Is Sustainability Just A Job For Vendors?

Is Gartner’s thinking at all joined up about Green IT? Just a few weeks after the analyst firm said that organisations could relax on Green IT, a different Gartner analyst popped up, warning that the IT industry is “falling short” on the move to sustainability.

WWF endorsed the latest biennial list of ICT companies’ sustainability efforts, with IBM and Fujitsu coming near the top, along with HP, Cisco and BT.

But sustainability activity is still an optional extra, said Gartner vice president Simon Mingay: “Although the leaders… such as IBM, Fujitsu, HP, BT, Ericsson and Cisco, have begun to build structural capabilities, governance, and allocated organisational resources addressing the opportunities of a low-carbon economy, their commitment still falls short of being integrated into their core business.”

A couple of weeks ago, however, the analyst told organisations they could cross Green IT off their top ten priorities for the coming year, and concentrate on other apparently more pressing jobs, like integrating media tablets into the enterprise.

This earlier announcement came at the US leg of Gartner’s Sympposium series of talks – it comes to Europe next. The analyst regularly publishes a list of “strategic technology areas” on which IT managers should focus; last year Green IT and “reshaping the data centre” were on the list, and this year they are gone.

So how come users are let off the hook, while vendors are being told to pull their socks up?

Is sustainability just up to the vendors?

Maybe Gartner has decided that sustainability in IT is more the responsibility of vendors than users. And there could be some credence to this.

Maybe users shouldn’t have to give more than a cursory glance at the emissions ratings of their IT kit, like checking the ingredients of the food they buy. After a quick look, maybe they should leave it to the supplier, and trust that there’s enough incentive – and competition – for the supplier to deliver what they actually need.

That would agree with the whole move towards services which we are seeing. In a webinar which I chaired last week, a clear majority of the participants agreed that clouds do build better IT – and showed accelerating plans to move their businesses’ IT support out there.

So, as IT staff move to a more supervisory role, the responsibility for the heavy lifting could move to the vendors.

However, I think it’s wrong to expect vendors to move very quickly towards providing sustainable services, without a big push from users.

If IT departments don’t demand sustainability from their IT suppliers, efficiency will still provide an incentive for the vendors, but really the biggest push to make vendors more green would then be awards programmes like the one from WWF/Gartner.

And how effective would that be? Well, this year’s index rated only 19 companies, because nine of the 28 companies who were invited decided they couldn’t be bothered to take part.

It seems to me that, if vendors really are falling short in their sustainability, it is up to the user community, to CIOs and other staff, to keep up the pressure to bring them up to scratch.