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)

IT@Intel is producing a series of four videos to highlight various Intel IT sustainability projects and the Intel IT experts that work on them.  The videos will be published on Intel’s IT@Intel site as well as on the IT@Intel Playlist within Intel’s YouTube channel.  I was privileged to be featured in the first video, which covers some of my personal expertise in home control and energy management as well as how I’m now using that experience conducting proof of concepts in the office environment for Intel IT. Here’s a link to the first video and stay tuned for future videos in the series.

Here’s the first video in the series.

You can also check the IT@Intel Playlist on Intel’s YouTube Channel for this video series as well as other IT@Intel videos.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions about the first video.

-Mike Breton

Among the projects I am working on recently, one of them is deploying video conference solutions in Intel. Video conference has been gaining a lot of attention recently here. When I was talking to the CIO of a large organization in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, video conference was also a topics that came up in the conversation.

From what I have heard and seen, there seems to be a increase interest in this subject. There are three factors I believe are driving this. One is the impact of the current economy, which drives down travel budget. Video conference is a lower cost alternative to meet people when one cannot be physically there. The second factor is the increased focus in sustainability. By replacing travel will video conference, one can reduce the carbon footprint of the organization. The third factor is probably the advance of video conference technology. The systems have been getting better in terms of performance and cost. Many of them have gotten much more user friendly and Support more usage models. Some of them also work reasonably well on a laptop PC.

In Intel IT, we have a program that is trying to make video conference capabilities pervasive to our employees. We have deployed some high end solutions in a number of large sites during last year. We are going to deploy some middle tier and lower tier solutions during the rest of this year. We see these video solutions will bring benefits in areas of travel reduction, sustainability, employee productivity, enablement of new business models, and enhancing collaboration.

A simple survey for the pilot users of a table top solution confirmed that the video conference capability had increased team collaboration comparing to audio only meetings and increased engagement from remote participants. The survey also revealed that some tips and tricks needed to be advertised to use the solution effectively, although the system might appear intuitive to use.

How are you using video conference solutions in your organization? Do you have any experience and best know methods to share?

Back in April I told you about a small proof of concept we were planning to measure energy use in the office environment and then use that established baseline to test different energy saving methods.  I thought it would be good to give you a quick status update on the work done to date.

The PoC is currently underway, and in fact, is nearing completion.  Like I mentioned in April, it is pretty small with just 12 users, but we hope the results will help direct what we might later try on a larger scale.

We started the PoC on Friday May 15^th with meter loggers installed on 6 circuits monitoring energy use for the 12 users in the PoC every 3 minutes.  We ran the metering for 2 weeks before telling the PoC users to establish an uninfluenced baseline.

After setting the baseline, we split the 12 users in to 3 groups, each focusing on a different energy savings technique.

One group receives information on their energy use every 2 days showing how much energy they are using, what it is costing, and a few simple tips on how they might reduce their energy use.  Nothing is forced.  In this group, we are looking at how “Awareness” alone might change behavior.

The second group installed a 3^rd party agent on their systems which allows us to enforce more restrictive energy management profiles than they might normally use.  The software also allows us to record time in state on each system, thereby providing a degree of “soft” individual system metering.

The last group had USB triggered power strips installed in their offices, connected to their docking stations, which automatically power off all devices in their offices that do not need to be on when they are not there.  We connected devices such as; task lighting, displays, and chargers to these strips.

We are in the last week of data collecting now, so stay tuned for some high-level results to be posted soon and possibility a full paper published later.

Please let me know if you have any questions or if you are doing or have done anything similar in your enterprise.

-Mike

One of the areas I’m focusing on for Intel IT is Sustainability.  My specific area of focus is energy use in office spaces, including but not limited, to client systems.  As I got started, one of the first issues I discovered was a general lack of baseline data on how much energy is used in the office space today.  If you want to implement changes to save energy, you have to really understand where you are starting from.

So, before I can really try some proof of concept activities to reduce energy use in the office, I’ll first need to establish a solid baseline.  I hope to soon start a small proof of concept to physically meter energy use in the office space.  One the baseline is established, several additional phases will take place to see how energy use can be reduced via; awareness, software, and electrical controls in the office.

I’ll be back with more info as we get started but, in the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.  Have you already looked at energy saving in the office environment?  Is it something you are considering looking at in the near future?  What are your thoughts, concerns, focus areas?

-Mike