Departments pass green buck

New research suggests that the vast majority of IT departments in the UK are still only paying lip service to environmental issues

Organisations are under increasing pressure to adopt greener technologies and working practices and many experts believe IT departments are ideally placed to help firms reduce their carbon emissions ­ but to what extent have they taken up the challenge?

A recent survey by reseller Bell Micro, which polled IT departments from a cross section of 350 UK organisations, paints a rather disappointing picture of enterprise green IT policy and technology adoption.

“The figures are dramatically low. The green message just does not seem to be getting through,” said Antony Young, director of Bell Micro’s services, security and networking divisions.

The survey’s findings seem to fly in the face of accepted opinion, which holds that energy efficiency, for example, is an increasingly important consideration for IT buyers. Numerous stories in IT Week and on its sister web site, BusinessGreen.com, have added weight to the assertion that green initiatives are high up the corporate agenda. But this increasing awareness of green issues has yet to be translated into much action.

Andy Lawrence, research director for eco-efficient IT at analyst firm the 451 Group, agreed with many of the Bell Micro findings. “The take up of new [green] services is very low,” he said, adding that where firms had made green moves, their main motivation often had little to do with the environment. “With technologies such as server consolidation or virtualisation, a lot of organisations claim credit for having initiated a green strategy, but they have not done it for those reasons. These technologies make their business easier to run,” he explained.

The survey, which was carried out on behalf of Bell Micro by Dynamic Markets, found that only 21 per cent of the firms polled had adopted a formal, written policy aimed at promoting green practices and technology. More damning than this, however, is the fact that only eight per cent of those respondents ­ or six of the 350 firms surveyed ­ had fully implemented a green IT policy. Meanwhile, 15 per cent of respondents admitted they had not begun any green initiatives at all.

As a reseller, Bell Micro said it is in a good position to know what green systems and solutions are on the market, and to what extent they are being adopted by user organisations. So far the signs are not encouraging for those who believe IT has a key role to play in fighting climate change, according to Young.

“We have seen a lack of demand for green services,” he said. “Most firms know they have to do something, and that it might involve power consumption and server consolidation, but they don’t know where to start, and what help or solutions are out there for them.”

Young laid the blame for much of this ignorance at the feet of the IT industry. “The IT sector does not know how to present itself, or its solutions,” he said, adding that a general lack of advice and guidance on green systems and solutions meant few firms were buying into the technology.

Indeed, the survey found that many organisations have not even started down that road.

“We found, both in our survey and anecdotally, that the majority of companies just have not formulated a green IT policy. Seventy-nine per cent have no formal policy, and of those that do, only a very small sample are actually following it,” Young explained.

One cause for this could be the way that most firms are set up on an administrative level, Young explained, with electricity costs, for example, falling under the responsibility of the facilities department, while the kit that uses the electricity is managed by the IT team. “So you have two budgets, one for IT and one for facilities. If you are doing something green you have to know whose responsibility it will be. When it comes to adding something new to a building, or altering the way a datacentre is cooled, often there can be disagreements between teams,” he said.

Another reason is confusion over the relative merits of the green solutions on the market, argued Young. “Firms know they need to do something, and vendors have solutions in place to offer them, but buyers just don’t know what they are, and the sales people don’t know how to sell them,” he said. “The IT industry has to make its green message clear and concise.”

Young said vendors were not doing enough to emphasise the energy efficiency and corporate social responsibility aspects of green IT, and instead tended to use alarmist scenarios and the threat of new legislation to push their solutions.

That said, tougher regulations are in the pipeline, with proposed new laws to curb the use of plastic bags being one recent example. The EU is also looking at introducing legislation to cap the amount of carbon emissions that firms produce.

Pressure for a clearer legislative framework to govern emissions is also building. In November last year, a coalition of leading UK businesses, environmental charities and MPs wrote to the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, and business and enterprise secretary, John Hutton, calling for standardised rules for corporates on carbon emissions.

“There is currently little legislation across the globe, but the UK looks likely to adopt the Climate Change Bill, which has a legal obligation to deliver reductions in carbon emissions,” Lawrence said. This would mean that datacentres would be mandated to at least measure their power consumption.”

Such a legislative framework would appear to be long overdue, with Bell Micro’s survey suggesting that organisations are still taking a haphazard approach to green issues, with initiatives differing widely in scale and ambition. Young said: “Most firms are just doing the small, obvious things, such as changing light bulbs and switching computers off at night, while a small hardcore, three per cent, have gone so far as to add solar panels to the roof of their datacentre.”

The survey found that 87 percent of green IT policies mandate the recycling of cans and paper, while the recycling of IT hardware and consumables is mentioned in 79 percent. Just 25 percent of policies call for the increased use of hardware, while the same proportion recommends the use of energy-saving hardware and software.

Virtualisation, whose green credentials have been heavily hyped of late, features in only 13 per cent of the policies.

Young advised firms to adopt a single over-arching green policy that all departments must adhere to. “Green considerations need to be built into your entire structure,” he said.