IT Greening, But It Doesn't Add Up

"In our experience the sectors that are ahead in eco initiatives are larger organisations that are exposed to customer pressure. As the pressure from customers and government to reduce environmental impact increases, the ripple effect will spread to all suppliers, no matter the size," — Duncan Bennet, Vice President and Managing Director, Sun Microsystems ANZ.

This has been HaraBara's contention from its beginning, and is the basic reason for our existence.

Mr. Bennet's statement is based on a survey of Australian and New Zealand IT managers carried out by Sun Microsystems. I found these results the most interesting:

Measurement of carbon emissions

• 22% have practices in place to enable the measurement of carbon emissions
• 36% have no practices in place but are interested in evaluating them
• 33% have no plans to measure carbon emissions

Greening the IT department

• 38% have dedicated green IT plans in place
• 23% plan to deploy eco responsible technology in the next 12 months
• 21% are evaluating putting green IT plans in place
• 15% have no plans at all

So 38% have green IT plans, but only 22% can measure carbon emissions? What, then, does "green IT plan" mean?

The following findings were unsurprising, since all studies of "going green" show that businesses are focused on the bottom line:

Drivers for uptake of green technology (multiple answers allowed, top 4 below):

• Reduced power consumption - 78%
• Lower costs - 73%
• Lower carbon emissions and environmental impact (eg recycling) - 61%
• Improved systems performance and utilisation - 50%