Governments will soon mandate a firm green technology standard
By Ross O. Storey
23 Feb 2009
Judging from MIS Asia magazine’s newly-released IT Nation tech trends and enterprise priorities research, the technology approach that has most disappointed Asia Pacific CIOs is green IT. Nearly a third of respondents to the research considered that green IT has failed to deliver on its promises.
Researcher Peter Hind, who compiled the IT Nation 2009 report, believes this attitude may be due to the impatience of CIOs in this region. Peter argues that many seem to have expected green IT to deliver instantaneous benefits, within one or two budget cycles, but the reality is, this environmental approach requires significant changes to business practices before the value becomes apparent.
Cost cutting focus
Most CIOs see cost savings from reduced paper consumption, lower energy bills and easier systems management through consolidation and virtualisation, as being the focus of green IT. Reduced energy expenditure was seen as the dominant driver for an investment in ‘green IT’ with 66.5 per cent of responding organisations agreeing with this option.
So, the popularity of green IT seems to be one the wane, but it would be a huge mistake for enterprises to let this environmentally-focused strategy fall down the priority list. Once this current economic blip on the global radar passes, there is little doubt that governments across the world will formulate much tougher compliance rules. With global warming a major concern, it would not be surprising for these tougher rules to include greater requirements for enterprises to meet ‘green targets’ or pay the price for not doing so.
Equivalent to the airline industry
The bottom line is that governments can be expected to enforce ‘significant changes to business practices’ because the IT industry currently generates about two per cent of the world’s annual output of greenhouse gases—equivalent to the airline industry.
When the IT Nation 2009 research was launched at our annual event in Singapore on 17 February, one delegate, Eric Woo, from Rhodia, e-mailed me afterwards to say he was “deeply worried” about the consequence of green IT “no longer (being) in the category of a frequently discussed concern in organisations”.
Eric said it is not only the “over discussed topic on green IT equipment and data centre, energy saving that requires investment”. He said the recycling of used equipment also plays a key role in green IT.
Reprieve for Mother Earth
In his e-mail he said: “For a company to have a proper recycling process, where used equipment is broken down to raw components in a responsible way, would help the organisation in marketing its green efforts and more importantly, allow us to play a role in ‘zero land fill’. We should not dump any more toxic waste into our Mother Earth. Companies can certainly market their responsibility and roles in sustainable development.”
“It is a role we must all play, so that we can achieve state of sustainable development for our organisation, our country, our planet.
“Other considerations are paper waste—junk mailing; posting the same marketing material to the same address many times, the over production of product brochures and unnecessary office printing.”
I think Eric is right on the money. If IT doesn’t adopt environmentally practices, there is little doubt that governments will do it for them—through legislative force, so the time is now to be proactively ‘green’ before you are forced to spend more to do it, based on authority’s agenda.
Ross O. Storey, currently the Managing Editor of Fairfax Business Media Asia, is responsible for the editorial content and production of MIS Asia, CIO Asia, Computerworld Singapore and Computerworld Malaysia magazines.
