The green message continues - and long may it continue to do so

http://www.cio.co.uk/concern/alignment/expertadvice/index.cfm?articleid=669

Green IT is about retooling business processes and the ICT environment to reduce energy consumption and tthe organisation’s carbon footprint. Happily, this coincides with increasing pressure to improve operational efficiencies and reduce processing costs. -Thus, an improvement at the bottom line can also enhance a company’s green credentials – a development that is becoming both a legislative requirement and a competitive differentiator.

No longer aimed at just heavy industry, there is increasing pressure on corporates across all market sectors, and within all areas of activity, to reduce their greenhouse gases. And when it comes to technology, this is being translated into a growing list of legislative, media and industry initiatives.

At the government level, there is a growing list of mandates that include the EC’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive and the Energy Star programme from the US Environmental Protection Agency, strongly supported by IT suppliers such as Intel. This last programme was instrumental in introducing a ‘sleep mode’ to PCs and other electronics products.

Very cool. We do need to improve energy efficiency of the IT infrastructure, of limiting the carbon footprint of the organization and the IT infrastructure. At the same time, we need to do this in a business orientated way, preaching is less effective to showing the return on investment, the business empowerment/functionality achieved from a more energy efficient infrastructure (a virtual server estate for example).  Say to a CEO we need to reduce the carbon footprint might give you the opposite effect intended, illustrating the business benefits financially (return on investment), operationally (more on demand provisioning, a more fluid type infrastructure etc) can be more effective, ticking the boxes from a corporate social responsibility (a green viewpoint) and a shareholder/stakeholder viewpoint.