'I am constantly looking out for trends, tendencies, and technology best practices. In the past year, one trend has grown clearer every day: I call it the "greenlight effect".
This is the simple proposition that technology purchases that might not otherwise be approved in today's uncertain economic climate are "greenlighted" because the benefits of energy savings and the motivation to reduce carbon emissions overrule the economic woes.
Increasingly, organisations are becoming more sensitised about the energy efficiency of IT equipment. Energy consumption, electricity cost, and CO2 emission are the attributes that are greenlighting today's computing initiatives.
The greenlight effect is growing more pronounced and is the difference between technology initiatives that move forward and those that do not.
There are two main forces at work: the need to trim business costs combined with energy and climate concerns.
Business Cost-Cutting
The first departments to face the heat are almost always those that are not revenue-producing. Business IT, marketing, operations departments all have budgets at risk. IT departments, in particular, are being asked not only to justify new technology expenditures, but also the maintenance costs for their existing infrastructure.
They are accountable not only for how much it costs to purchase a single PC, but also how much it takes to maintain that PC. Think how many patches Microsoft publishes in a year and you get a sense of the maintenance challenges.
Energy and Climate Concerns
As energy costs continue to rise, businesses will turn down the lights, use more discretion with heating and cooling of offices, and they will look to IT departments to find ways to reduce energy consumption.
It is estimated that 15 percent of an organisation's energy costs and carbon footprint results from IT use, of which 39 percent is attributed to the use of PCs.
Governments are also leaning on businesses to reduce the impact of their carbon emissions.
The governor of the state of Louisiana, for example, has implemented a "Green Government" mandate that is designed to make state government more environmentally friendly.
When its Department of Revenue needed to upgrade its technology infrastructure, a 75 percent reduction in energy costs associated with virtual desktops was the primary driver in their deployment of virtual desktops.
Streamlined support costs and extending the lifecycle of desktop devices from today's range of four years to seven or eight years was important, but the economic decision was driven by energy savings.
At the 2008 May Day Business Summit on Climate Change, Prince Charles praised the recruitment company Reed for an 80 percent reduction of power use by replacing its PCs with thin clients.
Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, Scotland is combining energy efficiency and information technology in ways never before imagined.
The building design stipulated that the desktop computing platform should be limited to approximately 45 watts of power per device so that the working environment can be handled by natural ventilation.
In fact, school districts and universities - institutions that are routinely underfunded - are finding new technological implementations greenlighted because of the greenlight effect.
A representative of Kansas City-based Rockhurst University noted: "I get to work with computers that cost less, have little to no maintenance, have centrally administered policies, and save the school money on energy."
PCs are emerging as the main culprit, both on cost and energy consumption.
While the data centre has received the bulk of attention on the green IT initiatives, The Climate Group estimates that in 2007, PCs and related peripherals consumed close to three times the amount of energy and related CO2 emissions as the data centre.
Another organisation, Climate Savers, states: "The average desktop PC wastes half of the energy it consumes. This wasted electricity needlessly increases your electric bills and contributes to global warming."
The "salary" of a PC is significantly higher than its capital cost, and far higher than that associated with a virtual desktop device. What if the countless administration costs associated with PCs went away, and some of the savings helped a business keep its valuable employees?
The expense of PCs, combined with the hidden, environmental, costs is becoming more apparent today: from production, through use, and finally in disposal at end-of-life.
An average desktop computer with monitor requires about 10 times its weight in chemicals and fossil fuels to produce.
During use, a computer's electricity consumption and, to a lesser degree, heat output, are the most critical impacts on the environment.
Finally, when a computer is at the end of its useful life, hazardous substances and materials contained in it such as heavy metals and brominated compounds place a burden on the environment.
We have seen energy costs, once a general company overhead cost, moving to the IT budget. Departments need new categories of information and new tools to measure computing energy consumption.
As IT departments look closely at their energy usage, some very troubling trends reveal themselves - not least of which is the fact that costs and demand are both increasing.
Today, we have an environment where CIOs are only approving expenditures that save money and save energy.
This is the opportunity I refer to as the greenlight effect, enabling organisations simultaneously to reduce costs and improve the technology infrastructure.
The greenlight effect is one reason why I am so excited as we begin 2009.
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