The CIO as eco-champion

Five ways IT can contribute to a company's green agenda

Working with a wide swath of FORTUNE Global 500® companies over many years, Accenture has observed that IT is often perfectly placed to initiate and even spur on the environmental agenda across the organization.

It's early days yet, but IT executives at some farsighted companies are already beginning to think and act in those terms without losing any of their fiscal pragmatism. They're starting to think about IT's impact beyond the data center.

But why IT? What makes the CIO a likely or a credible champion of the green cause?

The first answer is economic. For almost all services businesses and even some areas of light manufacturing, IT operations are responsible for the bulk of an organization's energy consumption – and that share is climbing all the time. In effect, demand for IT's services is growing faster than the efficiency of the underlying technology. While IT can address supply-side issues, it is also in a position to manage demand.

The second answer is more diffuse. Think how pervasive IT’s influence has become. Today, using remote access technology, personal communications tools and a widening range of software options to enable collaboration, IT can shape and help determine where and how people work, how much they travel and how they behave when they get to their destinations. All of which translates not only into how much energy they consume but also how much they use of other costly resources, from paper to minerals.

IT's impact can extend still further. The workplace environment, the procurement methodology and the supply chain are all within its sphere of influence – as are the automation and efficiency of the organization's compliance with environmental regulations.

Taken together, these areas of influence mean CIOs have a substantial opportunity to further the energy efficiency and corporate citizenship aims of the entire company. They can do this by proposing and implementing solutions that will simultaneously produce business and environmental benefits, increasing efficiency in terms of both cost and energy and boosting employees' ability to do their jobs well in responsible ways that also fit their lifestyles.

Five focal points
One note of reason: This does not mean recasting the CIO as a kind of greencaped crusader – a role that would be neither credible nor practical. But it does mean that CIOs and their leadership teams can begin to step up to their potential for influencing the company's green agenda. Accenture has identified five areas where this can happen.

1. Don't let up on the data center
Since poorly configured data centers can use 100 times the electricity per square foot of a typical office building, it's easy to see why this is the natural starting point for IT's green initiatives.

One approach is to refresh rather than rebuild. Building out a new data center can cost about $1,000 per square foot and take years, while using strategies such as virtualization, standardization, orchestration and automation to extend the lifespan of a data center requires only a fraction of that cost. Virtualization of servers can be a good first step into other computing models such as cloud computing – which also offers significant green IT benefits.

Shared-services practices can lead to server consolidation, and application renewal can help boost system efficiency. At the same time, optimization of where and why processing takes place can also help to tackle energy inefficiency, while smart scheduling of computer usage to create "follow-the-sun" processing models may reduce energy consumption and costs even further.

Part of the challenge is to properly monitor energy use over a range of duty cycles. With the development of virtualization, it is even more important to be able to collect and analyze information about power consumption. Distributing storage and processing cycles without considering the power issues can actually accelerate system crashes, some experts point out.

2. Let IT foster green work practices
The CIO can play a leading role in changing employee behavior, starting with enabling people to work remotely by providing "thin client" and Web-enabled business services. In the office, IT can also help reinforce policies that encourage employees to conserve energy by turning off their computers after use rather than leaving them on standby, recycling waste, and printing documents only when necessary. However – and this is a big "however" – IT cannot simply enforce changes in employee behavior. There's no point, for instance, in IT imposing companywide default printer settings if workers can (and will) simply override them.

IT first needs to map the many ways it influences work practices and then study how changes to those practices could reduce the organization's carbon footprint. Then it must objectively weigh the risks against the rewards of doing so – the dangers to data security of supporting mobile devices, for instance – and prioritize the practices that will yield the greatest energy savings with the lowest risks.

3. Rewire (and recycle) the office
IT can also help reduce resource consumption on the company's premises by partnering with facilities management teams. Besides cutting the use of electricity, more energy-efficient office equipment, including multifunction and double-sided printers, can create significant savings in consumables such as paper and toner. Postponing the replacement of desktops can also help (consider that the energy used to make the average PC equals four-fifths of the energy that PC will use over its normal life).

At the same time, many IT executives are uniquely placed to lead the commitment to the responsible disposal of office equipment. That is because in the typical service firm, and even in some light manufacturing and distribution facilities, the servers, PCs, routers, storage systems and other IT hardware represent the company's largest capital expenditure. Disposal activities can involve finding and arranging new homes for outdated gear and organizing the recycling of non-functional or obsolete equipment.

4. Purchase with green intent
Here's an area where IT can rapidly make an enormous difference. There are two main opportunities for savings.

First, there is the CIO's immediate influence over the IT hardware that can make up such a large slice of the company's capital expenditure. As the most basic step, the CIO's organization can require that all hardware purchases be accredited through Energy Star or other similar programs. It can also favor suppliers that are proactive about reducing, reusing or recycling their packaging. Going further, IT can rate suppliers on the extent to which they run their businesses in environmentally acceptable ways.

The second area of influence applies more to industries that produce and distribute goods. By collaborating with the company's supply chain and logistics experts, IT can help to identify processes and tools that engender "smart logistics" – maximizing freight payloads, consolidating shipments, improving supply chain visibility to minimize distances shipped, and evaluating the carbon footprints of transportation options.

5. Help elevate corporate citizenship
By interacting in environmentally friendly ways with local, regional and global communities, the IT department engenders goodwill and helps burnish the company's image as a responsible corporate citizen. This might mean something as simple as recycling IT assets to local charities – or helping neighboring small businesses to do so as well. Or it could be as involved as working with regional governments to introduce measures that encourage businesses and individuals to turn off PCs when they're not being used.

By taking a central and proactive role in executing the company's green agenda, IT also positions itself to help build responsible practices internally across the work force, and to communicate those practices externally to the wider community of stakeholders. Investors and analysts, for example, now take a keen interest in companies' environmental performance; by pursuing initiatives of the kind outlined above, the CIO can help ensure that there is a positive story to tell.

This article was excerpted from "The business case for a greener IT agenda," by Stephen Nunn, Dale R. Hersch and Rockwell C. Bonecutter, with permission Accenture.