Attendees at AIT Global’s GreenTech conference, which was held last week on the Brooklyn campus of NYU-Polytechnic, generally came away with six points about Green IT.
No. 1. There’s a big problem out there. There’s too much equipment, generating too much heat, in too little space, according to Ernie Schirmer, a technology consultant at Acentech and one of the conference’s opening speakers. Indeed, according to McKinsey Consulting, information and communications technologies are responsible for about 2% of green house gas emissions. And the future doesn’t look any cleaner. “[T]he rapidly growing carbon footprint associated with information and communications technologies, including laptops and PCs, data centers and computing networks, mobile phones, and telecommunications networks, could make them among the biggest greenhouse gas emitters by 2020,” according to an October 2008 McKinsey Quarterly article titled “How IT Can Cut Greenhouse Gases.”
No. 2. It’s not easy going green. Among the challenges CIOs and their companies face: adopting metrics to measure their carbon footprints and finding ROI tools to calculate their return on energy savings investments. There are, however, tools from research companies such as Forrester and vendor consortiums such as the Green Grid that can help CIOs do both.
No. 3. There are still cultural challenges. Not every executive believes humans are responsible for global warming. And, according to comments made during the conference, only about 50% of the nation’s CIOs have made any green tech plans.
No. 4. There is some good news on the technology front. For CIOs serious about making their IT infrastructures cleaner and more energy efficient, there’s a host of options. Most IT vendors offer robust green tech product lines. Hewlett-Packard (which sponsored the AIT Global event) offers energy efficient server and storage devices, data center design and consulting services, and control systems. Also, IT strategies such as server consolidation and software virtualization can drastically cut data center energy usage.
No. 5. The best way to go green is with a holistic approach. The successful companies, according to speakers and participants at the conference, are those that formulate a green strategy that considers the corporation’s entire energy needs, that win wide management support, that develop solid project metrics, that embrace the right services and products, and that get strong backing from the workforce.
No. 6. There’s no time like the present to start. The problem isn’t going away anytime soon. And the sooner companies start, the sooner they’ll be able to realize the goals they set – be it to cut down on carbon emission, reduce energy cost, or to just become a better corporate citizen.
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