January 1st, 2009
Here are 10 green IT resolutions: How many can your team keep?
There’s nothing like fresh-fallen snow to clear your mind. But if you can’t relate to cold and white winter imagery, think about the most azure seascape you’ve ever gazed across or the greenest mountainside meadow in which you’ve daydreamed. That’s my way of saying I’ve pretty much had it with 2008, so I’ll leave all the look-backing to my colleagues in the blog-journalist world. Me, I’m more interested in the bright-green future. Tomorrow, when everything is slushy and gray, I’ll go back and grade my predictions from last year.
So what kind of list do I have in store for this New Year’s Day; you know it’s coming, don’t you? Because I’m an optimist, let me offer 10 Green IT Resolutions that businesses WILL embrace in the coming 12 months despite general gnashing of the teeth over the economy and its impact on IT spending.
1. Steal some T&E budget for conferencing technology: Videoconferencing isn’t what it used to be. That is to say, it’s much better. With broadband communications access accelerating, there’s no reason NOT to convert at least a portion of your company’s meetings into virtual ones. Not only will this save money, it will improve morale among those employees and executives weary of airport lounges or crowded highways.
2. Support and encourage telecommuting: The old-guard manager will argue that people goof off when they’re not in the office, but I’ll bet they’ll get even more work out of key employees who can hunker down and think by themselves at least one or two days a week. IT managers can support this by creating policies that control access and manage security for people working outside headquarters or bonafide branch locations. Not only will this practice save on the emissions created by commuters, it will have an impact on the company’s electricity usage. So, there are lots of productivity metrics that could be impacted.
3. Establish baselines to improve corporate carbon profiles: There are just too many darn carbon calculators and other freely available tools available at this point NOT to track and to understand the extent of the carbon and greenhouse emissions your company (or at least your IT department) is creating. How can you manage improvements and reductions without setting the starting point? If you’re really serious (and who isn’t), there is a whole category of applications emerging that are focused on managing carbon information across your entire organization (not just the technology department).
4. Adopt power management: Turn the thing off when it’s not being used. How simple is that? As I blogged a few days ago, this one is pretty much a no-brainer at this point as far as the return on investment proof points. Now, the trick is to find the budget to invest in order to save budget.
5. Go paperless: OK, so maybe it’s naive to think that you can eliminate all paper, but encouraging digital archiving and workflow practices will help with compliance regulations across many industries, AND cut down on paper waste, AND help your company better-manage its printer fleet.
6. Incorporate virtualization and consolidation into routine data center practices: It’s time to stop thinking about virtualization as a one-time event and look at how it will influence server and storage purchases over the long term. While you’re at it, I expect any company building a new data center to look really closely at real estate concerns, such as the availability of alternative energy sources or how conducive the climate is to free cooling.
7. Establish an audit trail for e-waste: Even though companies are holding onto technology longer, all the bad media coverage over the environmental damage wreaked in developing countries by improperly trashed monitors, motherboards, memory and chassis will translate into tighter scrutiny of the entire technology lifecycle—from initial deployment to end of life (whatever that means).
8. Add “green” metrics to technology evaluation criteria: When buying new technology, there should be heightened scrutiny as to how it performs against fundamental “green IT” criteria. EPEAT, with more than 1,000 products now listed, is a great place to start. More information for servers should be out this year. Fingers crossed.
9. Look to the cloud: If you don’t have to deploy it yourself, why should you? The software as a service movement plays into the hands of those looking to automate key business processes but lets them do it without necessarily putting more pressure on their own data center. There’s a green factor to cloud evaluations that should not be overlooked.
10. Insist on a seat during larger corporate green discussions: Sadly, the interests of green IT are still handled separately of broader corporate sustainability initiatives, which seems counter-intuitive when you consider that IT is not only part of the problem but part of the answer. Wield your influence at the highest executive level possible.
A very Happy New Year to all GreenTech Pastures readers. Thanks for your support and feedback during the past year.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist in the New York area with more than 20 years experience covering the high-tech industry. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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