Intel Sustainability Leadership asked our team to provide insights on how Data Center hardware was used, reused, recycled, disposed of by Intel partners and cloud providers world wide. 

As the Senior User Experience Strategist, I led the team including multiple vendors, marketing, engineers and quantitative analysts to conduct interviews, review industry reports and synthesize data. We identified key workflows, personas, organizational decision making, their effectiveness and relative impacts and trends.

We predicted what the future looked like, what telemetrics would be of value and what prioritizations should be made in the future for sustainability and reuse of data center hardware. We provided strategic recommendations of how Intel could position itself as leaders in the field by implementing changes in supply chain, manufacturing, recycling, and software as well as the resulting revenue and corporate social responsibility improvements.

Challenge: Understand Data Center Hardware Lifecycles

We started by researching the existing information and reports on data center sustainability practices across the industry and categorizing verticals into their sustainability ‘maturity’ and methodologies. Within a quarter we were able to educate Intel leadership on the fairly new service of IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) that was often outsourced by larger companies that would be a key area of inquiry in the project.

Qualitative Ethnographic Interviews

I interviewed people from North America, Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. They were all involved in data center development, implementation or operation. There were representatives from hyper scalers, cloud services as well as service providers and ITADs. Dovetail was used to build a research repository, transcriptions and tagging of audio recordings, helping me organize and analyze the qualitative data we collected.

Moderated Qualitative Testing: Decision Making and Influence Models Created

Based on a tight timeline, 30 interviews were done over the course of 3 weeks across 4 continents. I was able to create representations of the decision making flows, journey maps and influence models that I validated with some of the key interviewees for feedback and iteration. The results would now empower Intel executives to target key business partners and customers for further strategic discussions.

Methods: Triangulation and Analysis across Quantitative and Qualitative Data

We implemented a wide range of methods to gain deep insights into data center sustainability workflows, decisions and journeys. We combined moderated and unmoderated usability study data, quantitative analysis of telemetric and meta-analysis data and circled back to do validation of the affinity diagramming. This holistic approach enabled us to make recommendations that encompassed why and how sustainable data center decisions were made and also who made them, what their impact was and relative ranking based on industry, software and hardware types.

A sample of a Director of Procurement Persona slide showing updated sustainability concerns and objectives

Impact: New personas, journey maps and strategies for sustainability

Multiple types of reports were given to stakeholders through different styles of presentations. The recently created role of Chief of Sustainability took the findings and recommendations as well as the updated decision maker personas as key inputs for their proposed strategies for the next 5, 10 and 15 year plans.