Green IT: Beyond the Data Center

Accenture believes that CIOs must take a holistic view to maximize IT’s contribution to reducing carbon footprint and enabling overall high performance.The Accenture Green Maturity Model can help CIOs to underpin this holistic approach with the basis and rationale for further action.

CIOs find themselves in the front line of the battle against climate change.
 
CIOs are under pressure from many quarters: CEOs want higher shareholder value, CFOs want higher returns on IT investments and COOs want lower-cost, more effective operations. And everybody wants the CIO to help drive the organization toward high performance.

A new pressure has been added to the mix: as a major (if not the major) consumer of energy within the organization, the IT department is being asked to demonstrate its commitment to reducing carbon emissions. Put simply, IT needs to go green—and prove it.

CIOs must take a holistic approach to reducing the organization’s overall carbon footprint and maximizing IT’s contribution to the organization’s drive to achieve high performance and raising the standing of the IT organization in the organization as a whole.

Spurred on by hardware vendors who are seizing the opportunity to supply new energy-efficient hardware, the debate around green IT can remain marooned in the data center. While important, this focus risks missing some major opportunities beyond the data center. These include:

• Demand-side management. CIOs need to manage the demand as well as the supply side of IT to provide an effective solution.
  
  
• Impact on working practices. IT is now pervasive, which means that IT’s impact includes how and where people work, how much they travel and how they behave when they reach their destinations.
  
  
• Impact on business processes. IT also affects the nature of the workplace environment, the procurement methodology and the sourcing supply chain. IT also affects the automation and efficiency of the organization’s compliance with environmental regulations such as Waste from Electric and Electronic Equipment directives and emissions caps as applicable.

These areas of influence mean that CIOs have a substantial opportunity to further the energy efficiency and corporate citizenship aims of the entire corporation. By providing leadership beyond the confines of the IT organization, the CIO can also help to raise the standing of IT within the organization as a whole.

Accenture’s research and experience indicates that CIOs should focus on five key areas to pursue the benefits of green IT in a systematic and effective way.

These five key areas can have the most rapid and demonstrable impact on energy consumption—and thereby on the organization’s green agenda:

• End-user working practices.
• Office environment and equipment.
• Office infrastructure and data center.
• Procurement.
• Corporate citizenship.

To help IT gain its rightful place at the heart of the environmental agenda, CIOs must scope the available opportunity across these five areas to benchmark current performance and maturity in energy efficiency, and identify focus areas for improvement.