I’ve been hearing about green IT for a while now and personally thought it was a lot more hype than true business value creation.   I was surprised coming over to the IT side to see a good deal of focus being applied to Sustainability.  A couple months ago, I asked a peer of mine working on Intel IT sustainability a simple, yet challenging question.

“Why should an IT manager or CIO bombarded with a 1,000 other things to think/worry about, care about sustainability?  How will it help them advance their careers or bring more IT value to the business.”

The answers I got from her plus a recent listing from Gartner of “IT for Green” as Number 4 on a Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010, helped shape my thinking and the title for this blog.

• Keep the Business Running/Legal.  As an ongoing activity, IT must always look at industry and regulatory trends to proactively plan for an ever-changing compliance landscape.  Many European Union countries and the US Environmental Protection Agency are creating regulations that affect the application of information technology.
• Green IT initiatives can impact ROI and Profitability. In addition to the benefits of electricity savings, the proper application of technology (like proactive server refresh, facility re-use) can affect land use, avoidance of new construction, boost asset utilization … all of which assist in improving corporate sustainability.
• Green IT initiatives can also reduce operational costs. I recently learned about the broad video conferencing capabilities that Intel IT has enabled to help employees collaborate across time zones and countries.  This capability has encouraged less travel for routine purposes avoiding unnecessary travel expense for employees delivering a dramatic multi-million dollar savings impact this current year.

The three reasons listed above are prudent IT operational activities and doing them represent best IT practices that have a solid impact on creating business value. Not doing them could actually have detrimental impacts to an IT career. Intel IT’s recent data center strategy identified that not only is proactive server refresh the biggest driver of financial value but also in the reduction of IT’s CO2 footprint. Another area where our business strategy benefited IT Sustainability was in our transition from a desktop driven PC fleet to a mobile PC fleet that boosted employee productivity while employing more energy efficient solutions.

However, IT sustainability also help serve as an example for corporate responsibility building brand, influence product purchase with an increased focus on energy efficiency and influence the improvement of business processes with a mind toward efficiency and elimination of redundancy and waste. 

Gartner's Top 10 list reinforces these sentiments where they identify that "IT can enable many green initiatives. The use of IT, particularly among the white collar staff, can greatly enhance an enterprise’s green credentials. Common green initiatives include the use of e-documents, reducing travel and teleworking. IT can also provide the analytic tools that others in the enterprise may use to reduce energy consumption in the transportation of goods or other carbon management activities.”

So while IT Sustainability may not be your most important IT or CIO priority, investing with an eye toward this topic is wise and is likely aligned with many other priorities you and your peers are already doing. 

For us inside Intel IT, it is now clearer to me why Intel IT maintains an IT Sustainability Program that supports Intel’s Corporate Sustainability initiative.  

Intel IT’s proof of concept efforts in data center cooling innovation earned us recognition as one of the 2009 Green 15 by Infoworld.com.  Together with Intel’s business leaders, our operational and investment efforts have helped Intel achieve a top 5 ranking as a green company by Newsweek.

Learn more about Intel IT’s lessons learned and best practices here.

Chris (twitter)