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Chapter 5 IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies 217

INTERACTIVE SESSION: ORGANIZATIONS

NORDEA GOES GREEN WITH IT

One early morning in the fall of 2007, Dennis such as banks. In the spring of 2008, Jönsson was
Jönsson was reading the latest reports on global appointed the green IT manager at Nordea.
warming and thought that someone ought to do The initiative to use technology to reduce air travel
something about it. Then he realized that he and consisted of two parts. First, meeting rooms at
his fellow coworkers at Nordea, all with airline gold Nordea branches were equipped with special-pur-
cards and access to the airport lounges, were part pose, high-quality videoconferencing equipment.
of the problem—especially since Nordea employ- Second, desktop and laptop computers with Web
ees occupied many of the seats on the 7:10 flight cameras, headsets, and software were provided to
between Copenhagen and Helsinki every morning. enable two-party video calls. It was hoped that vid-
Nordea is the largest bank group in the Nordic coun- eoconferencing and video calls would reduce travel
tries and the Baltic region. It has around 10 million needs as well as improve the quality of collaborative
customers, 1,400 branch offices, and a leading online work at Nordea.
banking position with 6.1 million e-customers. The In the area of computer power consumption,
bank has about 34,000 employees in 23 countries. Nordea works on both limiting the power needed
Since its foundation in 1820, the organization that to run the computer park and on innovative ways
is now Nordea has incorporated some 250 banks, of cooling down computers in use. After launching
including Danish Unibank, Finish Merita, Swedish a new component in its property management sys-
Nordbanken, and Norwegian Christiania Kreditkasse. tem that could document power use in the Nordea
The history of mergers has resulted in a geographi- offices, Nordea discovered that power usage was
cally distributed organization that requires extensive surprisingly high at night. The reason was simple:
travel between national branches. many computers were never turned off. The Power-
Carbon dioxide emissions caused by one person Off project resulted in power management software
traveling by airplane between two of the Nordic capi- being installed on 23,100 computers at Nordea, forc-
tals is in the order of 200 kg—twice the amount a car ing shutdown at night if the computers were not in
with four passengers emits over the same distance. use. Settings for turning off monitors and putting
In total, short- and long-haul air travel makes up computers into sleep or standby mode were also
about a third of Nordea’s total carbon dioxide emis- fine-tuned. This saved 3.5 million kKh annually,
sions. Reducing travel is not only desirable from an which is equivalent to 647 tons of carbon dioxide.
environmental perspective, but from a cost-saving On the server side, the IT department worked with
perspective, too. Every year a substantial amount of server virtualization to reduce the number of physi-
money is spent on air travel. In addition, for many cal machines consuming power.
Nordea employees who must travel frequently a For an IT-intensive organization such as Nordea,
reduction in travel days would mean more time the cooling of computers is a significant cost. The
home with friends and family. organization must pay to cool down its computer
In early 2008, Dennis Jönsson was himself one of rooms at the same time it spends money heating
the Nordea employees on the 7:10 flight to Helsinki. other areas. The solution was to locate its computer
He had been called by the IT management group to halls in places where the excess heat could be used
give a presentation on “Nordea and Global Warming,” for heating purposes or to use a cooling method
focusing on what actions Nordea could take. The with a reduced environmental impact. Today, one of
underlying question in the presentation was whether Nordea’s major computer halls is located next to the
Nordea could use technology more efficiently to save sea. Cold, Nordic seawater is used to cool the hall. By
costs and reduce its environmental impact at the lowering the power consumption for cooling, Nordea
same time. The presentation focused on two areas saves money and reduces its environmental impact.
that the IT department was accountable for. The first Nordea has noted that cutting costs and reducing
was air travel between different Nordic branches. its environmental impact often go hand in hand,
The second area was computer power consumption, because lowering the firm’s environmental impact
which accounts for a substantial part of the total frequently means consuming fewer resources, and
power consumption at IT-intensive organizations resources cost money. In other words, it is difficult to

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