IT chiefs urged to lead green transformation

IT dominated the agenda at the annual Kyocera Green Card conference on environmentally sustainable business, with speakers urging IT chiefs to go beyond energy-saving initiatives by leading the development of green business models and pioneering sustainable procurement practices.

Speaking at the event earlier today, which runs as part of the Government Computing Expo, Victoria Barber, IT asset manager at energy giant Centrica, said that the company's IT department had realised that while cost savings related to enhanced energy efficiency were important, there were other potentially more interesting ways in which IT could "help the business become green".

"We are focused on ensuring datacentres are well managed to use less energy and we focus on ensuring [electronic] waste is handled in an environmentally responsible manner, but there is a lot more we can do," she said.

Peter Long, improvement specialist at Centrica, said that the IT department had played a leading role in a number of green initiatives, including delivering paperless billing systems, providing engineers with laptops and mobile software that allow them to reduce travel and paperwork, introducing home working technologies for office staff, and rolling out online training systems that stop staff travelling to training courses.

Experts agreed IT chiefs should play a more central role in the green business initiatives being adopted by growing numbers of firms. However, Nick Harwood of Sustainable Energy Developments warned that firms had to undertake thorough environmental assessments before rolling out new "green" processes. " If you take paperless billing as an example, you need to look at the whole energy lifecycle and ask if it is delivering real savings compared with older paper processes," he said.

Separately, Stuart Williams, procurement lead for environmental charity Forum for the Future, which provides best practice advice to the public and private sectors, said that overhauling procurement practices to focus on the lifecycle cost of IT equipment should play a central role in any sustainable procurement policy. "IT represents a quick win as it has sizable environmental impacts, but there is a clear cost case for buying kit that uses less energy over its lifetime," he said.

However, Gary Meades, environmental affairs manager at British Airways, warned that many firms still find it difficult to justify investment in more energy-efficient IT systems. "Firms need to look at their financial systems as there is rarely an incentive for [the IT chief] to think about life-time costs, " he said. "If you don’t have electricity costs and waste disposal costs in your budget then where is the incentive to buy energy-efficient and long-lifed kit?"