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Green IT now imperative for today’s corporations – Connection Research

Tony Chan | October 23, 2009 | 1 Comment

Summary of presentation by Graeme Philipson, founder and chief research director at Connection Research, at the Green Telecom Session of the CommsDay Melbourne Congress.

Green ICT practices are now becoming a key business component for any organisation, according to the presentation by Connection Research’s Graeme Philipson.

First off, Philipson laid out Connection Research’s definition of Green IT: “Green IT is the conscious implementation of technologies, techniques and policies designed to reduce the carbon footprint of the IT function within the organisation… and the use of IT to reduce the carbon footprint of the whole organisation.”

According to the definition, there are now plenty of reasons for implementing green IT now, such as broader green issues are gaining prominence, power bills are rising, IT’s power consumption is rising, IT’s power consumption is more visible and carbon emissions reporting is becoming mandatory, he said.

And just as IT had provided the management and reporting capabilities that enable corporate governance in the 2000s, green IT is now an essential part of any green corporation for the 2010s.

“You can’t do corporate governance without IT because IT is the repository of the information, and IT governance is the process of properly doing IT, and corporate governance relies on all that information,” he said. “There’s a similar situation happening now, you can’t be a green corporation without IT, for the reasons that IT is the monitor, it’s the information repository and it’s the reporting tool.”

GREEN IT FRAMEWORK
One of the key achievements by Connection Research is the development of a framework for adopting and measuring green IT.

“We have developed a green IT framework. A lot of people use the term Green IT and don’t know what it means or they don’t define it – we have defined it. One of the things we are doing as an organisation is bring metrics and frameworks and measurement into the whole area of sustainability.

“A lot of people when they talked about green IT, they talk about server virtualisation. Well that is just one box in one vertical of our framework – the stuff to do with data centres. There is stuff at the end-user level, there’s stuff in the enterprise level, and there’s stuff in the lifecycle level: How do you procure? How do you dispose of IT equipment in an environmentally friendly way? And there’s the big one of IT as a low carbon enabler that helps your organisation reduce its carbon by things like teleworking, cutting down the amount of transport, telepresence, making your supply chain more efficient, making your manufacturing process more efficient and such like. So there is four different aspects of green IT, and the most important of them is the enablement tool.

“Across all of these, we have five horizontals. Attitude – what is your attitude towards green IT? What is your policy towards green IT? What sort of practices are you following? What kind of technologies are you using? Practices is like turning off your computer at night, and technology is like virtualising your storage. All these come into play.

“We do surveys, we do benchmarks, with 300 Australia IT departments so we have a database large enough to do some benchmarking, so we can start measuring people against each other and against themselves over time. That is a really big one – metrics, because you can’t manage what you can’t measure and you can’t measure until you’ve define metrics. One of the biggest problems with green IT is that often there’s no metrics,” he explained.

According to Philipson, the framework has been adopted by Fujitsu because the global company looked worldwide and couldn’t find a framework for green IT. “We developed the framework. They’ve licensed it and it is now being adopted by Fujitsu worldwide.”

Philipson also provide a green IT capability maturity model, which mapped out five different phases for implementing green IT without in organisation. These include an initial stage with some awareness and ad hoc initiatives, followed by a replicable phase where initial successes are replicated across the organisation but still with no measurement or management. The third phase involves defining formal programs and the initial implementation of those programs. After that, methodologies are developed for the systematic implementation of those programs, complete with measurement and management processes. The final phase is where all activities are monitored and managed for optimal performance – “best practice.”

AUSTRALIAN GREEN IT READINESS INDEX
Combining its green IT framework and the green IT capability maturity model, Connection Research has prepared an Australian Green IT Readiness Index, which showed that the majority of organisations are still below par when it comes to green IT practices.

In the areas of Enterprise IT, Lifecycle management and Measurement, the largest portion of the respondents surveyed were still in the initial phase of the maturity model, while in the areas of end users and enablement, the most responses were found in the Defined (third) phase of the maturity model.

Key findings offered by Philipson: User level initiatives involved mostly printer rationalisation and flat screens; Server virtualisation is popular at the enterprise level, but not because of green; Software tool market is very immature; IT is immature as an enabler of sustainable business; and low level of optimisation in key areas.

The survey also found that green IT maturity differs greatly by size of organisations and by industry sector. The transport and storage sector led the Green IT Index by industry and as a general trend, larger organisations lead their smaller counterparts.

NGERS ACT
Why all this is important is because Australia’s NGERS (National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System) Act of 2007 will now force Australian corporations to report on their environmental performance, Philipson pointed out.

“This is very strong stuff. If you are emitting more than 125 kt (kilotons) of emissions a year, or if you are a facility – a factory or hospital or a university campus, emitting more than 25 kt – which isn’t that much, you have to report under L, A, W, law. You have to measure and report on, a very complex series of things that they make you do to report your emissions. This is in operation. In this year, this fiscal year, the next 1,000 companies going down to 87.5 kt in emissions by the end of 2011,” he said.

“By the end of 2011, we estimate 3,500 Australian organizations, getting down to every manufacturing company in Australia, anybody with a fleet of more than 50 people, and any white collar company with any work force at all. But hardly anyone is doing anything about it yet – globally financial crisis, procrastination – no one is doing anything until they have got to. Now they’ve got to, so they are going to have to do it. So suddenly, there are all these drivers – legislation, being good corporate citizens, their staff, and their shareholders.”

CEMS
Lastly, Philipson revealed a whole new industry sector that has spurred up as a result of green IT – CEMS, or carbon emission measurement software – an acronym that Connection Research pioneered.

According to Philipson, CEMS is a new class of software to help organisations measure and manage their carbon emissions. There are now some 60 companies offering over 100 such software packages in the market and the market is growing, he said.

“This market didn’t exist 2 years ago. Interesting thing about this market, out of the 60 or so vendors, 15 of them are Australian, or 25% of the market. CarbonView of out Sydney is a world leader,” he said. “It’s still a classic immature market – lots of little vendors, each with a few users, and as it happens in any new market, they are going to acquire each other, or go out of business –it will all rationalise.”

“We are now positioning ourselves as a world leader in analysis and tracking of this market,” he said.

Download Graeme Philipson’s presentation here.

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