While reducing your information system’s environmental impact is important, it’s the benefits you can attain beyond that primary goal that will make the difference.

Information technology is one of the rare areas within a business where it seems quite possible to make substantial reductions in energy use without substantially altering employee behaviour. This is an important aspect of any corporate sustainability plan. It’s these "quick wins" that make all of the more difficult goals palatable for senior management.

Optimizing your IT systems isn’t necessarily a quick win, but with the right approach, it can certainly save you a substantial amount of money and reduce your carbon footprint. Green IT: Reduce your Information System’s Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line, by Toby Velte, Anthony Velte and Robert Elsenpeter is the best book I’ve seen thus far to help with that process.

The book outlines the reasons why an organization should care about this issue - financially and environmentally - and how it’s possible to make rapid change with the right determination.

In a discussion with Toby Velte, I asked what information in the book would most likely surprise readers.

"Only about 10 per cent of IT departments see their bill and know what they spend," he says. "The cost to power and cool systems will shock them. The cost to power and cool servers will soon exceed the cost of the server itself. This situation adds a new variable - what was once thought of as cheap and ubiquitous no longer is."

The important point of the book, as Velte says, is that it’s about strong business practices, not about "getting programmers to recycle Mountain Dew cans." It’s about "real, quantifiable change."

Velte also believes that the proper approach to IT can be the platform for other green initiatives. The biggest impediment to that, however, is changing people’s behaviour, and to a certain extent the book was created to help with this challenge.

Velte notes that there are four areas where a company can make meaningful upgrades to their IT practices:
 
1. Data centre server consolidation / rationalization. "This offer a year and a half or less in return on investment (ROI)," says Velte. "Couple that financial win with taking carbon out of the air - normally more than a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions - and you have a great success story." This doesn’t even factor in the administrative savings and floor space gained by using this approach. What this offers anyone working on improving IT performance is a comparatively quick win. But it needs to be coupled with a continuous improvement plan as well.

2. Desktop consolidation. By moving to a thin client operation, it’s possible to have employees work from anywhere, anytime, which can cut travel time and more unnecessary carbon emissions. A thin client environment also allows older machines to be repurposed to operate with new systems.

3. Application rationalization. "A business might have one thousand applications on its systems and there will be some that haven’t been used in a year," says Velte. "The functionality of others could be found in another application. In some cases, it’s possible to work that number of applications down to the low one hundreds."

4. Green IT strategies. Once an organization has managed the basics of its "greening" program, it’s possible to start using IT to drive revenue - to create green practices that offer real payback. "For instanced, the goal might be to reduce the number of flyers you send out," says Velte. "Business intelligence analytics tools can be usedto send those flyers to a specific segment of people. Not only do you save paper, there’s also an up-tick on your response rates, so you get a better ROI."

Green IT offers useful advice about these particular issues, as well as tackling the challenge of determining your carbon footprint, and managing your IT throughout its life span, from cradle to cradle - manufacture to disposal and recycling. From measuring datacenter efficiency to exploring software as a service and green supply chains, this book leaves nothing important out of the discussion.

Green IT is published by McGraw-Hill. To read an excerpt from the book, click here.

 

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