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Culture: Green IT
Green IT was in full swing even before Al Gore picked up the Nobel Peace prize. Our prediction: For the first time, midmarket CIOs will have to consider the broader environmental consequences of the IT choices they make for their businesses.
Consider these proof points:
Gartner predicts that by 2009, one-third of IT organizations will include environmental sustainability in their top-six buying criteria for their hardware and services vendors.
The Environmental Protection Agency sounded the alarm this year: If left unchecked, energy consumption by U.S. data centers and servers will nearly double by 2011, accounting for 2.5 % of U.S. electricity consumption.
The Green Grid, a nonprofit consortium of IT companies formed in 2007, unveiled its roadmap for developing and promoting energy efficiency in the data center.
Dell CEO Michel Dell got spontaneous applause at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., in October when he told a room of 6,000 technocrats that IT can lead the charge in reducing carbon emissions at their companies. When customers of Dell buy a PC they can, for a fee, order a tree planted to offset carbon emissions. Corporations can fund a forest.
A carbon footprint may take years to reduce, but company culture can change pretty quickly when leadership brings an environmental agenda to the workplace. Ask George Bock, senior director of IT at Sole Technology Inc., a Lake Forest, Calif.-based company that supplies the world's skateboarding population with boots and shoes. "The culture is coming straight from the top," Bock says.
Sole owner Pierre André Senizergues' passion for environmentally friendly practices permeates operations, from the nonpetroleum-based glue now used on Sole's footwear to the just-installed waterless urinals. Sole Technology's headquarters in Lake Forest runs on solar power, as does the new, all-wireless, 215,000 square-foot distribution facility. Internal and exterior lights are set to timers, so "if you're here at 8 o'clock at night you have to go reset the timer," Bock says.
Eight months ago, the company hired an environmental affairs manager, whose only responsibility is facilitating the culture change and calculating Sole's carbon footprint. From an IT perspective, Bock is starting to vet vendors for their environmental practices. Microsoft, Dell and Cisco Systems Inc. top the list of Sole's vendors. A third of Sole's machines are from eco-conscious Apple Inc.
HP is working with Bock on the server end. On the docket: blade server technology to save space, and videoconferencing to reduce travel. Bock's department also ponders other ways to cut energy consumption, from forcing monitors to shut off automatically to recycling.
Meanwhile, the "Blue Brigade," a new internal company committee, monitors behavior. "I get emails every now and then asking why something got thrown out," Bock says. "It takes time to change. We chip away at things that make the most sense. This isn't a one-year thing."
Linda Tucci is senior news writer for SearchCIO.com. Write to her at ltucci@techtarget.com.
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