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    Green IT in Practice: How one company is approaching the greening of its IT
    Green IT in Practice: How one company is approaching the greening of its IT
    Green IT in Practice: How one company is approaching the greening of its IT
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    Green IT in Practice: How one company is approaching the greening of its IT

    By Gary Hird

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    About this ebook

    Green IT in Practice is a practical book to help managers navigate a little more easily through the mass of information surrounding Green IT.Written by Gary Hird, Technical Strategy Manager for the John Lewis Partnership, who has responsibility for progressing Green IT initiatives for John Lewis and Waitrose, and endorsed by Trewin Restorick, Director of the environmental charity Global Action Plan, this key book exudes tried and tested helpful advice, techniques and examples.

    LanguageEnglish
    Publisheritgovernance
    Release dateMay 27, 2010
    ISBN9781849281461
    Green IT in Practice: How one company is approaching the greening of its IT
    Author

    Gary Hird

    Gary Hird is the IT Strategy Manager for the John Lewis Partnership, who has responsibility for progressing Green IT initiatives for John Lewis and Waitrose. Gary was also shortlisted for the British Computer Society’s Intel IT Leader of the Year award 2008. Endorsed by Trewin Restorick, Director of the environmental charity, Global Action Plan, this key book exudes tried and tested helpful advice, techniques and examples.

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      Book preview

      Green IT in Practice - Gary Hird

      Resources

      INTRODUCTION

      There’s a bewildering mass of information to sift through for managers involved with a programme of Green IT work.

      This guide is intended to help you navigate through all that information a little more easily by giving it a structure and by outlining some practical examples of techniques and solutions that IT departments, including ours, have adopted in this area.

      It is not meant to be a detailed technical guide, a long list of statistics, a prescriptive ‘do these 10 things or the earth gets it’ set of laws, or a boast that I know all the answers (I certainly don’t). It’s partly for those people, scared by terms such as ‘ISO14001 compliance’, who are looking for an alternative way to get started.

      So, hopefully you will find it helpful. And if not, well, I’m acutely aware that, even if you purchased this in eBook format, this book has a carbon footprint of its own (I haven’t attempted to calculate precisely what that is, I’m afraid). So, if having read the suggestions in the following chapters, you feel that the book simply wasn’t worth the carbon needed to produce it, I’m sure some appropriate way to reuse or recycle the pages will suggest itself to you!

      Whatever its merits now, I’d still like to think that this book will have become redundant in a few years’ time: the ideas referenced here will by then have become an ‘unconscious competency’ (to use one of the labels from Chapter 3) being practised effectively by the majority of IT departments; and of course a whole new raft of innovative ideas for using IT to further reduce companies’ carbon footprints will have emerged.

      We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’d like to wish you good luck in all that you do to improve the environmental credentials of your organisation’s IT. I’m also happy to hear from you about your own experiences in progressing a green agenda. You can contact me at gary_hird@johnlewis.co.uk.

      CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS GREEN IT?

      ‘Green computing’, like anything with a ‘green’ tag, can be hard to define. The label means different things to different people, and an IT department getting to grips with the subject can find it useful to start by trying to determine exactly what it understands by the term.

      I’ve used the following definition to describe a green programme of IT work:

      Green IT is a collection of strategic and tactical initiatives which either:

      •  directly reduce the ‘carbon footprint’ of the organisation’s computing operation;

      •  use the services of IT to help reduce the organisation’s overall carbon footprint;

      •  incentivise and support greener behaviour by the organisation’s employees, customers and suppliers;

      •  ensure the sustainability of the resources used by IT.

      The first of the categories listed above is where most of the focus of Green IT (including the majority of the case studies and examples in this book) has been over the past few years. However, a green computing action plan should also look beyond what the IT organisation is doing internally, and explore the possibilities for IT to act as an enabler for greening the rest of the company. This is particularly important, since it is generally accepted that this is the area with the opportunity to make the biggest positive impact on a company’s carbon footprint. An example might be the development of a computer system to allow more intelligent vehicle scheduling for the organisation’s supply chain fleet.

      The three questions we in IT departments need to ask ourselves right at the start, before launching headlong into the ‘how we get there’ detail, are:

      •  Why are we doing this?

      •  How green are we currently?

      •  How green do we want to be (and how soon)?

      These questions will have different answers for different organisations working in different industry sectors. It is important that the IT department doesn’t simply try to answer the questions in isolation based on its own position, without placing them in the context of the overall green agenda of the organisation.

      For some companies, the answer to Why are we doing this? is simply a need to reduce overall energy costs. Other motivations may include a desire to improve customer confidence in the company’s products or services. It may be a matter of satisfying shareholders, meeting regulatory obligations or avoiding costs because of the environmental impact of the company’s actions. Some may be mindful of media attention, or keen to foster or maintain a reputation as a green organisation for competitive advantage. Employees’ concerns or even prospective employees’ expectations may influence some firms, while some will even be looking to generate income by trading emissions allowances. And a few companies will still persist with a ‘why indeed?’ stance and be unconvinced by any of the above reasons of the need to act. Thankfully, fewer and fewer companies and individuals fall into this last

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