Just how mature is your green IT strategy? Forrester provides dashboard for measuring it.
As I've said many times here in this blog, green IT activities can really be looked at from two perspectives: the actions your company or team takes to reduce the environmental impact of your information technology AND the way that IT can actually help your business get a better handle on green business practices.
How good a job are you doing?
Forrester Research has pulled together a comprehensive report providing step-by-step suggestions for assessing your organization's internal green IT standing. For Forrester, there are five key areas that CIOs should examine:
- Energy efficiency and management activities
- Equipment and resource reductions
- Lifecycle and e-waste handling procedures
- The way technology supports other green business initiatives
- Governance and reporting processes
In Forrester's mind, now might be a good time for your team to step back and consider whether or not the things you've been doing already are effective or having the impact you expected. Doing so will help set a baseline for your ongoing activities. It will also help you identify gaps and figure out where you might need new/more resources -- all the things you might reasonably expect to emerge from ANY IT assessment activity.
Forrester has created a dashboard of 26 different green IT subdomains where your team can pull more details; these criteria fall into the following higher-level categories, Process and Governance, Data Center, Distributed IT and Business Operations. (The report I referenced above actually gives you a sample of dashboard in which each of these activities are rated according to the following scale: Needs Improvement, Improving, Robust and Best-in-class.)