Information Security Research Library

As a chief information officer (CIO), you are under pressure from many quarters. Just look around the boardroom table. The CEO wants you to deliver higher shareholder value. The CFO is demanding higher returns on IT investments. The COO is looking to you to create operations that are lower-cost and more effective. And all of them want you to help drive the organization towards high performance.

Now a further pressure has been added to the mix. Amid intensifying scrutiny of your company's environmental impact, your IT function has found itself in the front line of the battle against climate change. As a major-p perhaps the major- high-profile consumer of energy in the organization, IT is being asked to demonstrate its commitment to reducing carbon emissions. And everyone is watching for your response, from the CEO to investors, and from employees to green lobby groups. Put simply, IT needs to go green-and to prove it. As a CIO, if you haven't been asked to do this already, then you soon will be. When that question comes, you want to have the right answers ready.

Greening the data-center...
What should those answers be? To find out, let's start by examining the tone and focus of the current debate around green IT. To date, the agenda has largely been set by IT hardware suppliers, who have not been slow to seize the opportunity presented by this new pressure on the CIO. For them, the debate is around running IT assets and services in a more energy efficient way. And they will be happy to supply new equipment to enable the CIO to do this. This agenda has had two results. One is that the whole discussion around IT's ability to drive energy savings has tended to focus narrowly on data center operations. The other is an upsurge in marketing of IT hardware and systems that consume less energy while delivering the same processing capacity.

...is just the start In our view, this focus is not wrong, just incomplete. It risks missing some major opportunities, because the real environmental agenda for the CIO can be-and certainly should be-far broader. True, the data center is one valid area of focus in IT's efforts to support the company's environmental agenda. But it is just one of many. There are also several other areas where IT can make a real and demonstrable contribution. At its root, the shared challenge facing every member of the board is how to limit, and hopefully reduce, the organization's overall carbon footprint. The question is how much can each executive bring to the party. And as CIO, you can bring a lot more than more energy-efficient servers. Indeed, if you don't, you will be failing to pull your full potential weight.