WHAT’S HOT Green IT
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Green skills for the green economy
In a recent BCS video debate, a panel of green IT thought leaders discussed the recently released ‘Skills for the Green Economy’ report from UK government. The panellists debated the issues around green IT and the skills required to write an effective green IT strategy.
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hat do companies mean when they say they want to go green? It’s probably different in each case; if you asked Board A versus Board B you would get slightly different responses. One thing the panel hoped is that they are doing it for genuine reasons rather than simply the box ticking mentality that perhaps has prevailed in the past.
Some companies, because they don’t necessarily have people in the organisation that can do the quantitative analysis, end up getting something like ISO14001, which is genuinely trying to do good but actually is more about recycling waste paper. Often missed out is the power usage, which in IT is a big factor. It seems that often businesses don’t know quite what they are really asking for when they want to ‘go green’ and often get mis-sold things as well.
It’s very important to understand the whole scope of your energy usage, measuring your emissions in order to find out where your hot spots are, which means you can understand your actual activities from end to end: from commuting through to production, development of services, maintaining them, operating them and the final decommissioning or disposal process. A typical commercial or educational organisation finds that about 30-50 per cent of their electricity bill is as a result of IT equipment, a massive proportion that tends to be excluded from energy efficiency measures.
Skills in the organisation An organisation that had appropriate green skills in its IT area would have to have
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www.dcseurope.info I March 2012
someone at the top who is a strategic thinker and can look at the entire network as an holistic being and thus determine strategy. This needs to be aligned with the corporation’s IT strategy as well, and the larger organisation strategy.
Further down the chain then you have technicians, the implementation people. You’d probably need some sort of business analyst that’s actually got the skills to work out what the carbon footprint of their
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