The Center for Sustainable Systems defines green information technology (green IT) as an approach to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional Information Technologies (IT). These include the use of energy-efficient hardware and data centres, server virtualisation, and monitoring systems.
“Green IT focuses on mitigating the material and energy burdens associated with conventional IT while meeting our information and communication demands.”
Center for Sustainable Systems
Green IT adoption trends
Asked what he thinks will need to happen for organisations to adopt green IT practices, Nick Jones, vice president and Gartner distinguished analyst, acknowledges the topic to be complex adding: “Green IT starts with the organisation being aware that IT sustainability may be an issue, and understanding the magnitude of that issue.
“Green IT covers a wide range of issues including hardware, software, energy supply, partner ecosystems such as SaaS providers. It's not just an issue of carbon footprint but a wide range of other factors such as recycling, e-waste and so on.”
Nick Jones
He asserts that someone senior with power and budget has to take executive responsibility for sustainable IT. “For example, some of the most advanced organisations in this area have appointed roles such as director of sustainable IT or have an exec such as the CTO who is championing the issue,” he elaborated.
He goes on to point out the importance of addressing IT sustainability in the context of the organisation's wider sustainability strategy. In some cases (such as banks) IT might be half of the organisation's carbon footprint, in others (such as manufacturing) other corporate activities may be a far bigger issue than IT.
“Investing in IT sustainability might not be the most important priority from the overall organisational perspective. We call this concept "materiality", which is how material the ICT-related emissions are compared to the rest of the organisation’s emissions,” said Jones.
“Every organisation has a different definition of "sustainability" and a different set of organisational goals. For example, the UN definition covers many factors such as ethics that are outside the scope of most IT organisations,” he continued.
“Many IT sustainability efforts will go beyond greenhouse gas emissions to address issues such as circularity/recyclability, e-waste and embodied carbon. Similarly, local factors such as demands from regulators or trading partners may determine what an organisation needs to track and report on.”
Nick Jones
According to Jones, a key challenge is measurement. “Before you can improve IT sustainability you need to know where your IT is operating poorly from a sustainability perspective, to decide where to focus your efforts,” he explained.
He cited the situation where systems or devices are hotspots and need attention first. “Measurement is an immature area, and not all systems, platforms and vendors have the data you need. Leading cloud vendors can usually provide information such as the carbon footprint of apps,” he added.
Acknowledging that many legacy systems don't run in the cloud, he proposed that organisations develop their own tools to understand the issue before prioritising action. “Note also that measuring the electricity consumption of hardware or software is not the same as measuring its carbon footprint,” he commented.
Jones opined that sustainable IT is a business decision, not purely an IT decision, because sustainability decisions may have business implications. “For example, a common tactic to make websites more sustainable is to eliminate the use of video and make the website simpler. This might however mean the website is commercially less effective which could impact e-commerce revenue,” he added.
Practitioners of green software engineering
With sustainability, a growing issue even within the IT industry, a new discipline called green software engineering has come to the fore. It involves principles and competencies to define, develop, and run sustainable software applications.
According to Capgemini vice president, Thilo Hermann, software engineering does have an impact on the environment. “While the effect of mitigating its impact might not be as big as that of optimising the steel industry, there is still value in taking a closer look,” he added.
“You should take code and architectural changes into account that reduce the carbon emissions and energy consumption produced by your application.”
Thilo Hermann
Jones cautioned that software engineering is only a small part of the “green IT” issue. Simon Mingay, a research vice president at Gartner, acknowledged that the green software movement has been slow to gain traction is the complexity involved with coordinating a company's moving parts, which range from enterprise and solution architectures to operations and sourcing teams.
“In addition to measuring energy, resources and greenhouse gas emissions from the combined parts, companies must also consider other point optimisations, such as productivity and cost,” Mingray added.
