Sustainable IT: The Many Shades of Green

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As a concept applied to IT, "green" is one of those terms in danger of becoming whatever the marketing departments at hardware and software makers want it to be.

A reasonable person would assume green means "Earth-friendly," implying ecological responsibility. From the IT manufacturer's perspective, going green also provides an inducement for companies to buy new hardware, although that doesn't seem like a very Earth-friendly outcome at all.

Sustainability, on the other hand, is something we can measure and manage. We are sustainable when our use of resources does not permanently deplete or damage our supply, including natural resources, energy, and capital. Though perhaps we shouldn't blame the OEMs for using the Green movement to fertilize their bottom lines, corporate technology users who adopt sustainability as their goal will improve not only their environmental impact -- achieving truly green results -- but their profitability as well.

Correlating Sustainability and Cost of Ownership

Of course, electronics can never be absolutely sustainable. Steel, aluminum, copper, petroleum, and a host of other materials that go into manufacturing IT hardware are not renewable resources. Organizations can become significantly more sustainable, though, according to the choices they make around planning, buying, managing, and retiring their IT assets.

Greater sustainability almost always correlates with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) -- a useful validation for the sustainability of specific activities -- and the high-tech version of the old-fashioned notion of frugality. So behaviors that reduce TCO will likely improve sustainability and vice versa.

It is important to secure senior management support for the effort over the long run, as the payoff horizon for sustainability projects is usually at least as long, or longer, as the typical asset lifecycle. Then the first step is to define explicit policies and set quantitative goals.

Planning for Sustainability

Progress toward sustainability begins at the planning table. Lifecycles should be defined for all major categories of equipment -- the longer the better.

The power and reliability of modern technology allow extension of its productive life much further than in the past. Companies that opt to lengthen lifecycles will significantly reduce both total cost of ownership and environmental impact.

Longer lifecycles make it necessary that organizations plan for reuse, including refurbishment and redeployment, of some assets during their life. A conservative rule of thumb is that any asset idled during the first two-thirds of its planned life should be reused; assets becoming idle during the last third of the lifecycle should be immediately retired. Proactive lifecycle planning ensures that the retirement process is designed to minimize costs and risks, while providing for maximum accountability.

Managing for Sustainability

Asset management is perhaps the capability most critical to sustainability efforts. Waste happens when organizations lose track of assets, allowing some to go idle while buying others unnecessarily.

When assets are difficult to locate, delays increase the cost of retirement, and the lack of inventory control increases the opportunity for a costly privacy breach. And without rigorous asset management, it is impossible to generate solid cost-of-ownership and other metrics that enable sustainability efforts to be managed, and their success measured. Asset management should be considered the foundation of sustainable IT.

When considering new purchases, it is important to buy no new hardware before its time. The OEMs have become adept at arguing for the wholesale replacement of legacy systems using a rationale built around the comparative energy savings enjoyed by new hardware. These arguments rarely take total financial and environmental costs into account, however.

Manufacturing a new PC and monitor requires more than five hundred pounds of fossil fuels and 3,300 pounds of water. Lengthening the lifecycle of an existing system from three to five years will save $700 in monthly amortization expense per $1,000 of original procurement expenditure.

There are few scenarios, if any, where the energy efficiency of new systems will outweigh either the financial or environmental benefits of longer lifecycles. When the time is finally right to purchase new equipment, the most efficient models may be identified on the website for the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT).

The larger the organization, the more likely that at any given time a material number of assets will be idled through employee turnover, project churn, acquisitions and divestitures. A best practice is to maintain a list of models which are qualified to be reused, and to identify a "model stock" quantity to maintain available in a redeployment inventory that is visible and available to the organization.

When a qualified model is idled, it should be recovered for refurbishing as quickly as possible. Refurbishing should include thorough testing, data sanitization, re-imaging, cosmetic restoration, and repackaging. The greatest challenge to an effective redeployment program is not a technical one, but the attitude of end users who are often reluctant to accept a used piece of equipment; therefore, refurbishment standards must be managed to provide virtually a new out-of-the-box experience.

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