IT admins should also think green

“Plug data leaks” and “Embrace Web 2.0” are among the pieces of practical wisdom shared this week by InfoWorld’s Dan Tynan in an article titled “Seven things IT should be doing (but isn’t).” It’s a sound list, to be sure, but I believe there’s an important omission. For the sake of your company’s bottom line, its legislative peace of mind, its CSR (corporate social responsibility) standing, end-user morale, and yes, the planet as well, No. 8 on the list should be “Think green.”

Now when I urge you as an IT admin to “think green,” I certainly don’t mean donning your Birkenstocks and hemp sweater for work each day (though if you want, by all means go for it. Just peruse your company dress code policy first). Rather “Think green” means factoring sustainability implications into the IT decisions you make each day. That is, ask yourself how your next IT maneuver might not only achieve your other job objectives and save money — but also cut waste, lower energy consumption, and generally reduce the negative impact your company has on the environment in the form of carbon emissions and e-waste.

Why bother, you might ask? If no one is telling you directly to run a greener IT shop, what’s in it for you? Well, for starters, as I noted above, green projects can often result in cost savings, and finding ways to reduce spending it a great way to make yourself stand out among your peers. Additionally, identifying opportunities to reduce your company’s environmental impact is a good way to get a jump on the task. It’s a safe bet that your company will eventually jump aboard the green bandwagon, driven by pressure from investors, partners, and/or government legislation to reduce CO2 emissions and e-waste and be a more eco-friendly organization.

[ To learn more about who is pressuring companies to be greener, please read “Green demands trickle down the supply chain” and “Under pressure: 10 sources pushing CIOs to be greener.” ]

To better illustrate how you might go about applying the “think green” mantra to your IT admin duties, let’s contemplate some scenarios. Consider, for example, the task of refreshing your end-user’s computers. Rather than simply purchasing the (seemingly) least expensive PCs and monitors that meet your needs, what if you were to pause a moment and contemplate the green ramifications of the purchase. For example, you might consider that laptops require less power than PCs and monitors — and that Energy Star-compliant laptops are among the crème de la crème of power efficiency. That alone would mean lower energy bills for the company, not to mention a reduction in carbon emissions.

But what if you took a step further and, say, determined you would only purchase machines that meet or exceed the basic criteria of the Green Electronic Council’s EPEAT rating system, meaning they complied with Energy Star as well as ROHS requirements — and were perhaps also built for longer life and easier upgrades. The payoffs would include not only the aforementioned reduction in power costs and CO2 emissions, but also money saved from a prolonged hardware-refresh cycle and CSR points for superior environmental stewardship.

You could even take your green thinking a step further as you refresh users’ desktops and contemplate thin clients as an alternative, wherever they might fit in. They have the potential to reduce power consumption even further than laptops.

[ For more on purchasing green IT desktop hardware, please read “Are green IT premiums worth the cost?” For more on the green benefits of thin clients, please read “Thinking green? Think thin.” ]

Now suppose after refreshing your users’ desktop systems, you realize it’s time to deploy tools for easier backup and system patching. Sounds like a potentially sound investment for the sake of security and business continuity. But what if you also pause to, yep, think green again. You might follow the example of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools: In addition to purchasing licenses for BigFix asset and patch-management software, the district paid a bit extra ($2 per license) for the BigFix PC power management component, which is designed to put machines into low-power idle states when they’re not being used, thus cutting energy waste. The impact is potentially huge. The district, for example, expects to save at least $2 million per year for its 80,000 machines ($25 per unit) thanks to PC power management.

Once again, by thinking green in this scenario, you’d manage to save your company some serious money — and in this case, by doing very little extra if you were already looking to add asset and patch management to begin with.

[ Learn more about PC power management by reading “If PCs don’t snooze, you lose.” ]

The implications of “thinking green” don’t end on the desktop. Let’s take a stroll down the hall to the printer room. Check out the output tray, or perhaps the nearby recycling bin, and it’s likely you’ll see at least a few single-sided print-outs, possibly in color, that have been abandoned or chucked. To put a dollar amount to print waste, I’ve seen research saying the average user wastes $85 per year in unnecessary prints.

Here, again, lies an opportunity to think green in the name of cutting costly waste (and if you’ve shopped for printer ink lately, you know full well that print waste is costly). You can start by making the most prudent investments you can in green hardware, such as going for an MFP instead of a separate copier, printer, fax machines, and scanner. Looking for such machines that also meet Energy Star standards also makes abundant sense.

But beyond the purchasing choices, you can take further steps in applying a “think green” philosophy to managing your fleet of printers. For starters, set your printers to print double-sided and in black-and-white by default. That alone can result in significant savings, potentially cutting paper expenses in half — not to mention reducing postage costs as users will be mailing fewer sheets of paper.

You could even go a step further and invest in some print management software, either a free version such as GreenPrint or something more heavy-duty along the lines of Equitrac’s offerings, which include functionality such as a Follow You feature, requiring a user to key in a code at a printer before it will deliver a print-out. The idea there is to ensure printings don’t end up abandoned.

[ For more strategies to cut print-related waste, please read “Follow the paperless trail.” ]

One more way to apply green-think to your IT duties is to employ tools to measure your company’s IT emissions. You might start with a datacenter virtualization or consolidation project where you can expect a drastic reduction in both energy consumption and carbon output. That sort of project is, in and of itself, a potential boon for green gains — but gathering the carbon data can further boost its dividends. By measuring the change in CO2, you can have some data on hand — not to mention a carbon-measuring strategy — when the CXO suddenly realizes customers, investors, or the public want to know what your organization is doing to reduce its carbon footprint.

The above suggestions by no means constitute an exhaustive list of all the potential green undertakings for IT admins. But hopefully it sheds some light on at least some of the potential opportunities and benefits of applying a green-hued mindset to your IT tasks. There’s little doubt in my mind that IT has the power to make your organization — and the world — a greener place. Thus as an IT admin, the keys to drive that change are in your hands.

Ted Samson is a senior analyst at InfoWorld, where he writes his Sustainable IT blog. Subscribe to his free weekly Green Tech newsletter here.