Green has been a buzzword for a couple of years and the
IT industry has had a chance toevolve its green credentials. So how
are IT companies doing, and how easy is it to develop a scorecard
to evaluate their environmental efforts?
According to Simon Mingay, research vice-president at
Gartner, measuring progress
is not an easy job. In November, the analyst firm presented an
assessment of 24 IT companies to give CIOs and IT directors a
better understanding of their green credentials. It rated them in
five different areas.
Gartner's five segments were broken down into internal and
external environmental approaches. The internal segments tackled
environmental basics (how well a firm understands the essential
environmental impact of its business operations), supply chain
basics (managing the environmental effects of its service and
product supply chains), and basic steps to execute a climate change
strategy. The external segments looked at how well companies
deliver products and services to help their customers cut carbon
emissions, and how well they are championing carbon reduction more
generally in the public sphere.
Reducing carbon
emissions
One of the most significant rankings for businesses will be the
delivery of products and services to help
reduce carbon emissions.
So how does the IT industry's rhetoric match what is in the
product portfolio? Fujitsu Siemens achieved the best rating, with
75%. Ericsson, which is well-known for its work on evaluating
carbon emissions during the upstream manufacturing process, came in
at 74%. Google, Hewlett-Packard and BT came in third, fourth and
fifth respectively.
At the other end of the spectrum, Lenovo, Wipro, Nortel and Dell
sat between 20% and 30%.
Fujitsu Siemens, fed up with what it sees as an inadequate
Energy Star benchmark from
the US Environmental Protection Agency, came out with its own green
IT benchmark in November. HP also launched an environmental
information labelling system, called
Eco-Highlights, for its own products earlier in the year.
Supply
chain
Delivering products that help customers reduce greenhouse gas
emissions is one thing, but many people forget the effect that
operations further up the supply chain can have on a company's
carbon footprint.
For companies to truly call their IT green, it is necessary to
talk about the extent to which suppliers
audit their supply chains for environmental standards.
The problem is that supply chains are so complex that the
industry must work hard to achieve visibility beyond the first tier
of outsourced providers, warns Mingay. They must look at the
providers that the first tier companies outsource to in turn, and
so on down the chain.
"IBM scored well on the supply chain. It was going further than
the first tier," he says. HP, too, scored relatively highly,
although Nokia and Ericsson beat them both.
Green
companies
As large companies with a hand in software, hardware and
services, the likes of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun are worth a
look.
IBM showed that it was serious about green IT with its Project
Green initiative, launched in June 2007. The company embarked on a
series of changes to its own IT infrastructure involving
virtualisation of its equipment and the creation of green
datacentres. It also started services and consulting initiatives
designed to help its customers reduce the environmental impact of
their IT.
Christopher Mines, senior vice-president at Forrester Research,
worries that the company is missing a critical piece of the puzzle,
however.
"The challenge for IBM is translating its vision into products.
A lot of it now lives in the services part of the company. It is
among the best, if not the best there is, but it gets [stung] by
customers who think it is always a services engagement," he
says.
Beyond the
rankings
The rankings for companies that participated are significant,
but just as important are the companies that did not respond to the
Gartner/WWF survey. Accenture, Acer, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom,
EDS, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and TCS declined to take part in the
study.
Gartner believes that all of them bar the German telco would
have scored below average as a result of immature, marketing-led
approaches to corporate social responsibility.
But lack of participation does not necessarily mean lack of
action. "Sun was the first company I met that took the supply chain
issue seriously," says David Tebbut, an analyst at technology
advisory firm Freeform Dynamics.
He says he was impressed by the way Sun took time to understand
the effects of its supply chain activities and was trying to
address the issues.
The company has also taken steps to work on energy-efficient
servers, and has been instrumental in driving the forthcoming
server version of EPA's Energy Star standard.
Green
initiatives
Mingay warns that initiatives such as the
Green Grid, which
focuses on datacentre efficiency, and
Climate
Savers, which concentrates on making computing equipment more
environmentally friendly, are great in theory, but membership is
not necessarily a sign of greenness.
Most members sign up and send someone to sit there and listen,
he says. "By no means all, but the majority contribute relatively
little. But they will all cite the membership of these
organsisations as evidence of their green credentials," he
says.
So next time a salesperson comes calling, wave aside the
feel-good green logos they present you with, and ask how the
company is translating its membership of this month's worthy green
consortium into action.
You might ask about their supply chain activities, as Tebbut
does. And you might use Gartner's five-segment model as a framework
for your own request for proposal. The results might surprise
you.
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