Extending and Applying Business Intelligence and Customer Strategies for Green ICT

Understanding Environmental Intelligence – A Customer Perspective

While business intelligence (BI) is made up of complex correlations that are possible through the business systems, the end-goal of BI is to improve business efficiency and improve the decision making. An intelligence that imbues the people, processes and technologies in organizations with a new value system provides potential beyond imagination. In the current business environment, BI is achieved by having heavy duty data warehouses, processes and servers with the processing power to slice and dice available data. The focus of business intelligence within organizations has been primarily for enhancing customer service and bringing about business efficiencies. However, in this discussion, these BI reasons are considered in the context of their impact on the environment (carbon footprint). The end result is Environmental Intelligence (EI). EI is a combination of building on top of existing BI infrastructure as well as coming up with new initiatives relating to the environment. As earlier defined by Unhelkar and Trivedi (2009a), “Environmental Intelligence can be understood as the use of business tools and technologies to understand and coordinate a response to the environmental challenge”. This understanding of EI creatively extends the understanding of Business Intelligence (BI) as it enables the derivation of knowledge that is specific to the carbon footprint of the organization.