This article is more than 1 year old

How green is my vendor?

Not very, in many cases

Environmental issues are becoming a big concern for those involved in managing IT and communications. You can tell this because just about every other supplier is touting their green credentials.

Often they have only reduced their power consumption by a fraction of a megawatt, run an electric shuttle bus to their out of town business park location, or have just switched to "low energy" drinks in their staff cafeteria, but it's presented as being green.

It might make good marketing sense for vendors to make every effort to boost their green credentials, but is it really making a difference to customers, the vendors, or perhaps more importantly, the environment?

There are of course many green issues that might have an influence on the IT department, some directly affecting budgets, others involving relationships with other parts of the business.

The amount of power and cooling needed to run computers is often a first thought, then the chemicals and paper consumed by high speed laser printers and the legal requirement to re-cycle old desktops, laptops, and mobile phones (sometimes via the junior members of the departments). Marketing and personnel departments in many companies are starting to ask "how green can we say we are?"

While vendors are keen to tout how they might help slap a little spot of green paint, this generally only addresses one or two environmental issues and does not take a sufficiently broad view. The wider environmental challenge is about more than reducing power usage in one area, and has to encompass commercial impacts on the environment across the organisation, rather than just simplistic green ROI calculations.

It also needs to take into account the entire supply chain from component vendor to end of life, especially considering the legislative directives around waste and hazardous substances (WEEE and RoHS), and whether resources being used are sustainable or not.

These legal pressures will only increase as governments attempt to tackle the green issues further. So, for businesses of all types it is an organisational "lifestyle" change that has to be applied in a commercially sustainable business context.

This broader impact is difficult to quantify. For example, moving compute power from desktop PCs into a shared server farm may focus attention on the amount of power and cooling consumed in the server room, whereas the savings generated elsewhere from reduced desktop energy consumption, noise and even the frequency for upgrades may be missed.

This plays into another perhaps more important impact on the business - the red line of finance as well as the green line - which means no green measures will succeed unless they are commercially as well as environmentally sustainable.

Making investments in environmentally positive IT can have other wide-ranging benefits beyond simply reducing costs and environmental footprint. While IT consumes power and precious resources during its manufacture and use, it can change working patterns and behaviour in a way that reduces its environmental impact over its lifetime.

For example mobile, remote conferencing, and collaboration technologies allow unnecessary travel to be avoided, but they also permit workers to be more efficient as they can fill the time when they are on "standby" - between full-on work and home life - with productive tasks.

Dispersed teams can collaborate with telephone, web and video conferencing tools that take advantage of the high availability and relatively low cost of broadband, compression technologies and open standards, and so avoid the need to waste precious time and resources in travelling.

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like