital Media.  

Choosing the right KPIs requires a good understanding of what is important to your business and the customers that you deal with. This latter component is a key because most KPIs are tied to service delivery, and what’s important to internal teams may not matter to the customer. What do you think?

I would therefore say, to push your KPI evaluating in right direction and be effective, managers need to assess the alternatives available and pick the metrics that make the most sense for their business and organization.

Key Considerations for Managing KPIs:-
Tactics for tracking KPIs will vary substantially according to the metrics being assessed and the specifics of the business. However, following are some key strategic considerations that cut across all organizations and KPIs:
 
Consistency. On a consistent basis, whether daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly depending on the metric, service providers need to be gathering performance data and continue to do so over time. It is only by gathering this multi-interval data that managers can start to spot trends and truly understand the trajectory of the business.

Communication. The best KPI tracking is meaningless unless it is communicated to the right audiences. Both with customers and among internal teams, KPI reporting needs to be useful, relevant, consistent and timely. 

Actionable. KPIs need to help identify problems and strengths and inform actions that can improve performance

Customer or Employee Satisfaction and Sentiment
Customer or Employee satisfaction is critical for any business, and is a vital KPI for the service provider to track. Unlike a lot of other KPIs, which are more objective in nature, when it comes to customer satisfaction, the only thing that matters is the customer’s perception of your business and its services. Consequently, it’s critical to do surveys on a consistent basis to track how customers feel about your company. It’s simple, without customers your organization wouldn’t be here. Any organization has customers it has to satisfy. 

In the same time, we can safely say that employees are still the most important ingredients in any business. We all know that companies don’t do well if their employees are not happy and this again applies to all enterprises.

To sum up, we should determine the KPIs that are the most meaningful to our business. Taking the time to identify an organization’s most important KPIs, and tracking those KPIs consistently, is a critical success factor for every service provider. So it can be interpreted internally or used to benchmark the organization against competitors. If done properly, KPI will provide clear results of an organizations performance and strengthen its ability to improve it’s performance

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Did You Apply 3Es Before and Get a Good Reputation for Your Business?

Having a good reputation can benefit a business in a multitude of ways including the future value of an organization in the marketplace. A company achieves its competitive advantage when it succeeds to implement the strategy of value creation which is not possessed by its competitors on the market or in the industry, this in turn will lead to build a solid and notable reputation in marketplace. Think for a moment about the organization to which you belong or the department you are working with. Does your organization or company have a good reputation? Do you think your organization created or built right fundamentals of reputation's concept? Do you believe your company or organization should apply or adopt 3E’s elements in order to improve and protect its reputation? I would say good reputation is impossible to maintain without internal organization support.

I know you could ask a question; what is 3E’s means? The answer is 3Es are a set of recognized reputation tactics I sketched out to be examined at any organization, which leaders and managers can use it or apply it to differentiate their company’s service or products in highly competitive markets.

The 3Es are: (Emotions, Employees and Efficiency)

Emotions Factor
Emotion in organization presents original work from leading scholars in the field, they engage with emotion as a qualitative phenomenon which shapes and is shaped by organizational life.
Emotions in any workplace play an essential role in how an entire organization communicates within itself and to the outside world. Events at work have real emotional impact on participants. The consequences of emotional states in the workplace, both behavioral and attitudinal, have substantial significance for individuals, groups, and society. Positive emotions in the workplace help employees obtain favorable outcomes including achievement, job enrichment and higher quality social context. Whereas negative emotions such as fear, anger, stress and guilt, however increase the predictability of workplace deviance and how the outside world views the organization.

Employee Factor
Building reputation through your employees is always the first step.  It is even more important to encourage behaviors and demonstrate values which enhance your company reputation. Furthermore, best businesses invariably have the strongest employees. A company, as they say, is only as good as the company it keeps. 

That's precisely why supporting your employees and it should be available in a business leader's top priority. From my perspective keeping communication lines open, motivating, job satisfaction and listening to your employees' suggestions all crucial to your company's success. "Happy employees equal happy customers," and as Rick Galbreath said, "The final recipient of any misunderstanding between employee and boss is always the customer."

If you would like to pick one of these things we can talk about job satisfaction as the promotions provide opportunities for employee growth, more responsibilities and increased social status (Robbins 1993). More satisfied workers are less likely to leave their employer. Job satisfaction is influenced by a lot of variables. Promotions are an important aspect of employee’s life. Considerable increase in pay or wage of an employee also constitutes major effect on work. Different organizations or institutions use promotion as a reward for high productivity of their workers which accelerate their efforts. It can be only useful way of compensation where employee gives significant value to promotion, if not then pay or wage increment is best reward for more exertion, whereas employee dissatisfaction may result if an employee perceives that their efforts are not recognized or that their rewards are not equitable tied to their performance or tailored to their needs. 

Employees are fulfilled when they feel there is environment to learn, grow, take on additional responsibility and move up the ladder. Employee appreciation is the priceless impact on workplace reputation. Your employees are one of your biggest advertisements.  What they think say and do is totally representative of your organization.  Your business is the sum total of all of your employees, like it or not. What do you think?

Efficiency Factor
Efficiency in organization is the ability for organization to implement its plans using the smallest possible expenditure of resources. It is considered as an important factor in the firm's organizational effectiveness, this being the ease and degree of success with which the organization is able to accomplish its aims.

For example, if one business is able to produce 100 units of its products by spending $30 per unit, it is more efficient in production than a similar business that produces 100 units of the same product spending $40 per unit. Organizational efficiency is gauged using a number of quantitative figures such as production costs and production times because it is too broad of a concept to be encapsulated in a single figure. Increased the efficiency in your business make implementation both cheaper and smoother, but it is less useful if the plan being implemented was a bad plan. For instance, when your organization decided to change the unsupported physical servers which are drained your IT budget, and your services start growing, so do power and cooling costs. The organization bring to IT VMware virtualization that can help your organization to reduce energy costs and meet your business demands so that business is efficient, but the decision was almost certainly foolish and misguided when then did not do backup the data or enables to seamlessly extend datacenter, and increase availability! Despite this, organizational efficiency is still important to planning because it enables plans that are otherwise impossible.

To sum up, applying 3Es I believe can help organization or company to  differentiate its product/services in highly competitive markets, allow it to have premium quality , and can become the ultimate factor in whether a customer decides to patronize one business over another.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

How Green IT Changed How We Think About Organization Sustainability

Over the last few years, the term of “Green IT” has begun to be used to describe a form that pour into two trends. The first trend involves the growing concern about environmental issues across our life in communities. The second trend involves Information Technology the use of digital tools and techniques for manipulating information, and the social phenomena that surround these systems.

As we know the Information Technology industry (hardware, software and services) has provided many tools to help generate and process data, communicate globally, and improve productivity.

With data consumption rising more than 10% every year and with most companies still hitched to dirty energy sources, we see there many companies found a full-fledged green transition in the IT sector is urgently needed and becoming sustainable!

Information in general, and IS and IT systems in particular can play an important control role through support of environmental management systems, life cycle analysis, and design for the environment practices. What do you think?

From my perspective, information technology is positioned to play a key role in facilitating the shift toward sustainability - oriented business. As the use of IT in business grows and both public and private demand for environmental and social responsibility increases, the need for effective sustainability - oriented IT systems will similarly expand.

In the same time and before applying sustainable technique or sustainable technologies, do you know what are the steps should followed to adopt this strategy? Do we understand what it takes to finance the energy improvements we require? Do companies have good information regarding the results of their sustainability initiatives? Can they report with confidence measures of tangible and intangible benefits? Do companies work to propel business applications while ensuring the server maintains a small carbon footprint? Do buildings with more natural light really improve productivity and morale?

For instance, laptops and mobile devices – information technology (IT) is not only a booming economic sector but also an energy-intensive one. There is a research says it accounts for 2% of human greenhouse gas emissions worldwide! Did you hear about that?

I would therefore say Green IT is the latest buzzword being promoted and become one of the best strategy that delivering incremental benefits to the organization by improving end-user working practices, creating energy efficient office environments and reducing data center energy consumption.

For Instance, the City of Calgary really does have to think about going “Green” and introduce new innovative technologies. Calgary this year has different projects in Green Technologies such as, Waste-heat capture program and Imagine Calgary

Going green is not only relate with the reduce the amount of paper we use or carbon footprint , it is the way to think of using information technology tools — from sensors to databases and websites to integrate sustainability factors into business operations.

Another Example I have in American University of Sharjah, in June 2011 AUS has lunched higher standard for academic buildings to sustain the campus environment. The building incorporates the most advanced technological facilities of academic infrastructure in the UAE and region. 

From IT aspect many of the clever ideas connected with Green IT and sustainability involve the joint use of purely virtual space, most servers used today utilize between 5 and 15% of their total capacity while consuming 60 to 90% of their maximum energy consumption at idle. To overcome all these energy consumptions AUS has adopted a visualization (VMs) which allows the number of physical servers to be drastically reduced for large power savings and has contributed to add more space (Increase Data Center Capacity) in the data center once visualization is implemented due to the decreasing amount of physical hardware needed. 

Clearly underlining that several organizations take Green IT seriously can boost that organization’s image and brand. Today, image and brand are significant aspects of competing for sales of products and services and for attracting and holding onto staff.

So it the time to integrating your Green IT strategy into business objectives.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

How to Easily Build a Powerful Employees' Performance

If you have your own business or you drive a company, I believe you are always looking to drive this business or this company forward! But the question is; can you do it alone? Or you need other elements to support you and keep your business in sustainable framework!

Did you ask yourself if your employees giving your company their all? Do they believe that what they're doing is important? Do they feel appreciated? Do they show up for work each day filled with passion and purpose?

For business leaders in any organization of any sizes, the writing's on the wall: You can make and save money by keeping employees engaged.

From my perspective I would say; to make your workers more engaged, more satisfied at work, and more likely to stay at your company--try adopting these sustainable work practices.


Every company wants to drive sustainable high performance from employees. But many leaders make the mistake of not starting with themselves.  As a leader, what is say is important. But it's what you do that is mirrored by your employees. If you want your employees to perform at a high level and not burn out, you better take on sustainable work behavior on the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual level. 

Fact says that many bosses practice unsustainable work behavior, leading to stressed and unhappy employees who are distracted by their search for their next job. According to a Harvard Business Review study, only 25 percent of 19,000 employees from around the world said their leaders model sustainable work practices! 

For instance, organizational leadership or managers support have been identified as key determinants of the success of organizational environmental initiatives (e.g., Ramus & Steger, 2000). Leadership plays a role both in communicating the importance placed upon environmentally sustainable behavior by the organization and in providing a role model for the desired action. Furthermore, the opportunities for employees to be able to engage in environmentally sustainable work behavior can strongly influence action.

Today's entrepreneurs must make it a priority to get to know their employees so they can provide whatever's needed to keep them fully engaged in what they do. This creates wins for everyone and helps to boost company performance.
In this article I would list below four fundamental way or behaviors you should be modeling that help to enhance your employees’ performance, which will be reflected positively on your company growth

Encourage Vacation.
What is your company’s policy on vacation? How do they encourage (or discourage) employees to take vacations and breaks? Take one yourself.  Do you encourage your employees to take lunch out of the office, take short breaks, and go on vacation? You need to do all of those things, too. It's not just so they work harder, more efficiently, and line your company's pockets with more revenue. It's to ensure they are less likely to quit. I would strongly say, employees are more likely to come back refreshed and full of new ideas. When an employee returns from a well-deserved vacation, you will begin to see their work progress and their attitude improves.

Don't email over the weekend.
If you email late at night and over the weekend, what kind of message do you think that sends to your employees? Even if you say explicitly "I don't expect a reply over the weekend," what do you think someone under your employ is going to do? "But once again, their behavior speaks louder than their words. If you feel compelled to write emails at all hours, I would suggest to park them in your draft folders and push the send button during working hours!. During office hours do you expect an automatic reply? It's important for everyone to have some time to concentrate on their work without distraction. 

Show appreciation, Reward and recognize employees.
Employees have emotional needs that need to be met at work. If you do not recognize and appreciate your subordinates, they'll leave you and get it somewhere else. There is a study shown "findings strongly confirmed the adage that 'people don't leave organizations, they leave leaders.' When employees in this study felt valued by their leaders, for example, they were 1.3 times more likely to stay with the company," the duo writes. Remember to celebrate both accomplishments and efforts to give employees working on long-term goals a boost.

Clearly communicate about your company goals
Employees can't perform well or be productive if they don't clearly know what it is they're there to do and the part they play in the overall success of the company. Be sure to communicate your expectations--and to do it often. Leaders or Managers need to fulfill employee's spiritual level too!

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Why The Future of leadership Depends on Sustainability

To begin with, I would start the introduction of article by this quote - “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” by Charles Darwin about The Need to Respond to Sustainability.

When we talk about Sustainability it doesn’t mean we should only focus about planet aspect without including the other major elements. Sustainability does not simply mean whether something can last. It addresses how particular initiatives can be developed without compromising the development of others in the surrounding environment, now and in the future (Hargreaves & Fink 2000).


http://yasseralmimar.blogspot.ae/2014/06/information-technology-and-sustainable.html

In every era, some organizations or companies are judged to be leaders. What earns them this distinction and differentiate, however, this is not always considered as constant. The criteria that define “leadership” have developed over time and began to take different concept. I recent years the yardstick has been the ability to innovate. Today the framing of corporate leadership is shifting again, to a concept that encompasses the learning and best practices from all these antecedents: corporate sustainability. 

The move towards sustainability is not simply to achieve a worthy cause, nor is to convince the relevant institutions that we are corporation cares about the environment. Rather, it is recognition that those who can make efficient and responsible use of natural resources and human capital are more likely to be the destination of choice for talent and investment. Therefore, as mentioned earlier concept of sustainability extends beyond environmental impact, although this consideration naturally looms large especially for manufacturing and extraction businesses. Today, sustainability assessments include environmental and social practices, as well as related governance.


Most large companies acknowledge the need to be more responsive to shifting societal expectations, to be better able to establish trusting relationships with stakeholders, and to become more open and accountable. And yet those same companies often struggle to translate good intentions into good practice.


There are several examples show how the sustainability integrates into the brand and client value propositions, for instance, IBM decided earlier than many to integrate sustainability into its brand and customer value propositions. It has effectively used its Smarter Planet TM theme to communicate how the company helps its clients enhance their performance in ways that foster sustainability. Recent IBM advertising has been focused almost exclusively on outcomes and social benefit, rather than products and services. While some companies such as Intel choose to build reputation through secondary communication channels, most of the study’s Leaders follow the IBM example. 


To sum up, sustainability leadership offers new ways to respond to today’s leadership challenges. The traditional leadership metrics that developed out of an industrial frame is no longer sufficient. In the competition market today, the focus is pouring on individual and corporate goals, shareholder value, and the financial bottom - line. As Kotter said; Sustainability leadership – like all leadership – is fundamentally about change, as it often entails engagement of uncertainty and the unknown

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Green Policy - Do We Need to Apply It as Green Deal On Organization?

Nowadays, most people have a clear vision about the concept of Green Organization and what is the reason for organizations to go green in terms of impress employees, business world and enhance corporate reputation. So green strategy is now a trend in the market place, it’s also a term that's been going around for quite some time in different parts of the world. But what's the real deal with "Going Green"? And why should businesses care?
From my perspective, going green for organization pours in one stream which is increase employee engagement, create value might find additional competitive advantage and maintain company’s sustainable revenue. 

I would therefore, summarize why business should care Go Green about and what is the impact on:-
  • Go Green for the Environment
  • Go Green to Reduce Waste & Decrease Costs
  • Go Green for Public Image & Increased Sales
  • Go Green for your Employees
 


So for the question, do we need to apply Green Policy in organization? I would say, all companies should have green policy - and all areas of human activity for that matter. Gone are the days when humanity can afford to base decisions solely on cost-benefit in the traditional sense of the term. We are already using more than 100% of the earth's resources available to us each year and if everyone on earth enjoyed the average Western European standard of living, by 2050. 

All companies and all governments need to start considering the cost-benefit of activities on people, planet and profit rather than profit alone. A cost/benefit analysis may not reveal the true cost of the environmental impact and depending on how it is done may not reveal all the environmental costs associated with the project. For example if we did a cost benefit analysis of a vehicle would we go as far as to include the environmental pollution costs? Think about it. Whereas, if you want to see it from second point of view,  green policy will:-

  • Reduce costs by consuming less. When you do more with less you reduce overhead costs and improve the bottom line
  • Reduce costs by reusing materials and goods. When you use things more than once you reduce the amount of new materials you have to buy, which saves money and improves your bottom line.  
  • Reduce costs by recycling. Disposing of “waste” is expensive. As we run out of landfill space, the cost of disposal is likely to increase. Recycling materials reduces disposal costs and keeps it out of the landfill.
I would add, in order to have a successful company you must have a good, solid reputation. Reputations come in all forms – they come via the quality of your product, your people skills, customer satisfaction levels, etc. Going green is a considered a great step to improve your company’s reputation – just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons, not just to boost sales.

Going green may also enable companies to keep customers and investors happy, maintain market share, become more efficient, avoid legal liability for environmental damage and stay in business. So if you have a small company or business I would strongly say you should go green in order to stay competitive in the market and gain the opportunity to compete.

Establish and implement green policies such as hardware energy consumption, waste disposal, using recycled and environmentally superior content, water and energy efficient products and alternative fuel vehicles can very significantly impact your organization performance in positive direction and will know that your business invest going forward

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Information Technology and Sustainable Business Growth

I have introduced the concept of sustainability in different platforms, and I have presented the topic of Secret to Sustainable Business Growth in my MBA defense in Cumbria, UK, in 2013. One of the questions that I added in my research; what is the strategy you should follow in order to grow and keep the business going. Maybe you're offering a service that not enough satisfy your customers, or maybe you've hit a wall and you do not understand your competitors. In any case, the plan just doesn't seem to be working, at least not as you hoped it would.

Today's global marketplace is forcing many companies to re-evaluate, find out innovate solutions and even collaborate their efforts just to keep up with demands of the business and services in the market place. 

For instance, in Information Technology sector we know the Information technology (IT) is essentially a tool to manipulate flow of information in business system. With the growth in need of IT services across the globe, we have found several companies have started venturing away from self-sufficiency in their way of conducting business to identifying specific processes that can be developed by some other company in order to reduce costs and focus on their core business.


Adopting sustainability is considered an important business strategy that affects your products and services in terms of cost-reduction opportunities, reputation, and revenue generation. Many people think that incorporating sustainable practices requires a significant transformational program, but the ultimate goal is to embed sustainability into business- as-usual activities.

Sustainable IT goes beyond using IT to reduce energy consumption. It’s also about helping the whole business meet its sustainability targets. From the other side, businesses considering sustainable IT face many questions such as: 

  • Does the organization recognize IT as a significant contributor to its overall sustainability strategy?
  • How does IT contribute to the organization’s sustainability goals?
  • What more could IT do to contribute to those goals?
  • Are there clear, measurable objectives for sustainable IT?
Nowadays, sustainability has considered as key factor for IT in several organizations to improve performance and growth. Numerous firms have worked to adopt different strategies in order to re-manage its organizational performance, enhance growth, and competitive advantage in terms of social and ecological sustainability, so the success of sustainability means raise the economic scale through the ability to innovate, as well as increased competitiveness by lowering costs and increasing profit as a result of better-quality and services. 

So to answer mentioned questions, I would follow Mines's research when he showed that a number of organizations are expected to jump on the Green IT bandwagon pushing the Green IT services market to an estimated US $4.5 billion by 2013. 

Therefore, the process of development green product or services is increasing attention as means to improve companies’ performance. CIOs have singled out “Green IT” in their organizations as the most important sustainable strategic technology. 

In order to achieve “How does IT contribute to the organization’s sustainability goals” question, I would say, Green IT initiatives will become mainstream and will move from niche projects to a part of core business practice. Therefore, working on new innovations in the field of green products and services will have an efficient role in supporting companies and economies towards environmental sustainability, For instance in 2010 and 2011 video conferencing efforts an environmental savings of more than 87,500 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Another example is cloud computing which is considered as core of IT infrastructure application network as green technology, it is an evolving paradigm which is enabling outsourcing of all IT needs such as storage, computation and software. 

The reason why cloud computing is a greener technology is that it looks to enhance and to better utilize computer resources which ensures the decline of physical resources and hardware components needed within firms as researcher states (Hafner and Zhang 2012).

To sum up, the concept of sustainable growth can be helpful for planning healthy corporate growth. This concept forces CEO's and managers to consider the financial consequences of sales increases and to set products and services growth goals that are consistent with the operating and financial policies of the company or organization

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Motivation and people behaviour

When we say leaders can influence people, we need to know how those leaders understand why people behave the way they do, their efforts to influence others will have random, perhaps unpredictable, even alienating effects. I believe most of us have tried or we might try to influence someone and get just opposite effect we expected!!, for instance perhaps we have been trying to get a subordinate to do something at work, and no matter what you do, she/he just won’t respond. On the other hand, maybe your boss has been asking you to do something, and you resist. So what can we say for this action or behavior? If you‘ve ever asked yourself as a leader or a colleague, “Now why did he do that?” you’ve wrestled with this problem. At home, at work, or at play, you have no doubt observed people doing things that were, to you, unexpected or unusual. You may have seen two people in very similar situations respond in very different ways. All of these incidents raise the question, for leaders of why people behave the way they do. This is a very complex subject about which volumes have been and continue to be written.

From my perspective, it relates to the self-awareness and how we act differently to different things. Some people are never able to understand their own motivations and rise above the need to fill personal "holes" from our childhood. I would say it is part of attitude that can positively or negatively affect a person's behavior, so your behavior and the behavior of the people around you, has a major impact on how you form relationships with each other – and birds of a feather tend to flock together!. Therefore, we need to know the way of dealing with people whatever their attitudes and behaviors in order to reach a level that could help leaders to see the effects of leadership in the work environment whether in organization, community or in society. 



In the other side, the motivation plays an essential role in people behaviors and their reaction to the duties or works have been required or asked about. Therefore, the vanilla leaders’ view of motivation generally included two ideas- rewards and punishment. We hold a “carrot” out in front of somebody and expect that he or she will move ahead in order to get the carrot. If that doesn’t work, then we stand behind and beat their backside with whip”. BUT still I believe the motivation of others is the ability to influence the behavior of other people in such a manner as to get them to do what you expect them to do, because the person motivated enjoys doing it.