August 6th, 2009
What's your energy IQ?
IT services and consulting company Varsity Technologies has operated with a green IT sensibility for quite some time. But now it has translated that philosophy into a formal new service that it is calling Energy IQ.
Patrick Ciccarelli, CEO and senior consultant for Varsity, says his Energy IQ service examines the relationship between operational and energy efficiency within organizations with more than 500 employees. The key is not only finding where savings can be realized but in finding ways to measure progress continually and make adjustments as necessary along the way and over time. “The problem that we are starting to hear is that people are being shown the benefits of reductions, but they are realizing all of the savings that they actually projected,” Ciccarelli says.
This is a big problem if your organization has created budgets based on those savings. One school district that Varsity is now aiding called the company in after realizing that the millions it thought it would save from a certain project had failed to materialize. There is less risky of this happening if organizations consider their energy problems holistically, Ciccarelli says. That is, by including the IT department AND all the various roles related to facilities management in the conversation.
“We need to figure out a way to move this entire conversation beyond IT and look at other services in the building that, combined with IT, will help generate the greatest level of energy efficiency and intelligence,” he says.
Varsity is partnering with electrical engineers and mechanical engineers who can round out its knowledge base in order to hold these deeper conversations, according to Cicarrelli.
Varsity started Energy IQ because of lessons learned during its own internal assessment and energy efficiency program kickoff. The company plans to focus the service on organizations with a high dependency on IT; educational accounts will be among the targets. “There needs to be a value for the service organizationally,” Ciccarelli says.
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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