Green IT and the business
View this page in:
The impact of IT
The consumption of energy needed to manage IT is, globally, responsible for about 2% of total emissions of the planet, and can be compared to that of the entire aviation sector: therefore they deserve specific analysis. The issue is relevant to any type of organisation: all sectors are affected and the objective to reduce IT emissions, for any organisation, generally means a cost saving.
Is there more to say about Green IT?
Until now, Green IT was primarily associated with technological renewal thanks to the replacement of hardware with higher performance and lower consumption. We believe, and the results of the analysis support this, that the concept of Green IT is much broader, including not solely hardware components, but also how these components are used. By combining these two issues, the attainable efficiencies, not yet developed by the economic system, could be considered relevant.
For businesses it is often difficult to accurately identify the costs related to consumption, using models and tools that are supposed to detect these, but that rarely provide adequate quantitative data. In this sense one can say that today, in fact, companies face a systematic difficulty in knowing with precision the costs related to the use of information systems needed in order to calculate emissions, impact, efficiencies, savings, etc. And exactly because of this it’s worthwhile studying and monitoring what will be implemented in the coming years at an international level.
It should be stressed that, if at one side many recent initiatives have been focused on the difficult analysis of choices that could lead to cost reduction, there are also virtuous companies for which Green IT has, instead, embraced a wider view and has approached the issues of sustainability from a broader perspective, incorporating corporate politics, strategy, IT governance, and employee behaviours.
The Green IT challenge for the business
Therefore, Green IT, understood as the application for innovation in the IT sector with the aim of preserving the natural environment and resources:
- Offers an opportunity to further engage towards sustainability and social responsibility for those companies that have already undertaken actions with regards to improving and efficiency of their production processes;
- Poses a challenge for management, which will need to measure itself, among others, based on the following questions:
- Which could be the savings deriving from a strategic approach to Green IT?
- Where do you see most opportunity to improve the company’s environmental foot print?
- Does the IT provision meet the regulatory requirements and the demands of investors and consumers, in an economic scenario imprinted by greenhouse gas reduction?
- Is an opportunity to achieve energy savings and at the same time ensure exceptional returns on investment.
The Green IT Report 2010
The Green IT Report 2010, represents a recent study on this increasingly important and relevant issue, and has the objective of:
- Understanding the approaches to address this issue by looking at different companies, both in Europe and the United States;
- Monitor the strategic choices of the businesses, the evolution of how they organise themselves in order to contain and reduce, over time, greenhouse gas emissions and related energy costs, and how they are structured in order to best address the Green IT challenges;
- Provide summaries that can stimulate the business system, by presenting those solutions that can be best practice choices or considered best in class for the sector.