Survey on IT Managers Green Awareness

Eugenio Capra, Ph.D.
Alessandro Caleffi
Politecnico di Milano – Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione
Milan, Italy

The energy consumed by IT systems has become significant, both from the point of view of CO2 footprint and of economic impact. Even though Green IT, i.e. the discipline that studies the environmental impact of IT, is gaining momentum, most of the IT managers have not yet built a mature and fact-based position with reference to these issues. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted on 138 Italian companies to evaluate the Green awareness of their IT Managers.

Our data shows that 89% of IT managers do not know the electric consumption of the systems they manage and do not take into account energy efficiency parameters when evaluating new purchases. This may be due to the fact that in 81% of the analyzed companies IT managers are not responsible of the electricity budget. The paper also presents statistics on Green IT strategies and budget, and a success case that we analyzed in details.

Our survey has shown that 84% of the IT managers do not know the consumption of the infrastructure they manage, and that only 30% of them consider energy efficiency as an important factor when new IT components are purchased. This evidence can be easily interpreted by noting that energy costs are charged to the IT budget in less than 20% of the companies analyzed. This introduces an important misalignment between corporate and personal objectives: it is unlikely that executives invest part of their budget to improve the energy efficiency of a system or to pay a premium price for "greener" IT components if they are not responsible for energy costs. On the other hand, IT energy costs can be charged to IT budgets only if they can be clearly identified and if the consumption of each appliance is monitored and registered.

Statistics shows that the energy consumption of IT has a deep impact on TCO (IDC 2007, Josselyin et al. 2006). In addition to that, Green IT has a moral relevance, as itaffects the health of our planet. As these issues needs to be addressed, we would recommend companies to design and implement executive information systems to monitor the environmental performances of their IT systems.

These technologies are quite mature: new servers and PCs automatically provides energy consumption through built-in functions (EMA 2008), several typologies of sensors capable of measuring the energy consumed by an appliance are available (Emerson 2008), including ammeter clams that do not require to cut wires, and data may be stored and analyzed by means of datawarehouse and KPIs dashboard tools. The case of Bank Alpha shows as this can be implemented with state-of-the-art technologies. Other studies (The Green Grid 2007) shows that a energy-aware re-engineering of data centers, based on the monitoring of consumptions and of green KPIs, may reduce consumptions from 5% to up to 20% with a payback, in most of the cases, shorter than one year (Caleffi 2008). Moreover, these projects may - and should be extended to all the business processes and electric appliances, not only IT.

What is really needed is a corporate commitment to define a set of Green IT KPIs, to monitor them, and above all to take them into consideration. This last goal can be achieved only if IT managers are made responsible of the green performances of IT. This in turn may be obtained by specific incentives and by changing accountability rules, so that IT managers are responsible of IT energy costs, even though this involves significant organizational changes.

The natural continuation of our work is the definition of a general methodology and guidelines for identifying the most significant "Green IT KPIs" that a company should monitor. We propose to conduct another survey and to analyze some success cases in the near future to obtain this goal.