"Upper management tying electric bill to CIO performance," Green IT Guy says

If that's true, it's certainly about time. I'd love to see a list where this is happening. I haven't heard it from any IT managers I've asked in the past year.

Read the full article at http://thegreenitguy.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/making-the-case-for-green-it/. 

Some other key points:

• If I can walk into any organization and cut their energy usage, carbon output, and IT expense in half, I don’t see how that could be considered green washing or marketing hype.
• Energy reductions standards are moving from voluntary to mandatory.  
• Large investors are starting to pay attention to sustainability indexes.  
• IT departments that once considered Green IT a niche now see it as vital to their business.
• "Green IT 1.0" initiatives such as data center consolidation have gone main stream. Pioneering companies and government agencies, such as UPS and the City of Palo Alto, have moved on to "Green IT 2.0"-- using IT to make everything else Greener.

See more of what the Green IT Guy, Terell Jones, has to say at http://thegreenitguy.wordpress.com/. 

Where did Green IT go?

Green IT has run out of steam, for now, because too many people have failed to make the conceptual leap from cost savings to sustainability. Some time ago, I and others moved on to emphasizing Green IT 2.0*, in which IT makes everything else more sustainable. But, people mostly aren’t seeing the connection. The worst is the guy at a recent VMWare event who’s proud of all the money he’s saving by virtualizing his data center, and still thinks climate change is a hoax.

No, scratch that story. I made it up. I'm sure that kind of dichotomy exists out there, but I don’t have any actual evidence. I probably should just start asking around. 

Picture Saturday Night Live pointing their camera at a random person in the audience, and the caption saying “Cut 1200 tons of carbon a year by virtualizing her datacenter, still thinks Global Warming is a hoax.”  

This is shaping up like a stand-up routine.

Here's a related dichotomy:

Many big info-driven corporations, like IBM, Microsoft, Starbucks, Proctor and Gamble, Toyota, and even Wal-Mart are grasping the need to become more sustainable, and the inherent risks in not doing so. So why are they so silent around the noisy Congressional climate change denialists, and the business leaders that support them?  

* I think Forrester Research coined that term.

Sustainability without KM is like Engineering without Math: KM supports green initiatives worldwide

Sustainability without Knowledge Management is like Engineering without Mathematics. Could it be more simple?

Drastically reducing its energy consumption is absolutely vital to any enterprise that expects to survive in a fuel-constrained future. And, doing that depends totally on capturing, organizing, making sense of, and applying a far vaster array of environmental and operational details than ever before.

Read the KMWorld article that inspired this essay.

THIS IS KM. If you're uncomfortable using that term, get the heck over it. Without acceptance of the term Knowledge Management, and a firm grasp of the principles that constitute it, your environmental initiatives will be more likely to fail. It would be like trying to do Engineering without accepting totally the discipline that is Mathematics.

Unfortunately, the "Green KM" discussion almost always starts by chasing away its most significant audience, the general business community. It does this by first addressing sustainability in the classic KM domains of imaging and document management.

In this sense, it’s just like the argument for Green IT, which always seems to start out self-referentially-- how it makes IT itself more sustainable-- before moving on to what IT can do to make everything else more sustainable.

In both cases, as in any conversation that opens with "me-me-me," the audience is lost before it even became an audience.

In the same issue, see also Following a Greener Path: Data centers, power distribution companies and construction firms all try to conserve energy.

Do we embrace Green IT 2.0, or will the planet spit us out like a watermelon seed?

I've been pushing the idea that Green IT 2.0, Forrester's term for using IT to green everything else, will make Green IT 1.0, making IT itself more sustainable, look like a rounding error.

Actually, that's what Cisco founder John Chambers once said comparing e-learning to email. I hope this prediction's more accurate than that one.

Effective use of information, whether we call it IT, or KM, or whatever, is the key to making it possible for humans to survive on this planet. Nature will do fine; losing a hundred thousand species is chump change to Her. But unlike all those other species, we get to choose whether we're one that stays or goes.

Like I said, Nature doesn't care whether we take it or leave it. Humans mean about as much to nature as a million brain cells matter to an all-night binge-er.

Do more, better sustainability ideas come from Imagination, or Experience?

People can come up with more uses for technology than IT can imagine. That's the crux of idea #2 in an Information Week article about Randy Mott, recently departed CIO of Hewlett-Packard.

From the article: "To really understand a technology's potential, IT needs to put it in end users' hands." From Mott, in 2003: "It's tough to imagine fast enough. You have to experience it to imagine what's possible."

I believe this applies doubly to using technology to enhance sustainability. People who care about the planet are intrinsically motivated to excel where their work involves enhancing sustainability. The experience of imaginative, engaged people creates more solutions than imagination alone.

Most technology that reduces waste or saves energy, for example, also reduces costs. That's good for the company. Enhancing sustainability is good for the planet, which matters to the employees who made it happen. This combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation should, at least in theory, get workers super-engaged in making sustainability efforts work.

But of course, this line of thinking in itself contradicts my key point, in that it has risen completely from my imagination, and not from experience.

So, let's put some substance into it. If you've been engaged in sustainability efforts at your company, does your experience bear out my premise?

Wikileaks:painful but necessary

Wilikeaks is a painful, but necessary step forward. Eventually, the walls must come down. It's a natural process in human evolution, for us as individuals and societies to grow more able to face and deal with our own reality, not lash out when it's revealed to others against our will.

The most harm, we are told, has been to our relations with harsh undemocratic regimes. With their trust in our confidentiality diminished, they will be less likely to share with us things that they know make them look bad, and that they shouldn't be doing in the first place, such as being deceitfully cozy with their non-democratic allies.

In the short run, revealing such truths may work against our foreign interests. In the long run, it's a big step forward for human evolution.

The World View on IT Greening the Enterprise

How does the rest of the world view Green IT?

I want to draw your attention to a wonderfully concise (just 3 pages) summary of ICT's current and potential contributions to sustainability. ICT, by the way, is what the rest of the world calls IT. It more accurately represents Information and Communications Technologies, or ICT, as one package.

Trudy Heller, CEO of Executive Education for the Environment, offers an encouraging view of worldwide efforts to both make IT greener, and use IT to make everything else more environmentally sustainable. Dr. Heller wrote the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) chapter for the recently released Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability.

Although the article is not available online, I'm hopeful Trudy will either make the content available in some other venue, or work with me to summarize it here. Stay tuned.