With all of our study tours, we typically do quite a bit of research before the tour. This helps us select sites to visit and also gives us a ‘Point of View’ that we can test during the tour. In the case of the Green IT tour, we had a significant amount of help from Daniel Esty, Yale professor, and author of the recent book Green to Gold, and one of his students, Carola Borja, who helped us collect a wide range of articles. Dan’s book suggested several helpful ideas.
First was the idea that Green does not have to be an extra expense. Dan provides many examples where companies, such as DuPont, were able to reduce the environmental impact of their business while saving money at the same time. From an industrial engineering perspective, reducing energy use is just reducing scrap or waste. We also liked the idea of using potential savings and profits as a way to capture the attention of innovators who could come up with new ways to deal with environmental issues.
The second important idea from Dan’s book is that environmental issues touch a much wider range of stakeholders than is typical when we look at how companies interact with the world around them. In other words, you need to take a holistic approach to Green. Don’t just focus narrowly.
This led David Moschella to imagine a holistic view of how IT can impact Green. It is not just the data centres and the desktops. IT touches supply chain, logistics, buildings, travel, collaboration, and even support for the brand. To capture this holistic view, David created the following diagram in conjunction with Dan Esty:
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Source: Leading Edge Forum/Daniel Esty
Green IT provides leadership opportunities for IT directors who take a holistic view. This ‘Point of View’ served us well for our study tour. In fact, both Cisco and HP, two of the most thoughtful firms we visited, said that our request for a holistic view was the first they had received from a customer and, in fact, had caused them to stretch in their thinking.
This theme that IT has responsibilities and opportunities beyond the data centre and the desktop is one that we kept coming back to during the study tour.
Posted by LEF Executive Programme at 11/14/2007 12:36:43 PM |