Everything's Gone Green (part 2)
Continues...
As the collective voice of the IT industry, the NCC believes that if we’re serious about enhancing energy efficiency and carbon neutrality then perhaps it is time to call a halt to further efficiency labeling schemes, each with their own agenda and priorities, and try to encourage genuine industry-wide adoption of the standards promoted by an independent body.
The simple truth is that green IT remains a very complex issue – a tangle of technology, power consumption versus costs, geo-politics, brand leveraging, board pressure and consumer perception. Some organisations are making good progress without any adverse impact on business performance or profitability.
As the NCC 2008 Annual Conference on Sustainable IT highlighted, most are still yet to grab this issue and run with it. Attitudes towards green IT are in no way cynical, but the undeniable sense when IT decision makers congregate is that green business drivers will never top profitability as the key business driver.
NCC Conference
The broad conference theme focused on helping organisations develop the right roadmap for green IT. The conference was a rich feast of stats, stats and more stats; power consumption versus costs, geo-politics, brand protection and leveraging, board pressures and the need for behavioural change.
Above all, there was an acute awareness that the green imperative needs to be underpinned by a cost-cutting agenda, with measures designed to reduce IT’s power consumption, drive business efficiency and leverage the value of technology. ‘Eco-efficiency’ and ‘profit’ are no longer considered mutually exclusive.
“It’s easy to get carried away by the green wave," commented Sarah Burnett, senior Analyst at Butler. “It can look suspiciously like a fad, a bubble that’s going to burst, but adoption is slowly and steadily ramping up. It looks like a sustainable trend.”
Describing Green IT as a “profound economic challenge” that was moving from “interesting” to “required”, and becoming “increasingly embedded in organisations”, Ms Burnett’s thoughts echoed many of the conference speakers’ in emphasising that green IT is more a challenge of changing processes and human behaviours than about thrusting new technologies at the problem.
The subtleties and pressing nature of the challenge were not lost on other keynote speakers at the Green IT conference.
Government CIO John Suffolk, who in recent months has been very vocal on the conference circuit – not least because he has the unenviable responsibility for hundreds of millions of pounds of public sector procurement, much of which is driven by the need for green standardisation – focused on learning the lessons of the past.