The green agenda

The green agenda is now mainstream worldwide, and ICT stands accused of consuming two or even three percent of the world’s energy. We can do a lot to make ICT more efficient, but the real prize is what ICT can do to reduce the other ninety-eight percent of world energy usage.

Reducing internal energy consumption, cutting back on printers and printing, better disposal policies and improved lifecycle planning can all help to reduce energy usage, but the biggest impact comes from ICT-enabled changes in working practices and service delivery. ICT strategies today have to take account of the green dimension. How close are you to achieving the ‘paperless office’? Could electronic document management help you work more efficiently and waste less paper? Are you fully exploiting mobile and flexible working to reduce your organisation’s carbon footprint?

Environmentally aware procurement policies can also make a huge difference. Nowadays suppliers are willing to compete on green criteria – for example, if you can encourage all your suppliers to go green it would achieve so much more than you could achieve alone. And experience is showing that green doesn’t necessarily mean more expensive.

How Socitm Consulting can help

• Embedding green perspective in ICT strategy, based on our Green ICT maturity model
• Developing Green ICT usage policies
• Towards the paperless office – making best use of EDRM
• Virtualisation – reducing energy usage in the server room
• Using thin client, videoconferencing and managed print to reduce cost base and carbon impact
• Environmentally aware procurement and disposal policies
• Reducing carbon footprint via home, mobile and flexible working
• Benchmarking your Green ICT performance against peer authorities