Over the last 18 months, the topic of Green IT has rapidly emerged, both in the media and on our clients’ agenda. When we began researching this issue early in 2007, our goals were to develop a holistic perspective that encompassed the key environmental dimensions of the IT business, to identify the most important Green IT challenges and opportunities, and to assess current business strategies and practices. The result is this initial Position Paper, which presents our overall point of view, and sets the stage for additional workbook and case study projects to be conducted in 2008 and beyond.

The need for a broad perspective has proved especially important in this project. To fully understand the implications of Green IT, we had to go beyond our traditional focus on enterprise IT usage, and consider the energy-intensive processes used in IT hardware manufacturing as well as the energy-saving value of IT to the wider economy. Indeed, the most fundamental finding of this project is that the rapid obsolescence implicit in Moore’s Law is inherently environmentally unfriendly, and that this places a special burden on our industry to use IT to further the greater environmental good.

We have found that much of the current Green IT emphasis is misplaced. It focuses almost exclusively on data centres and PC power management, which together account for only about 2 percent of overall energy usage. While more attention must be paid to the considerable energy used in IT manufacturing, it is the huge potential energy savings that IT can bring to the wider economy that will create the most important business opportunities. Hence the title of this paper: Green IT – Moving Beyond the 2% Solution.

View video of David Moschella discussing this report.  Click Here