Green Future: Cutting Hardware Out Of Business

Last week, I wrote about how a rising tide of eco-guilt has finally driven me to stop buying new hardware.

Tired of being whipped into a consumer frenzy by another messianic performance by Steve Jobs, I have now committed to stop buying any new kit unless it’s replacing something broken. I have almost any scenario covered tech-wise and there is really no excuse to buy any more until natural wear and tear dictates otherwise.

Of course there are machinations of tech companies to contend with, such as the expiring support for Windows XP, but I am pretty sure I can port my netbook to Linux when the time comes. Actually, I should have done it before now but, infuriatingly, it still pays to have access to a Windows machines for those proprietary apps that will run on nothing else (which included the CMS behind this website until very recently).

Making the pledge to “sweat my assets”, as it’s known in environmental circles, got me thinking about whether the plan would scale-up for a business. As a freelance journalist, I am a one-man business and I have no real concerns at this stage that the hardware ban will massively affect my own productivity. However I reckon that the idea of a complete hold on new kit wouldn’t go down well at, say, a global enterprise.

But then again, IT budgets have been pretty tight over the last two years as management juggles with the impact of the financial crisis. Sure, there has been less business to do and therefore potentially less need for sophisticated new platforms to cope with it, but I wonder whether this make-do and mend attitude to IT spending has really affected productivity? What would happen for instance if a company did make a similar commitment to no new hardware for, say, a year. Would it really make a massive difference to its performance? I am betting it wouldn’t.

Sweating Assets

Environmental and tech experts, including some from the UK government, agree that we should be using kit for longer. Last year, Cabinet Office deputy champion for green ICT Catalina McGregor, said that government departments should get tough on sweating their IT assets and hang on to kit longer.  “It is going to be uncomfortable when it first comes and I think there is going to be a lot of raised eyebrows but certain areas really needed to be sweated, sometimes for up to 10 years, and you are going to be shocked,” she told an audience of IT managers at last years Green IT conference.

But wait. Maybe this thought-experiment isn’t going far enough. Rather than a ban on new hardware, maybe companies should be looking to phase it out completely. That might sound radical, but factors such as the consumerisation of IT, virtualisation and the rise of cloud computing are pushing things in that direction already.

Take PCs for example. Traditionally companies have chosen to supply staff with PCs because of security, application compatibility or even as a potential perk. But as companies such as Citrix have demonstrated, desktop virtualisation can overcome the security and application issues. Given the choice, a lot of the so-called “millennial” generation would rather use their own Mac book or Sony Vaio at work than the clunker provided by the IT department anyway.

So with the application of a little forward thinking, some desktop virtualisation and a cooperative workforce, companies could do away with the need to own PCs. Having crossed that hurdle why not go the whole way and imagine an enterprise which doesn’t have any of its own hardware at all. There are probably a lot of small businesses who work to something like this model right now – but there is no real reason why it couldn’t work for every organisation out there eventually. Even routers, modems and cabling could be offered by the service provider or building owner.

Phase Out Hardware Completely

There are some blockers, however, with corporate culture probably being the biggest. Although an increasing number of companies are happy to trust a cloud provider with some applications, there is still a reluctance to let go of the crown-jewels, such as customer databases for example. Compliance also probably plays a part in this with legislation governing how certain data has to be protected, which could limit outsourcing. But those kind of hurdles are not insurmountable.

There is already a well-established culture of companies outsourcing whole swathes of IT to services providers. The Department of Work and Pensions recently ousted HP and drafted in Fujitsu as part of a massive desktop and thin-client outsourcing deal involving around 140,000 machines. This deal seems radical but it could go further in green terms.

DWP will make some efficiency savings by moving to thin clients for sure but those devices have to be procured and manufactured, which means the use of a lot of natural resources and the generation of a lot of carbon to boot. Better to ape the approach of Citrix which effectively outsources desktop management to its own staff in return for a stipend. Not all users are up to this kind of maintenance but what are we really talking about – some routine software upgraded – something that the likes of EDS have shown themselves capable of messing up in the past anyway.

But while it may be practical right now, the idea of the hardware-less enterprise also hinges on whether replacing the ownership of tech by lots of companies is more or less damaging than by a smaller number of service providers.

Avoiding the duplication, which comes from having a “work” and “home” PC, is an obvious green-winner. But in the future scenario I am painting, the likes of Amazon, Google, and Salesforce would have to ramp up their hardware footprints to cope with the dramatic increase in business. That means more data centres for companies that already have a massive tech footprint.

However, putting hardware ownership in the hands of a smaller number of tightly regulated organisations could be a smart move. There is good reason to suppose they would make improvements in environmental management beyond the scope of most corporate IT departments. Google, for one, is certainly making such claims.

The idea of a business that doesn’t own any IT at all is obviously concerning for IT professionals but there is a lot more to tech than hardware. Some analysts have already pointed to the future of IT professionals – in corporates at least – being more about contract negotiations and managing suppliers. If that doesn’t sound fun then there will be plenty of hands-on jobs in the services companies themselves.

Ultimately protecting habitats and conserving natural resources is going to mean using and consuming less. And if climate change predictions are correct, we can either choose a future where we cut back and sweat our assets or look forward to sweating ourselves a whole lot more.