WHAT’S HOT Green IT
There are ongoing discussions about the hybrid manager. Someone who was up with the IT and understood the business and its processes and could translate what the technology could do. The report also makes reference to everybody in the organisation from top to bottom having a green awareness; ‘light green’ skills going right through the organisation
existing services is, and then look at determining what the cost of those services is in a cloud-based environment and to determine whether it’s a good or bad move for the business.
IT is quite possibly a little bit more certain about what their IT skills may be in the green space, whereas, in general businesses don’t appear to be certain about their future green skills needs. There is a massive skills gap at the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and consultant level around IT, which is potentially what’s causing IT to get ignored. Imagine the scenario: the green consultant or the CSR guy who’s being given this job of greening the organisation goes along and knocks on the door of IT, IT don’t want him to meddle; they’re just going to come up with some cleverly concocted technical reason to get him back out the door again. Or even say ‘oh yes we’re doing this already or we’ve been thinking about this for ages, or we did virtualisation last year…’
In some cases you can get big consumer electronics and IT companies talking about ICT carbon measurement, but mainly they are administrative people, few really have technology understanding. There are people with that presence and confidence; but not in the IT arena because they don’t have the technological knowledge to back up their position.
So they are easily turned around and sent back out of IT’s door. What we need is either to get a consultant in who is standing next to them that says ‘Just hang on a second here’, or they need to be empowered themselves, and that is a big skill that’s needed in green IT.
There are ongoing discussions about the hybrid manager. Someone who was up with the IT and understood the business and its processes and could translate what the technology could do. The report also makes reference to everybody in the organisation from top to bottom having a green awareness; ‘light green’ skills going right through the organisation.
It would be the function of a CSR person to develop the general resource efficiency type of view and concept and there should be a small team of people that are concentrating on the technology side. If you widen that brief the message can get lost.
Writing a green IT strategy
The panel felt that an individual who could be trusted to write a good green IT strategy was a rare breed. Such an individual would probably need some experience of the ITIL® library and some formal project management training. If operating in the green IT sphere they really should have the BCS Foundation Certificate for Green IT; and going on a step further there is the EU Code of Conduct in Data Centres, an intermediate certificate. This sort of person has got to be worldly
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www.dcseurope.info I March 2012
wise; to understand that there are best practices that you can pull from different companies to create the strategy. They also have to be a strategist. The technical knowledge, the data, the information awareness to be able to drive these things through projects and to make them form a part of a broader strategy is probably in a larger organisation a full time role, or at least a very significant part of an individual’s job. They’ve got be to be quite senior, otherwise the message isn’t going to get down through the ranks.
It needs to be somebody that understands the organisation from within, with some technical understanding, ideally in a management position perhaps even with a scientific background. At the moment it often ends up being someone from the marketing side of the business which isn’t ideal.
All roads lead to the data centre
So, with a report that outlines that there could be some £22 billion a year of potential savings to UK businesses by using raw materials, water and energy more efficiently, it is hardly surprising that the focus switches to the data centre.
With an organisation’s data centre facility enabling things like cloud and virtualised services, it really is the low hanging fruit. Typically employing engineers and professionals with a facilities background, skills here are often overlooked.
At BCS, we are slowly seeing a shift from a very segregated IT and data centre facility function to having a much greater alignment in delivering efficiency measures without compromising the service.
You would fully expect with the right training and certification programmes, for the data centre professional to fulfil a large portion of the quoted tens of thousands of jobs created if the UK pursues the green economy correctly.
Hosted by Brian Runciman MBCS, the panel was made up of Green Consultant John Booth, Colin Pattinson MBCS of Leeds Metropolitan University, Kate Craig-Wood, Managing Director of Memset, Bob Crooks MBCS CITP Green ICT Lead for Defra and Chair of the Green IT Specialist Group and Peter Hopton, CEO of Iceotope.
This article looks at a small part of the discussion on green issues; the full video is available at
www.bcs.org/video.
Other useful links: Foundation Certificate in Green IT:
www.bcs.org/greenit Intermediate Certificate in EU Code of Conduct in Data Centres:
www.bcs.org/eucoc
Certified Energy Efficient Datacentre Award (CEEDA):
www.ceeda-award.org
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