Enterprise Environmental and Sustainability Information Management: There is a Better Way

Data published by the Environmental Business Journal indicate that the global environmental market is approaching one trillion dollars in annual expenditures. Last year U.S. environmental industry generated revenues of about one-third of that. The industry continues to grow at an average rate of five to ten percent per year, and is poised to grow even faster in 2014 than in any previous year.

Despite its impressive growth, some troubling trends persist within the industry. Most notably is the industry’s failure to embrace the cloud-based  information management revolution. Not adopting the latest technologies for capturing, storing, distributing, managing, visualizing and reporting information increases costs of managing emissions to air, water, and soil, delays the cleanup of contaminated sites and management of climate change information necessary to better understand causes of global warming phenomena.

Most companies “own” their financial, human resource, customer relations, and other data. This information typically resides on computers located in the company’s facilities, or it may be housed off-site in data centers managed by an outside party, or more recently in the SaaS-based Cloud applications. Regardless of which alternative is adopted, both are similar in that:

  1. Information is stored in a consistent and organized manner in central databases developed by professional software companies.
  2. Employees within the company have, to the extent that their privileges permit, continuous and unimpeded access to these data.
  3. Companies unquestionably own the data and are able to change support vendors at will.

However, the way companies with environmental liabilities manage and store their environmental information and data stands in marked contrast to the model they have adopted for all their other key data. Historically, environmental consultants have used narrowly focused applications built on spreadsheets and client/server databases to serve the complex software requirements of this market. Today’s landscape of available technology options has consolidated; new and better options exist. While planned IT spending on environmental software is rising, organizations are still struggling to identify software and service providers that can support environmental information management in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed with other enterprise initiatives and enterprise software, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 10: Liberation from Non-Strategic IT Issues

Cloud applications should free environmental managers and their company’s IT Departments and their teams from time and energy spent on non-strategic, back-office IT operations and software coding. Today and into the future, the most highly valued CIOs—the ones that become heroes to the business—are those whose actions are closely aligned with strategic business initiatives and drive the IT projects that support those initiatives.

Environmental managers and executives should be able to focus on the business processes and subject matter, and the value they bring to their organization, and not on the nuts-and-bolts of technology and IT infrastructure. If environmental managers and their departments are doing things someone else could do, like software development and maintenance, then things that only they can do are not being done. A data center is a commodity, and a company that specializes in running a data center is going to do it better than environmental or even IT department can. And that frees environmental professionals up to do what they do best, which is to focus on strategic work and innovations and find ways to provide true business value, lower the compliance cost, automate reporting, reduce environmental liability, and ultimately lower the operational cost while increasing their company’s brand value.

AWWA introduces updated cost assessment for impending perchlorate regulation

The American Water Works Association (AWWA) recently introduced a new assessment on the cost-impact of an impending perchlorate regulation. The decision to move forward with the development of this regulation “to protect Americans from any potential health impacts, while also continuing to take steps to ensure the quality of the water they drink” was officially announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in early 2011.

Perchlorate is both a man-made and naturally occurring chemical that can be found in some bleaches and fertilizers, and is used to manufacture flares, explosives, fireworks, and rocket fuel. Scientific research finds that perchlorate may negatively impact the thyroids ability to produce hormones that are essential to the development of fetuses and infants- propelling the EPA forward to develop a rule.

In an effort to further evaluate the feasibility of the new regulation, the AWWA’s new assessment updates a review of cost done four years ago. The new evaluation includes additional treatment strategies, accounts for regulatory limits already in place in California and Massachusetts, and considers costs associated with blending, source abandonment, and development of new sources.

The new assessment concludes that the estimated national compliance costs for a perchlorate maximum contaminant level ranging from 2 to 24 parts per billion (ppb) is smaller than estimated compliance costs for other drinking water regulations.

However, according to AWWA Government Affairs, the relatively small compliance cost is most likely attributed to the limited number of public water systems that are expected to be affected by a perchlorate regulation. Because of this, the economic impact to individual water systems is expected to be substantial. For example, smaller water systems could see treatment costs increase by three dollars per 1,000 gallons.

To view the AWWA’s full assessment:

https://www.locustec.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AWWA2013PerchlorateCostAssessment.pdf

For further information on perchlorate:

http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/unregulated/perchlorate.cfm

Cloud Apps Critical Requirement No 9: Control

Cloud applications should allow organizations complete control of their environmental and sustainability data, even though it is located off-site. Organizations are freed of application maintenance; additionally, there should be no roadblocks or bureaucracy to hinder authorized individuals’ ability to import, export, purge, and archive data to and from the application without having to first contact the SaaS vendor. Customers own their data! SaaS providers should make it possible to have a “sandbox” version of the production environment, so an organization’s project team can view and analyze data, and experiment with features and configurations before going into production.

What’s more, high-quality SaaS providers should provide regular audit reports for their customers about the data in their applications. Customers should be able to understand, very quickly, the changes that were made to their data and who made them and when.