Green IT not so green

A recent report into Green IT and Sustainability in Australia by Connection Research indicated that Australia’s IT managers and CIOs are ‘green’ — in that they’re concerned about climate change and they see IT as being a key driver on reducing their organisation's carbon footprint — but they’re not doing very much about it. The report is based on a survey of over 250 CIOs and IT managers from a broad spectrum of Australia’s ICT-using organisations.

The report indicates that only half of the respondents had actually measured the environmental impact of IT, and that most of these had only just started doing it and didn’t have mature systems in place. Fewer than 10% had set targets for the future and only a quarter of them had measured the power consumption of their IT systems.

Nearly half of organisations had appointed someone specifically responsible for green IT, but for most it was still early days. This person was typically not the CIO or IT manager, nor even reported to them. Another quarter of organisations were considering appointing such a person.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Few organisations had implemented any formal energy-reduction schemes such as powering down PCs overnight, or looking at power settings on servers, but most had started on an ad hoc basis.
• Around 85% of respondents had introduced server virtualisation and half of these reported that energy reduction was either the main reason for doing so, or that it was an important factor in their decision.
• Three major barriers existed to respondents reducing IT energy consumption: waiting on corporate directives, insufficient money or no budget, and a lack of people or expertise. Each barrier accounted for around a third of the respondents.
• Fewer than 10% of respondents were using any sort of software tool to measure or monitor their total energy consumption or carbon footprint.
• Respondents said the least important factor to them was green IT marketing from vendors, but many stated that computer vendors were their main source of information on green IT.
• Green IT factors were becoming more important procurement factors.
• Users take into account such issues as ease of disposal, commitment of vendors towards sustainability, product lifecycle management and energy rating of hardware.
• CIOs and IT managers are strong believers in the reality of climate change. Only around 8% could be described as ‘climate change deniers’.
• CIOs and IT managers also strongly believe that IT has a major role to play in reducing their organisation’s overall carbon footprint. Most also believed that green IT costs no more than ‘business as usual’.

Connection Research is an Australian market research and consultancy company specialising in analysis of sustainability issues in the building, electrical and IT industries.