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RamZ Ramblings - From Anything to Everything
Ramesh  Raghavan
Author:Ramesh Raghavan
National Manager Services Transformation
Focus on Green IT
Wednesday 26th, November 2008

Context of Green IT: The Information Technology industry is responsible for greater than 2% of global CO² emissions, most resulting from the power consumption of PCs, servers and cooling systems. Most of the IT industry stakeholders are looking at devising their own green strategies, and are zeroing in on innovative measures to achieve their objectives. Green IT starts with manufacturers producing environmentally friendly products and encouraging IT departments to consider more friendly options like virtualization, power management and proper recycling habits.

What is Green IT? “Green IT” is an important agenda that most of the IT industry must deal with. Government organizations are more directly challenged because they play key roles in regulating and supervising environmental impact and because green IT will become more politically sensitive going forward. Green IT has three dimensions that one has to consider before embarking on crafting out a Green IT strategy,

A) Meeting regulatory needs

B) Reduce CO² emissions as a social responsibility

C) Adopting and promoting Green policies.

What organizations can do about Green IT?Greener business and healthier bottom line is what every company aspire for. Organizations can take numerous Green IT initiatives to help address their environmental responsibilities whilst maintaining or improving costs and service levels.

IT Related iniatitives

A) Greener Data Centres that ensure lesser emission and

smarter cooling

B) Better and smarter cooling systems for machine and people

C) Usage of tight policies on screen saver, shut desktops after

office hours

D) Usage of Grid computing, virtualization and KVM

E) Architect an application or hardware with Conscience

F) Use of technology to stitch the gap for communication and transport department thus enabling smarter utilization of company provided transport. Other areas are in the space of Building Automation Systems (BAS) which controls the lighting and temperature of the facilities.

G) Convergence of IT systems thus enabling lesser space utilization per person, thus bring down the overall area per square feet requirment per employee.

HR Related iniatitives

A) Introduce Work from home option where ever possible

B) Move to complete paperless office

C) Introducing CO² burn points against each BU/LOB

D) Creating Green policies that would be part of G&O of individuals

Enterprise Related iniatitives

A) Greener buildings

B) Use natural light and Change all light bulbs into CFL

C) Smarter options of landscaping the office premise

D) Telecommute instead of air travel

E) Use the power of Sun to fuel the energy requirements

F) Sensible ways to dispose e-waste

G) Ensuring no plastic bags are used for any product that is sold by the corporate

Conclusion: India has several large companies that has ingredients which can make it successful in the alternative energy area: availability of natural resources, cost-effective engineering and manufacturing talent. It also has the will to identify green iniatiatives. Its important that these iniatiatives have clear agenda in each sphere of the organization. This topic clearly identifies the IT side of the story.

If we were to go back to our early adaptor of green buildings, Emperor Shahjahan and if he were alive today, surely he could have gone in for a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for the Taj Mahal and his other magnificent buildings and palaces. In fact, he could have earned quite a few million dollars through the CERs gained (much like Olympia Technology Park). The money earned could have easily gone in to finance the Black Taj Mahal that he wished to make. And we would have one more magnificent edifice that we could admire and pride on. Now wouldn’t that be something worth heaving a sigh: Wah Wah Taj?

 
Comments
Comment 1: By Srikala Badrinarayanan on 05th Jan 2009
Excellent blog.Propogating Awareness , application and implementation of these need great effort .Find out the ways and means of doing that, and should be done at a faster and greater speed.

Comment 2: By Ramesh Raghavan on 23rd Dec 2008
Venkata, thanks for your comment. Whilst we don’t want to really worry about greater than 2% of the contribution that we can do via the initiatives mentioned above, we also don’t have a say in production of electricity or automotives. My idea of this blog was to ensure what we manage and what we can control from a C02 emission. Today you might be surprised to note that greater emphasis is given to data centres are they are houses of C02 emissions that contribute significant sum.
Awaiting your reaction.

Comment 3: By L Venkata Subramaniam on 23rd Dec 2008
Should we really worry about the 2%? I think there are bigger things to take care of. I dont believe any of these green it initiatives help. We should rather work on green ways of producing electricity. Also greener fuel for cars.

Comment 4: By prabeen patra on 27th Nov 2008
good blog but really possible in our IT
how possible to manufacture the peripheral device by using natural resources

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