PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. -
IT has been “green” for decades, well before the current ecology craze that’s hitting credit unions, say technology managers.
It’s 2008, and marketing people are touting electronic statements to the member; operations is talking alternative energy and recycled building materials; and lending is offering good rates on fuel-efficient cars.
Meanwhile, IT has been greening up all along, according to members of the CUNA Technology Council’s Executive Committee.
“The whole e-commerce movement is green,” said Brian Warfel, chair of the council’s executive committee and SVP-sales and service at $465-million Power Financial CU, here. Warfel pointed to paperless services such as electronic statements and notices, which have been around for at least five years.
“And we’ve all been looking for ways to use less energy for many years,” for example, by consolidating servers with virtualization, added Gail Koehler, vice chair of the Executive Committee and VP-technology at Purdue Employees CU, West Lafayette, Ind.
The first notable environmentally-friendly nod from the technology department at HarborOne CU in Brockton, Mass., came nearly 20 years ago, said Dick Bastiansen, SVP-operations at the $1.5-billion CU.
Cold Storage Technology
“We were a fairly early adopter of COLD storage technology,” which allowed the CU to stop printing and storing loads of paper computer reports, explained Bastiansen.
Of course, HarborOne wasn’t just thinking about the environment when it went COLD.
“It’s hard to separate the environmental case from the business case,” Bastiansen said. “Green initiatives must not only bring benefits to the environment, but they must make sense for the business, as well.”
More recently, the credit union is saving power–and therefore money–with server virtualization, which allows the workings of 35 servers to run on just four physical machines in HarborOne’s production and testing environments, said Bastiansen.
Storage area networks (SAN) are also helping the CU “dramatically reduce disk space requirements and support needs,” he said.
New flat-screen monitors at employee workstations are using less power than their tube predecessors, added Bastiansen.
Currently, HarborOne is wrestling with the waste created when the CU’s 300 employees leave their computers running overnight so that IT can install patches during the off-hours, said Bastiansen.
“All of us in the industry need to take a look at that in order to conserver power,” he said. “We’re close to a solution. It may involve an automatic shut-down process.”
HarborOne has a long history of green initiatives, Bastiansen continued.
Long Before The Check 21 Act
In 1997, long before The Check 21 Act made green checking look good, HarborOne started capturing check images and delivering check images on receipts at its ATMs, he said. Soon, an ATM upgrade will allow the CU to present the ATM images electronically, as well, saving even more paper and courier costs.
In 1999, the CU eliminated most of the paper documents generated by its indirect auto-lending program by implementing a consumer loan origination system that imported faxes into a server.
That made quite a mark because “indirect auto-lending is a big line of business for us,” he said.
COCC of Avon, Conn., which provides data processing and other technology services to HarborOne, helps drive the CU’s eco-efforts, said Bastiansen.
“Along the way, we’ve taken advantage of e-statements, electronic forms, electronic customer IDs and duplex printing for statement rendering, and now we’re aggressively into electronic document workflow,” he said.
Like other credit unions, HarborOne finds it difficult to measure the environmental gains from green IT.
However, COCC measured the energy savings from its internal virtualization implementation and found a 92 % reduction in watt usage, according to Robert Bessel, COCC public relations director. And duplex printing for statements has cut paper use by 33%, he said.
MORE
Read more about green technologies at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Technology Can Help CUs Be More Eco-Friendly
Can A Truly Green Branch Ever Really Be Built?
How One CU Gets Two Servers For The Price Of One Using Virtualization
For info on this story:
* www.harboronecu.com
* www.cocc.com
* www.cunatechnologycouncil.org
* www.greendataproject.org (c) 2008 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
