As you and your team are grappling with the ever increasing complexity of delivering more services with less resources, increased governance and shrinking budget’s, you are now also being asked to deliver these services and applications within a sustainable environment and have a Green IT initiative….its enough to make you see Red.

There are a number of socio-political considerations driving sustainability and Green IT for CIO’s and it is shaping their approach to the challenge.

European IT teams have conversations that revolve around the current and pending legislation by country. You are focused on compliance and meeting the requirements of the law – that will usually mean meeting the minimum of the requirements. Your focus will be on cost of compliance, planning for delivering your Green IT response, based on meeting the law of the land, not on what the ROI will be or how you and your team will benefit.

Here in the America’s there is a difference between Canada and the US based enterprises that are looking at this. The Canadians have a business intelligent approach, which has matured beyond the simple European compliance based model. Green IT is built into business plans and corporate objectives, but it has tangible financial measurements and expectations. While the strategy and vision statement have all the buzzwords like carbon-neutral and sustainable IT, the vast majority of these companies have linked specific financial objectives and performance outcomes to the Green IT program. These also flow down to individual performance objectives for the IT staff. But the base premise is all about the economics.

I would recommend that the US based IT teams look for a path to a successful sustainability initiative in the economics of their operation.

The path to a successful Green IT program start with not calling it “Green IT”, but rather a data center optimization and efficiency program. Focus on your operational and cost – performance footprint and you will see results in your carbon footprint

Start with operational performance efficiency of your data center assets. Focus on reducing time to deploy services, and increasing by a set %, the server utilization of your existing server assets. Drive a program to be virtualized by >50% within 2 years. If you are optimized like this you will be Green! Be asset smart. Optimize the assets that you have in your data center and this will deliver energy and carbon reduction results. Optimize your application profiles and focus on reducing costs and consumption to deliver these services.

Don’t tell your CEO you are developing a sustainable IT program. Tell him/her you are delivering a program to optimize the data center to deliver services and applications to your customers in the optimal location. An efficiency drive will lead to a green result, in both “greenbacks” and in green environment. If you can use fewer greenbacks to run IT, you make your IT operations sustainable.