Green Initiatives: Hire A Consultant?

Green IT Can Yield Tangible Financial Benefits, But Specialized Expertise Can Facilitate Project Development
Source: http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3024%2F31p24%2F31p24.asp, written by Kurt Marko.

This is my commentary on the article, along with some quotes. I wrote this piece in late July 2009, and posted it October 20. A companion piece follows: What the Big Players Are Doing.

The article was published June 13, 2008. What’s happened in the intervening year? Why so little apparent progress?
Might author Kurt Marko have ideas on identifying Green IT initiatives and connections in the Phila area?

Quotables:
The quotes are in san-serif type, and my commentaries are in serif type.

…three major drivers of green IT initiatives are cost savings imperatives (of which power and cooling efficiency are paramount), overall corporate green initiatives, and technology refresh opportunities.

Green may be golden for a new class of IT service providers aiming to capitalize on growing environmental awareness by enterprises, according to a recent study by Forrester Research.

In light of the diverse and fluid nature of green IT and the specialized knowledge outside traditional IT domains it entails, companies pursuing green initiatives are looking to consultants and service providers for help.

Forrester terms this new market “green IT services” and defines it as “consulting services that help enterprise IT organizations reduce their companies’ environmental impact by assessing, planning, and implementing initiatives that make the procurement, operation, and disposal of IT assets more environmentally responsible.” Of course, disposal is just one aspect. IT is trending toward cradle-to-cradle asset lifecycle management, which means that the materials in every product are managed with the intent that they will eventually become part of another product, not end up in a US landfill, or worse, in an off-shore dismantling sweatshop, poisoning foreign children and ecosystems.

…however, there’s a much more quantifiable reason IT departments are going green: power consumption. Increasing server density, coupled with today’s power-hungry quad-core processors, means many data centers are simply running out of electricity.

IT-intensive sectors are ripe for green initiatives. Mines says, “financial services, telecom, and pharma were often cited in our interviews as companies facing limits on growth due to power provisioning, cost, and/or tight real estate in their data centers.”

SO, WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
A Green IT Assessment looks much like the technology assessment a systems integrators will typically do for a new or prospective client. According to Forrester’s Mines, a green IT program logically follows three phases: assessment, planning, and implementation. This sequence is illustrated at http://www.processor.com/articles//P3024/31p24/31p24chart.pdf?guid=ED21050A20F84927AE47D721B647A602.

Some additional key points from the Processor article about the Forrester research:
1. Assessment services entail creating an overall green IT plan and developing an ROI model.
2. The detailed planning phase aims to identify specific green initiatives from a menu, including equipment procurement, recycling, and reuse to improve data center efficiency. It also can entail positioning IT to support a company’s overall green strategy through such things as telecommuting, building automation, or supply chain optimization.
3. Components of the Implementation phase are not summarized in the article, but are described in some detail.

The conclusion: Given IT’s voracious power demands and its role in equipment procurement and disposal, the greening of IT is a trend that will become more prominent over the next few years.