Fujitsu in Australia has published a second edition of its ICT Sustainability: The Global Benchmark Report, which analyses the extent of green information and communications technology maturity across the globe. The headline finding of the report is that lack of visibility of energy bills has slowed down sustainability initiatives.
The research is based on 1,000 responses to 80 questions in an online survey about ICT sustainability policies, behaviour and technologies. The respondents were chief information officers (CIO) and ICT managers in large IT-using organisations across industry sectors in Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, UK and the US.
The overall ICT sustainability index measured by the research across all countries and all industry sectors has declined slightly in the last year. It's down from 56.4 to 54.3 (out of a 100). It wasn't particularly good in the first place, but now it looks like organisations may be losing what focus on ICT energy efficiency they had, with existing projects slowing down.
The cause is put down to the fact that the majority of respondents were not aware of how much power ICT consumes. Only one in seven ICT departments includes the power cost in its budget. Performance was significantly higher for the small proportion (less than 15%) who did take responsibility for ICT-specific power – mostly larger companies.
The best-performing country of the seven surveyed turned out to be Canada, with the UK in second place. Together with the US, only these three countries were above the average score. The UK did particularly well in the Lifecycle aspects of the assessment, which covers procurement and recycling/disposal. The fact that the UK had a higher score in this area than any other country is attributed to our e-waste legislation, primarily down to the EU waste electrical and electronic equipment directive. The relatively high ratings for sustainability in the use of personal computers and for using ICT to reduce carbon emissions elsewhere in the organisation were seen as a result of the government's carbon reduction commitment energy efficiency scheme.
For the survey as a whole, the ICT/communications/media industry sector has the highest sustainability index score and manufacturing the lowest. The relative scores between industry sectors are generally similar between countries, but in the UK the government sector index score was the highest, suggesting that the "greening government ICT" policies introduced across the public sector may be paying off.
It's good to see the UK doing relatively well, although a score of 58 out of 100 is nothing to shout about. But the fact that the survey found that ICT departments are still not responsible for their power use is particularly disappointing. As the saying goes, if you can't measure it you can't manage it. It reinforces the view that much of the effort to date by IT departments to address energy use and carbon emissions is primarily picking off the easy options and achieving quick, one-off savings. For example, installing PC power management software is not something that IT departments really need to think about, given the very rapid payback in power costs. Similarly, server virtualisation – putting multiple "virtual" servers on one physical machine – brings with it flexibility, cost savings and makes better use of data centre capacity. You don't really need to measure the power to see the benefits.
But just employing these measures is short-sighted. Reducing ICT emissions (and hence saving energy and cost) is going to be a long-term process that will demand greater attention as time goes by. To really track progress you need to know where you're starting from and what the energy savings options are. The problem is that in the current financial climate it's the quick wins that get the funding. To really plan for a low-carbon ICT operation in the future needs more management thought and perhaps a little initial investment. It seems that at the moment that's not happening.
Pete Foster is a writer, researcher and consultant on sustainable ICT.
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