Three questions for Yelle Lieder
Yelle Lieder is product manager for adesso SE at ECO:DIGIT.
What role does adesso SE play in the ECO:DIGIT project and what tasks are associated with it?
"adesso plays a central role in the ECO:DIGIT project through its expertise in software development and its competence in the conception and development of large-scale software systems. The main tasks include the development of the core system, which performs measurement, data evaluation, and result provision. Furthermore, adesso has extensive experience in the field of Green IT and Green Software, particularly in the measurement and evaluation of the sustainability of software and the existing tool landscape. As the initiator of the project, adesso responded to the shortcomings of existing tools in customer projects and decided to develop its own solution."
What are the (technical) challenges in the project?
"The challenges of the project are diverse. In addition to the scientific question, there is a focus on designing the user experience. It is crucial that the solution can be easily integrated into existing workflows to enable informed decision-making. This includes considering interfaces to existing tools, the format of data provision and maintenance, as well as designing a user-friendly graphical user interface. Furthermore, the results must be prepared in such a way that they can be understood by relevant stakeholders and make transparent which data was measured to avoid greenwashing. Also, supporting different operating environments – such as cloud and mobile – as well as the opacity of the infrastructure between client and server devices pose certain challenges."
What makes the project unique?
"The ECO:DIGIT project is unique due to its combination of automated life cycle assessment and consideration of distributed systems. Most existing tools on the market do not get one of these dimensions (automated, complete life cycle assessment, distributed systems) right. Our solution, on the other hand, considers entire systems and not just individual components or processes. It automatically creates a complete life cycle assessment of distributed systems including all components and also considers the ecological production costs of the underlying hardware, as well as the environmental impacts of the involved network infrastructure. In short: The automated life cycle assessment of distributed software systems makes ECO:DIGIT unique."
