Time for IT to pay up for inefficiencies – reports
Two separate reports have come to the same conclusion: That IT organizations are slow to address climate change because they are often cushioned to the effects their systems have on energy costs.
While the amount of energy to power the corporate IT infrastructure continues to grow, most IT departments are still not accountable for the escalating energy bill.
“We found that IT departments are slow off the mark in terms of understanding the impact,” said Trewin Restorick, director of UK-NGO, Global Action Plan, who released the report, An Inefficient Truth. “A lot of ICT departments don’t even see their energy bill, let alone pay it, so how are they going to become more efficient if they don’t even know how much energy they are using.”
The report found that 56% of ICT departments do not see the bill for the energy their systems use and is not responsible for paying for it. Another 12% see the bills but do not pay for it while 7% have partial payment responsibility for specific areas such as data centres. Only 20% of ICT departments pay for the energy bill that ICT equipment uses in the organization.
“It is through the world of business that we realise that ICT, or computers, has a huge impact on the environment, and employees were getting very confused messages from their IT departments about the carbon footprint from the computer industry,” said Restorick.
“The first thing we found was that the computer industry has the same environmental impact as the aviation industry, which was a bit of a shock. We found that a server uses the same amount of carbon as a Chelsea tractor driving at 50 miles per gallon, so a big, big impact,” Restorick added without giving any specific comparisons.
At the same time, 86% of the IT professionals surveyed as part of the report, do not know the carbon footprint of their activities and only 15% are planning to find out. A further 38% would like to know but do not know how to determine this figure, the report said.
Meanwhile, a report by the Butler Group highlights a similar disconnect between the IT department and corporate sustainable initiatives.
“One reason why IT departments have been slow to react is because IT management often does not have energy expenditure in their budget. Power costs are usually tied to the property portfolio, so energy savings do not translate directly to budget savings for IT,” says Mark Blowers, senior research analyst and co-author of the study, Sustainable IT Provision – Meeting the Challenges of Corporate, Social, and Environmental Responsibility. “It (sustainability) is viewed by many IT managers as not their problem, I guess mainly due to the fact that they in the most part are not responsible for the energy consumption budget.”
Blowers sees a clear trend towards the inclusion of sustainability metrics in IT performance, but adds that sustainability objectives should be part of the IT strategy and not a separate project. “I would not advocate separating out “green” from “regular” IT budgeting,” he said.
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Category: Applications, Data centres, Green corporations
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