IBM consultant publishes step-by-step guide for greening your IT

Here's one for your summer beach reading list: "The Greening of IT," a new tome about "How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment," written by John Lamb, a senior technical staffer with IBM's Global Business Services division in Somers, N.Y. (If you visit this link, you'll get a quick synopsis of the Table of Contents.)

The $40 book, which is published by Pearson Education’s imprint of IBM Press, offers up step-by-step insights as to how your organization might be able to act on its green IT goals. It explores some of the very real governmental motivations that are prompting executives and includes some very useful stats (such as average utility prices per stat or lists of relevant power vs. performance benchmarks) that might help you run some of the return on investment calculations that will help you understand what actions you can take, and when they might be appropriate. It also offers up tips about how to handle org chart issues (who's in charge of this stuff anyway) and provides a half-dozen or so case studies, so that you can read about how "real" organizations managed their own projects and perhaps model some of your own ideas off theirs.

Much of what you'll find in this book isn't necessarily new, but it gathers up into one place a ton of useful reference material for anyone who's got this on their job description. If you decide to invest in a copy, the first thing you might want to do is flip to the back where there's a Green IT Checklist and Recommendations for structuring and writing up your own plan.