Accenture primes tech tools for green consulting

Green IT consulting services are poised to become to a $4.8B industry in coming years, a prediction made not too long ago by Forrester Research. As embracing green practices gains higher importance for companies worldwide, consultancies will have to prime their tools and offerings to win over customers.

One such consulting company is Accenture, which today announced its Green Technology Suite, a set of tools designed to help an organization assess their environmental standing and to provide recommendations on how to address their carbon footprint.

In creating the suite, the company has effectively supplemented the workbench of tools it offers to clients, according to Rockwell Bonecutter, green IT lead at Accenture. Those tools have traditionally focused on providing three overarching dimensions: reducing costs, mitigating risks, and increasing service levels. The suite adds a fourth dimension: enhancing environmental sustainability through such means as reducing waste and lowering carbon emissions. “Now, for example, when you bring in someone to help you with a server consolidation project, you’re making your decisions based on four dimensions and not the standard three,” says Bonecutter. “We can tell you what your carbon footprint is; we can also tell you what levels you could pull, and if you pull them, how it would impact your carbon footprint.”

Indeed, concern over CO2 emissions is growing among organizations, feeling pressure from regulators, customers, shareholders, and the public. “I would say for most part, clients are coming and saying we need to look at our carbon footprint [because] some CIO or CFO or IT exec is being asked the question, ‘What’s your carbon footprint?’ and they’re not able to answer that.

Passed and pending green-oriented legislation pertaining to carbon emissions as well as e-waste and other environmental considerations are driving companies toward these types of green IT services, Bonecutter notes. “The more we see legislation … both on a local and federal level, the more it becoming clearer and clearer that this is going to be a big play for us, even in light of the economic circumstances today,” he says.

Not surprisingly, Bonecutter finds that clients that embrace opportunities to reduce their carbon emissions find they save money in the process. “At this stage, I can’t name a single client that we’ve been to yet where we haven’t been able to identify an opportunity to address their carbon emissions and do so in a way that will save them some money,” he says.

Aiding in providing guidance to companies is Accenture’s Green Technology Suite, which comprises three tools. First, there’s the Accenture Green Maturity Model, which is designed to assess the environmental efficiency of an organization’s IT and to suggest actions to improve the organization’s overall environmental standing.

The GMM delivers those action based on answers to 300 questions across five areas, according to Accenture: working practice, office environment, datacenter, procurement, and corporate citizenship. Question topics range from commitment to reducing CO2 emissions to the type of enterprise network. The suite generates a scorecard that rates where the organization sits on the green maturity spectrum on a scale from 0 to 5.

There’s a free, high-level, Flash-based version of the GMM available online at www.accenture.com/gmm. Using it doesn’t require you to enter any kind if identifying information, such as name or e-mail address, so you needn’t worry about a follow-up call from an Accenture salesperson. “The purpose of tool is to allow IT executives or the CIO or CTO to go into that tool anonymously and look at some of the higher-level questions we’d ask as part of session,” says Bonecutter.

Second, there’s a tool called The Data Center Estimator. This is used by an Accenture consulting to assess the environmental and financial impact of datacenters. It “suggests energy reduction strategies based on information gathered from the facility, such as air conditioning, power distribution, and server, storage, and networking components, among others,” according to Accenture.

Last is the The Workplace Estimator, used to help companies “adopt a greener technology culture by developing recycling and energy saving policies for personal computers and procuring new equipment with energy efficiency in mind, ” according to the company.