Green IT — Part 1
We’ve previously commented on the government’s Sustainable ICT strategy and also on Green Personal Computers. I’m now going to write a series of posts about Green IT starting at the beginning.
What is Green IT?
The common view is that Green IT is about making computer equipment more efficient. Taking this view misses the chance to get more leverage from IT. It misses the chance for IT to contribute to the overall sustainability of the organisation.
Here I’m going to describe five factors that characterise Green IT for us at Greensense.
- Green IT helps meet the organisation’s legal and compliance requirements for the environment (ensuring the ‘license to operate’). It provides tools for records and document management and ensures robust and auditable data collection, data management and compliance reporting.
- Green IT helps to promote the organisation’s brand and environmental reputation. It ensures that publicly accessible information on the organisation’s environmental performance is correct and consistent. It also provides tools for effectively managing customer and stakeholder relationships, including relationships with government, the media and community groups.
- Green IT encourages innovation and a sustainability culture within the organisation. It makes operational and management information on environmental performance more transparent and more widely accessible (for example providing a dashboard on the corporate Intranet). It also provides tools, such as wikis, blogs, and discussion forums, to encourage information sharing, collaboration and innovation.
- Green IT improves business efficiency. In today’s economic climate this is particularly important. First, Green IT makes IT facilities and equipment more energy efficient and reduces IT waste. Then, Green IT improves efficiency in other parts of the business by enabling physical activities to be substituted for electronic ones (e.g. video conferencing). Green IT can also provide tools to help manage efficiency projects (measuring, tracking and reporting).
- Lastly, Green IT provides a platform for growth. By providing services or goods in a more sustainable way, new options can open up. Customers are attracted to more sustainable offerings and they are often cheaper. The way Green IT can be innovative and make services and goods more sustainable is to either transform them from being physical to being electronic (sometimes called ‘dematerialisation’) or through automation, reducing the number of people required to provide the service.
It is important for IT departments to see the potential from thinking and acting sustainably. Green IT should be a major strategic theme that cuts across the whole IT function.
In the next post in this series I will discuss how you can develop a Green IT strategy. I’ll also cover how Green IT relates to climate change and carbon management — our main priority at Greensense.
Tags: green IT
