[Scroll down to view Forrester’s "The Evolution Of Green IT" video… don’t worry, it’s only ~6 minutes.]

As a quick recap, part one of this video series walked through how corporations and governments are using green strategies to achieve their financial and political ends. From there, I gave a handful of examples around how green IT is helping leading organizations — like Sprint, AT&T, and Tesco — save $20m, $12m, and achieve a 17% reduction in fuel consumption, respectively. 

So what can you expect in part two? In ~6:00 minutes, part two of this video series will discuss green IT's quickly expanding scope and approach. What do I mean by this? In short, green IT's scope is evolving beyond the data center into distributed IT and broader business operations. Forrester calls this the green IT 1.0 ("green for IT") and 2.0 ("IT for green") transition. Likewise, the approach to green IT is expanding beyond procuring more energy efficient equipment to also include software, services, people, and process. And the savings from these new approaches are impressive:

  • Software: Through the use of server virtualization software, Solvay Pharmaceuticals' 100 virtual machines have translated into hardware savings of $1.5 million and annual power and cooling savings of $67,000.
  • Services: A large US government agency using Dell's Asset Recovery Services received $166,000 in equipment exchange credits and saved $1,143,000 in staffing costs by cutting removal times from six months to five days.
  • Process: Simply turning up the temperature in the data center from 69°F to 74°F degrees helped KPMG cut cooling costs by 12.7%.
  • People: Just today I had a client inquiry with a large pharmaceutical who "incentivized" its people (aka employees) to come up with "innovative" IT solutions — the winning idea was a green IT project around power management which is expected to save $900,000 annually.

 

What do you think? If your organization’s green IT efforts are going through a similar transition, I highly encourage you to post your thoughts, pains, and successes. I'll do my best to respond with recommendations and hopefully your peers reading them will do the same.