The declared goal of the sustainability agenda of manufacturing companies often refers to reducing CO₂ emissions. Does IT still play too small a role in sustainability strategies?
Sven Rotzsche: Decisions on IT support are usually made on the basis of cost-benefit considerations - in general, that has never been any different. However, there is additional pressure on companies due to the shortage of skilled workers and the rapidly changing market. IT systems are supposed to provide optimum support for core processes, and as complexity increases, they also have to take on more and more tasks. In addition, IT systems age much faster than the assets and the associated maintenance requirements are often ignored.
Sustainability therefore refers in the considerations rather to how systems can also provide their benefits in the long term. This includes topics such as interoperability/integrability, IT security, maintainability/adaptability, stability, knowledge preservation, and usability. It is important to keep in mind that these are moving targets. Overfulfillment of requirements yesterday will be a deficiency tomorrow. In our view, there is a need to be able to react to changing conditions with one's IT.
In practice, it has not been accepted that a single software solution offers all these aspects permanently and is used for this purpose (e.g. SAP). These all-in-one concepts often fail in penetration because they simply lack the know-how and manpower to achieve a high level of adaptation. A very natural solution path is to use a variety of specialized niche products that collaborate with each other.
However, a multitude of systems again has its own challenges, primarily interoperability / integrability.
This is precisely where sustainable IT architecture comes in. It is about connecting data silos and ensuring the flow of information.
In sum, this creates opportunities to monitor the totality of data on production processes and use it for optimization. As a basis for optimizing material and energy consumption, an end-to-end data flow is a necessary step.
Of course, these decisions around a possible target architecture tend to be driven by monetary considerations. How much effort will it cost to integrate another tool? How much effort do I expend to collect controlling data? How much data do I want to collect and store permanently? How long do I want to store the data? Can I gain an advantage with cloud and what about security?
Conclusion: IT architectures cannot make their own contribution to reducing CO₂ emissions on their own. But they are an important tool for empowering decision-makers to identify and track action.
