This is the last of my posts from notes I took during the Uptime Symposium last month. I've been stewing on this one the longest because the thoughts aren't from a high-tech vendor pushing green tech or from a person like me who just "believes," they are from a person who is in charge on a massive technology organization at a massive services company, Deloitte.
Larry Quinlan, who is the CIO for Deloitte, predicts that no one will be talking about green IT five years from now, it will simply be an accepted course of action for every successful IT organization. "The concepts of green IT are exactly the right concepts when it comes to cost cutting," he told symposium attendees. "Everything we do simply leads to a more efficient operation."
To get there, though, is another matter.
You won't find Quinlan passing the buck when it comes to taking responsibility for green IT policy, but you WILL find him delegating the most important tasks. In Quinlan's mind, right now, green IT IS absolutely an issue with which every CIO should be intimately familiar. At the same time, he doesn't buy current methods of calculating carbon footprints for IT infrastructure. Shocker: Deloitte hasn't actually measured its impact on the environment (at least not that it's willing to share publicly).
But that hasn't stopped it from taking action: No paralysis of analysis here.
Deloitte has 20 projects going on right now to address the energy-efficiency and environmental footprint of its IT infrastructure, spanning the data center to other practical equipment, such as printers and copiers.
Here are a couple of highlights. Deloitte has: