Live chat recap: Swaying CXOs to the green side

One participant (IT Exec-Connect member rakesh17) wanted to know how to get CXOs to take sustainable IT seriously, and that’s an excellent question indeed. I’m sure many a CTO or IT manager has spent many a frustrating hour trying to explain the business benefits of, say, investing in new servers or virtualization or, really, any technology project that obviously has value — at least to the tech-savvy advocate. So advocates of sustainable endeavors, be they technological or otherwise, are very likely suffering similar aggravation trying to make their case.

I think Roger hit the nail on the head with his reply: “CIOs, CFOs, and CEOs obviously care most about their bottom line. By providing a means for the CIO to assess the energy efficiency (measured as work output divided by the energy cost), we can give the CIO a means to show where to invest in the data center to improve real energy efficiency.”

In other words, in the business world, money talks. You can talk about eco-friendliness and general energy efficiency until you’re blue (or green) in the face. But if you want to really capture your CXO’s attention and get him or her to pry open those purse-strings, you need some compelling bottom-line proof that there’s money to be saved.

The Green Grid is working on helping you deliver the data you need to make your case, Roger said: “[The group] will provide a means for all of the various green data center technologies to prove how beneficial they are to the data center manager’s total cost of ownership (TCO).”

In coming days and weeks, I’m going to provide research as well as case studies about money-saving sustainable IT implementations that I hope will help strengthen your arguments to the CBC (chief bean counter), whomever it may be.

Roger’s comment about TCO elicited a nice point from rakesh17: “Instead of looking at it from a cost of ownership perspective, it could be beneficial to employ total economic impact analysis: the financial and soft benefits/risks,” (soft benefits referring to how being “greener” effects the image of the company).

Colette concurred, noting that right now, a lot of CXOs still aren’t attuned to those soft benefits. “Saving money is paramount for CXOs, but there is also the very noble aspect of helping to save the planet — and often times that’s ignore or felt to be too ‘soft’ to talk about,” she said. “We hope to help change the image of ‘green’ being too ‘soft.’ It should just be a given for all companies.”

We covered some other interesting topics as well, including what role the government should play in pushing sustainable IT. “We see government’s role as providing basic research to help move the state-of-the-art forward. The data center and IT industry is perfectly capable of creating products that meet the needs of customers’ energy efficiency goals,” Roger said.

“Spot on,” Colette agreed. “We want to keep the power of choice in the customers’ hands.”

Colette and Roger acknowledged that The Green Grid does want to work with the E.U. and U.S. governments, as well as other governmental research entities, to help solve the overall energy problem.

Virginia Hines, InfoWorld.com’s VP and general manager, saw the wisdom in The Green Grid’s remaining politically neutral: “It’s probably smart not to politicize the GG initiative.”

“You raise a really important point,” Colette replied. “We are not lobbyist, we are not politicos. We are a non-profit industry consortium. So we are being very sensitive to how we work with government bodies on this issue of improving power efficiency.”

If you’re interested in what other subjects we touched on, check out the transcript of the chat right here.

And if you’d like to see more live chats on sustainable IT down the road, please comment below, or shoot me an e-mail at ted_samson@infoworld.com. Whom would you like to hear from, and what topics are important to you?

For more information about The Green Grid, head over to thegreengrid.org.

Oh, and if anyone has Al Gore’s phone number, The Green Grid would like it.