Daniel Esty, director of the Center of Business and Environment at Yale University, points to a multitude of examples in which employing IT that attends to the planet helps companies cut costs or raise revenue. “One of the key tools that companies have used to develop an eco-advantage is good data collection,” says Esty, coauthor, with Andrew Winston, of Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value and Build Competitive Advantage. “Having a strong set of metrics and indicators allows companies to manage inputs better, reduce waste and achieve higher productivity,” Esty maintains.

The Cost-Benefit Analysis
Charity begins at home, and the CIO’s responsibilities start with the IT department. According to Gartner, the pervasiveness of computing equipment in most companies makes the IT department a major source of negative environmental impact.

Mitigating that impact will have its cost. All your hardware contains toxic materials that in many places must be recycled. The European Union recently toughened regulations for disposing of old computers; other nations and many U.S. states also have rules for recycling electronics. Meanwhile, new equipment, designed to be energy efficient and comply with regulations for use of toxic substances, may become more expensive if vendors decide to charge a premium for green products.

But the good news is that every company with a data center has a vein of green waiting to be mined. “Any organization that wants to improve its environmental footprint is going to look at power consumption,” notes Mingay. “If the company is a professional services, banking or insurance kind of business, IT will probably be the biggest consumer of power by a long way.”

Fixing the Data Center
As Senior Editor Stephanie Overby writes in “Clean, Green Machines,” data centers consume between 1.5 percent and 3 percent of all the power generated annually in the United States—at the high end, that’s equivalent to the electricity needed to power the state of Michigan for one year. But most IT departments don’t have a good grasp of their electricity bills because they don’t control the facilities their data centers occupy. One company, VistaPrint, where the IT department does manage its data center facilities, discovered that its electric bill was projected to skyrocket if the company, which sells custom printed products online, grew as predicted.

When Cable & Wireless, which hosts one of VistaPrint’s data centers, threatened to charge the company extra to cover the cooling costs for its blade servers, then-CIO Wendy Cebula (now the company’s COO) asked her IT operations director to improve energy efficiency. The project eventually led to the construction of a second, more energy-conscious data center in Canada, where hydropower provides a renewable, lower-emissions source of electricity. The company now projects savings of 70 percent on its electricity bills. It will also save $450,000 annually by replacing its blade servers with virtual machines that use more server capacity and consume less power. Within a year, VistaPrint will be reducing the emissions from its data centers to a degree equivalent to taking more than 100 cars off the road for a year.