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Energy-Efficient IT Leadership

How CIOs can become champions of environmental sustainability. And the business case for why they should.

By Elana Varon

June 06, 2007 — CIO — Nothing big happens without a leader to champion it. Whether motivated by the bottom line or concern about the planet (hopefully both), CIOs and IT managers play a critical leadership role in putting their companies on an energy diet.

We wanted to know how IT leaders can go about leading the charge to reduce corporate energy use. So we asked six experts to assess the impact IT can have on energy consumption and weigh in on best tools and techniques for capturing the value of greener computing. Our panel of technology leaders, researchers and vendors includes:

• Marv Adams, CIO, Citigroup
• John Davies, VP, Green Technology Research, AMR Research
• David Douglas, VP, Eco-Responsibility, Sun Microsystems
• David Kepler, CIO, Dow Chemical
• Kevin Klustner, CEO, Verdiem
• Jonathan Koomey, Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Consulting Professor, Stanford University

The group met over e-mail during a week in May. A transcript of the conversation follows, along with links to more information you can use to build your own case for a greener, more energy-efficient company.

CIO: We recently published a story in which we said an energy-efficient data center should be a no-brainer for CIOs because it saves a lot of money. In the same issue, David Kepler noted that IT plays a big role in managing energy usage for Dow’s manufacturing plants—billions of dollars in savings there. And yet, my impression is that the vast majority of CIOs have not contemplated these opportunities with much seriousness until very recently. Why?

Jonathan Koomey: In my view it’s an issue of organizational structure and incentives. Most IT shops don’t coordinate well with their own facilities folks, and their budgets are separate. Even if they were inclined to cooperate, they don’t see benefit to their department by doing so.

Someone needs to be focused on minimizing total cost of ownership. I think that needs to be the CFO. In addition, it’s important to create what The Uptime Institute calls Integrated Critical Environment (ICE) teams or the equivalent, so that no big decisions about data center operations or construction are made without all the relevant folks in the room at the same time.

Kevin Klustner: We see the same issue on the desktop side. Reducing electricity waste on PCs is low hanging fruit when it comes to implementing organizationwide energy-efficiency goals. However, since IT doesn’t own the plug-load, they haven’t been overly concerned about waste.

Marv Adams: One reason that CIOs are starting to pay a lot more attention to this is that board members and senior executives are focusing more on sustainability issues. Also, we are seeing IT transform rapidly into full solution providers. Our role increasingly is to orchestrate or design solutions from a large array of component technologies.

 

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