American Institute of Architects (AIA)

Builders look to architects to design buildings that help reduce carbon footprints—and many architects look to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for guidance. The AIA has taken a leadership role in green technology in several ways: by eliminating the production and distribution of paper for board meetings, by reducing travel and using virtual meetings, and through the planned availability of virtual tours of the association’s renovation of its headquarters to reduce its carbon footprint. A common technology behind all these moves is Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. As a result of its efforts, the AIA has cut costs associated with paper use by 30 percent, decreased travel by 15 percent, and planned highly visual virtual tours. In addition, board members now have better and faster access to information, helping the board make more effective decisions.

Situation

One of the most significant challenges facing architects in the twenty-first century is creating building designs that drastically improve energy efficiency to reduce a building’s total “carbon footprint.” The goal of this endeavor: to create buildings that are actually “carbon neutral,” meaning that they do not contribute to carbon gases in the atmosphere.

Given the importance of carbon neutrality to architects and their clients, the association that serves those architects cannot afford to be behind in its own carbon neutrality effort. In fact, it’s not. “We are a central resource for the promotion of environmental sustainability and carbon neutrality,” says Kevin Novak, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Integrated Web Strategy and Technology at the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

The range of activities that are undertaken by the AIA to promote these goals is impressive. The AIA publishes best practices for environmentally responsible building design; it sponsors community groups that share information and advance the state of knowledge; and it advocates for “green” buildings by both public-sector and private-sector clients.

All of which makes AIA support of environmental sustainability important both for the best practices that the organization generates and as an example by which it can continue to lead in this crucial initiative. The organization plans to reduce its carbon footprint 30 percent by 2011 and to become fully carbon neutral by 2030. Toward that end, the AIA is preparing to gut and rebuild its Washington, D.C., headquarters to make it a showcase for the integration of environmental sustainability.

But the AIA recognized that the way that its organization functions is as important a contributor to carbon neutrality as how its building functions. As the AIA surveyed those operations, it identified targets for improvement.

Chief on the list was eliminating all paper-based printing. Board meetings, for example, which were held six times each year, had involved the annual production of 800 documents printed 60 times, for an approximate total of 216,000 pages. The carbon dioxide emitted to produce that paper was exacerbated by the energy required to mail it to board members prior to meetings. Nor was mailing an efficient means of distribution, because board packets could be lost and board members might leave their hometowns for the national AIA meetings before receiving the packets. The AIA also recognized that having the board members travel to attend meetings was another carbon dioxide contributor.

The board wasn’t the only source of paper and travel. The AIA has more than 100 communities organized around specific architectural topics. Each community produces and circulates proposals. Because some of the communities are open to the public, the number of members in each community can reach into the thousands. When proposals were circulated in e-mail, untold numbers of documents would be printed. Moreover, the e-mailing of documents contributed to version-control problems in which the latest version of a document might exist only on the local disk of a PC ineconomic slowdown resulted in a 15-percent reduction in the association’s travel budget. Despite this loss of budget, Novak and his colleagues saw environmental sustainability as an opportunity. “We had to do more, we wanted to do more, and we wanted more ways to share what we were doing with our members and others throughout the country—and indeed the world,” says Novak.

Solution

The American Institute of Architects turned to technology to provide a virtual alternative to the physical paper and on-site meetings that have typified its operations.

The association first adopted a solution for virtual communities and online content based on Endeca software and Stellent products from Oracle. But the complexity of that solution limited its usefulness—barely 5 percent of AIA architects used it—so the team sought another technology to engage its communities and groups.

One of the key contributors to carbon dioxide output is the printing and distribution of paper. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we’re showing that technology can be part of the solution. Kevin Novak Vice President and Chief Information Officer, American Institute of Architects

The AIA has now adopted Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to help reduce the enormous distribution of paper, enable online communities, and begin to replace on-site meetings. To help design and deploy an intranet portal solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 technology, the AIA turned to a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

The initial focus of the Office SharePoint Server deployment was to replace paper documentation for board meetings. The AIA and Portal Solutions set up a SharePoint site that board members and selected staff could access using the credentials that they already had in their Active Directory® service accounts. External users—the board members—access the site and the documents that they’ll need for upcoming board meetings through a security-enabled Internet connection. They then bring their portable computers with them to the meetings so that they can call up agendas and other documents on-screen, eliminating any need to print the documents.

The AIA and Portal Solutions enhanced the security of the site—giving the board the confidence to adopt it in place of mailed communications—through the use of Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2007. They also used ISA Server to provide single sign on, eliminating the need to sign in separately to the board site and other parts of the AIA site.

Beyond the board site, the AIA added a range of other capabilities to its portal, based on out-of-the-box features in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Those features include a hierarchical site structure that provides a logical approach to storing and finding documents, side navigation that makes movement through the site largely intuitive, and document libraries and folders in which to store documents.

The AIA also used out-of-the-box Office SharePoint Server technology to make the work of its public, virtual community groups more efficient. Wikis enable groups of people to access, edit, and expand documents at the same time. The AIA is using wikis to make it possible for its public groups to create a series of sustainability strategies, essentially best practices by architects for their colleagues. Fifty wiki-based sustainability strategies have been published and Novak says that more are on the way. They are publicly available at http://wiki.aia.org/.

The reliance on SharePoint document libraries and sites to host content makes it important that board members and staffers have a fast, easy way to locate content beyond the intuitive side navigation frame. To provide that capability, the AIA adopted the Enterprise Search feature in Office SharePoint Server. The organization has adapted the technology’s metatag capability to tag (and later locate) content by adding tags such as those for function and document status. The search capability is available to people outside the AIA local network, such as board members.

Meanwhile, the AIA is taking a leadership position in environmental sustainability by completely renovating its headquarters with carbon-neutral technologies. Its members and others could benefit from viewing the progress of that renovation, but relatively few can go to Washington, D.C., to view it in person. Therefore, the AIA is planning to bring the renovation to them, through the use of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The organization is planning a custom Web part that will include a virtual tour of the renovation project. It expects to build the virtual tour using two key Microsoft Web technologies: the Microsoft Silverlight™ browser plug-in for highly appealing graphic animation, and mapping software and services to locate the renovation within its neighborhood and to give viewers alternate—including wraparound—views of the exterior of the project. The use of both software and services will give the virtual tour more detailed and up-to-date content, presented in a more visually appealing format, than would have been possible with a pure software or pure services approach, according to Novak.

 Benefits

By adopting environmentally friendly technology, the American Institute of Architects has cut the use and cost of paper document production and distribution, decreased travel, and laid the foundation for virtual tours of its upcoming headquarters renovation. In all these respects, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is helping the organization promote environmental sustainability and reduce its carbon footprint.

Reduced Paper Use Cuts Costs by 30 Percent

The AIA has succeeded in its primary goal of reducing the amount of paper that it prints and distributes, in order to reduce its carbon footprint. The organization estimates that it has eliminated the printing of 216,000 pages of paper per year, at an approximate cost of $4,000. In addition, it has saved about $6,000 by no longer distributing board packets by postal mail, for a total savings in paper use and distribution of 30 percent.

“One of the contributors to carbon dioxide output is the printing and distribution of paper,” says Novak. “With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we’re showing that technology can be part of the solution.”

Fewer On-Site Meetings Shrink Carbon Footprint

Beyond cutting the costs and carbon dioxide output caused by paper printing and distribution, the AIA is in the process of further reducing its carbon footprint by replacing on-site meetings with virtual ones. Board meetings have been cut by a third, from six to four per year.

We succeeded in conducting our operations effectively this year with a 15-percent cut in travel expenses. Kevin Novak Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Integrated Web Strategy and Technology, American Institute of Architects

“Going to virtual meetings is a challenge for us because our board members have access to varying amounts of bandwidth, which affects the quality of their real-time communications link,” says Novak. “Nevertheless, we succeeded in conducting our operations effectively this year with a 15-percent cut in travel expenses, and we are exploring ways to use Microsoft technologies to enhance the quality of virtual meetings for all board members.”

The AIA also plans to both share environmental sustainability technology with its members and others, and demonstrate the value of virtual communications, through its adoption of virtual tours of its headquarters makeover. When it becomes available, the virtual tour will give many architects their first up-close view of environmental sustainability technologies and practices as they are designed and deployed in buildings, making it both easier for them to adopt similar techniques in their own building designs and more likely that they will do so.

“For more than 150 years, the AIA has remained central to the professional life of architects by adopting the best practices and sharing innovative solutions to the leading problems of the day,” says Novak. “There is no more pressing problem for society than climate change, and architects have a key role to play by reducing the carbon footprint of buildings. With our use of a software-plus-services solution based on Silverlight and mapping services, we are once again sharing a solution to a key challenge.”

Broader Information Access Yields Faster, More Effective Decisions

Beyond making meetings more efficient in their use of energy and other resources, the AIA is also making the meetings more effective.

“In the past, there was an instance in virtually every board meeting in which the board couldn’t take action on a matter because relevant documentation hadn’t reached all the members before they left their homes to fly to Washington, or because the documents on which they were relying had become outdated or superseded by other documentation,” says Novak. “Since the move to Office SharePoint Server, that simply hasn’t happened. The board is able to take action in a more timely way on every matter before it because of the use of online documentation.”

And it’s not just the board that has become more effective. “We exist to serve our members and to create the community in which our members can collaborate to solve issues,” says Novak. “Our community groups are functioning far more effectively since the adoption of wikis, team sites, and other technologies in Office SharePoint Server. We don’t have all the answers here inside the AIA—our members are the industry’s brain trust. Office SharePoint Server is enabling them to develop answers—to environmental sustainability and other issues—and to share them more quickly and effectively than they did before.”