What Will It Take To Make IT Go Green?
Whether they act to stave off a global crisis, or a meltdown in their own budgets, IT professionals need to have better information if they are going to clean up their act.
There is no conflict between being green and saving money, said Jonathan Steel, chief executive of the Bathwick Group, a consultancy dealing in green issues: “Waste is inefficiency.” But users too often simply don’t know enough to make the best choice.
“When UK users buy servers, the number one factor is the sticker cost – not even the lifetime cost, let along the energy costs.” This completely misses a fundamental change in the relative price of electrical and computing power, he said. In 2000, a server costing £1000 would burn a few pounds worth of electricity in a year, but the price of hardware has crashed, while power has become more expensive: “This year it went over parity, and in 2012, a £1000 server will burn £1500 of power in a year.”
The battle is to make sure that vendors give their customers real information such as the lifecycle cost of equipment, said Chapman-Pincher.
The way forward is to address costs and revenue, said Booth. This avoids the potential danger of looking like a “tree hugger,” agreed Moy, suggesting IT professionals talk in terms of benchmarks and systems: “It’s about changing the language”
User organisations have to get their staff on-side, said Steel: “Unilever did a day with all their staff, and set out exactly what they would do as an organisation, and how it would help Unilever as a company. ” The first thing a green IT consultant should do in talking to clients is address the business benefit, with detailed metrics, explaining how the company will gain in the short term and in the long term.”
Some of the best green achievements come about through necessity, said Chapman-Pincher: ” BT, rang up the local power station, and asked for more electricity, and the power station said no. At that point, they started to plan in a significant way how they were going to reduce their power requirement. It led them down the route of sustainability, and led them down the route of investing in windfarms, and doing things like removing everybody’s desktop printer and putting printers at opposite ends of the building.”
Other companies have led on recycling for instance – IBM claims to send less than one percent of its IT waste to landfill, according to Steel.
In the end, IT has more of a responsibility to become sustainable, as it is an essential part in the greening of other parts of the business – through reducing waste in the supply chain and other business processes. “Technology’s role is huge,” said Chapman-Pincher. ” Innovation got us into this mess, it needs to get us out of it.”
“In my view, technology’s role is to eliminate inefficiency,” said Steel. “People are doing technology badly. If you do it properly, then you can start to use it to do stuff.”
