Requirements For a Green ICT

Follow the new trend: Turn to Green! Turning green is for major companies today a must. And they are setting impressive targets, and make investments to reach goals. A good moment to see in what way ICT can help. Gartner Research reports that they estimate ICT to be responsible for 1% of the global annual carbon dioxide emissions. AT Kearney has an active consultancy service to help customers getting greener. From their report I cite some points:

• Make sure that you create 'green' requirements.
• Check the current situation against these requirements.
• Take action.

As common examples they mention to place ICT operation centers in smart locations: No hot environmental conditions and cheap ground where energy is freely available. Also, buy green apparatus and switch off unused computers, printers etc. This advice is all true. But I think we can say little more than this. We should note that there are 3 major areas to look into, if we want ICT to turn green. These are:

• Make the ICT department greener.
• Make the usage of current ICT greener.
• Use ICT to make the process operations of the company greener.

The above advice is specially dealing the first 2 areas. I would advocate that there are more, and better, the places to look for low hanging fruit: The quick wins. When you are a little more ambitious you should look into area 3. And fortunately such program would be beneficial. To bring forward some good examples:

• Decrease the number of interactions in the process operation. Use smart solutions like mash-up software to implement that.
• Transfer paper documents into a paperless work-flow information. Paper documents are often printed or copied, and have to be stored somewhere. But make sure an intelligent transformation is performed, not a 1:1 bijection.

I am sure that you have more suggestions. Let us discuss. Contact Hans Lodder at Requirements-Management.nl.