Expression GreenExpressing the need for a healthy green lifestyle

Intel co-founder Gor­don Moore was a great vision­ary. In 1965, his pre­dic­tion, pop­u­larly known as Moore’s Law, stated that the num­ber of tran­sis­tors on a chip would dou­ble about every two years. More than 40 years later his pre­dic­tion con­tin­ues to hold true, as the IT indus­try con­tin­ues to develop at an expo­nen­tial rate. 

Many see this as an exam­ple of progress and devel­op­ment, how­ever there is a grow­ing con­cern that the never end­ing pur­suit of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment is tak­ing place with­out an under­stand­ing of the envi­ron­men­tal impact of the changes. There are mul­ti­ple valid rea­sons for this con­cern, but one of the main ones is incred­i­bly sim­ple; the more tech­ni­cal devices in cir­cu­la­tion, the more power is needed, requir­ing increased energy require­ments and there­fore increased CO2 emissions. 

Orga­ni­za­tions are increas­ingly begin­ning to con­sider the envi­ron­men­tal impact of their actions, partly as a result of the increased impor­tance of a green cor­po­rate image, but also as a result of the ris­ing cost of energy. The cost of pow­er­ing a server over 3 years is now more than the cost of the server itself and eco­nomic pres­sures are very effi­cient levers to direct action. As a result, envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns are creep­ing higher and higher up the strate­gic agenda. 

Ini­tially, cor­po­ra­tions looked inter­nally for sus­tain­abil­ity and envi­ron­men­tal effi­ciency, how­ever there is now a grow­ing real­iza­tion that this con­cept should be extended to a com­pa­nies wider orga­ni­za­tional eco-system and that respon­si­bil­ity should now be extended to the sup­plier com­mu­nity that sup­port their busi­ness activ­ity. This is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to IT sup­pli­ers who pro­vide out­sourced IT ser­vices, often from geo­graph­i­cally remote loca­tions, where from an envi­ron­men­tal per­spec­tive out of sight has pre­vi­ously meant out of mind. 

Accord­ing to a recent study car­ried out by Brown & Wil­son, authors of the “Black Book of Out­sourc­ing’ orga­ni­za­tions in North Amer­ica and Europe plan to con­tinue their out­sourc­ing ini­tia­tives while cau­tiously shift­ing func­tional respon­si­bil­ity for cor­po­rate envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns to the sup­plier. How­ever the report also points to an increased appetite and demand from buy­ers of out­sourced ser­vices for more com­pre­hen­sive green ini­tia­tives to assure compliance. 

The report is based on an inde­pen­dent study of out­sourc­ing indus­try deci­sion mak­ers and ana­lysts with a sur­vey of 20,000 out­sourc­ing users. Almost half – 43% – of com­pa­nies choos­ing to use a sup­plier for the first time included green fac­tors in their deci­sion mak­ing process for choos­ing sup­pli­ers. And more than 94% of exec­u­tives from listed com­pa­nies are plan­ning to add “green” clauses in their rene­go­ti­a­tion processes, com­pared with only 36% of pri­vately owned companies. 

More than 88% of exec­u­tives said that the envi­ron­men­tal com­mit­ment of sup­pli­ers would influ­ence their out­sourc­ing selec­tion process. And 21% of US and Euro­pean com­pa­nies that already out­source have added green poli­cies and per­for­mance indi­ca­tors to out­sourc­ing agree­ments this year, accord­ing to the research. 

Almost 25% of com­pa­nies are ask­ing their ven­dors to reduce their car­bon foot­print to have “zero impact”. Fur­ther, 45% of com­pa­nies expect sup­pli­ers to assure pub­lic trust by track­ing and demon­stra­bly mea­sur­ing green effec­tive­ness. Over 40% want out­sourcers to develop new green tech­nolo­gies, prod­ucts and ser­vices, which reduce wastes, save energy and increase efficiency. 

Sun Microsys­tems has designed new dat­a­cen­ters in US, UK and India to lower the company’s power con­sump­tion. Sun esti­mates that the company’s dat­a­cen­ter efforts will save the planet nearly 4,100 tones of CO2 per year and trim one per­cent from Sun’s total car­bon footprint. 

IBM is also fol­low­ing sim­i­lar ini­tia­tives to make com­put­ing more energy effi­cient and envi­ron­men­tally friendly. IBM is com­mit­ting to spend $1 bil­lion a year on a project named “Project Big Green” and have devel­oped a five step pro­gram for com­pa­nies look­ing to cut power use in datacenters. 

Fujitsu is also set­ting an exam­ple, spend­ing £44 mil­lion on a 65,000 square foot Lon­don based dat­a­cen­ter facil­ity that has min­i­mized its car­bon foot print through the use of the lat­est IT cool­ing and pro­cess­ing tech­nolo­gies. Fujitsu pre­dicts that this will save enough elec­tric­ity to power as many as 6,000 homes annu­ally, equiv­a­lent to sav­ing 10,000 tones of CO2 each year. 

Rack­space the IT-hosting com­pany is also busy rein­vent­ing itself as a green sup­plier. It is build­ing a new data cen­tre in Slough and is doing as much as it con­sid­ers prac­ti­cal to achieve car­bon neu­tral­ity. Rack space gets its elec­tric­ity from Slough Heat and Power, which switched from coal and gas to wood chips and fiber fuel in 2001. Rack­space is design­ing its new cen­tre so that sep­a­rate sec­tions can be cooled inde­pen­dently. It will also draw on exter­nal fresh air when con­di­tions allow. Rack­space has also been busy out­side; they have been plant­ing trees — some 300 per month — to off­set their car­bon emis­sions, as well as using less power hun­gry com­puter equip­ment inter­nally and adopt­ing re-cycling and re-use across their offices. 

As con­sumers become more envi­ron­men­tally aware, retail orga­ni­za­tions are improv­ing their envi­ron­men­tal cam­paigns and pro­mo­tional activ­ity. Marks & Spencer has pledged to be car­bon neu­tral by 2012. The super­mar­ket Tesco plans to include car­bon foot­print label­ing on all of its prod­ucts. Online bank First Direct has installed new tech­nol­ogy to reduce its use of elec­tric­ity and air­lines such as Easy­Jet are work­ing hard to con­vince pas­sen­gers that they can still fly with a clear conscience. 

In the retail indus­try, con­sumers have ulti­mate power and retail­ers will respond accord­ingly. With out­sourc­ing the con­sumer is one or two steps removed, but with improved com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy, an orga­ni­za­tions inner work­ings and stan­dards are eas­ily acces­si­ble and quickly dis­trib­uted. Being envi­ron­men­tally unfriendly is now bad news and this social accep­tance together with finan­cial pres­sure to use less energy has cre­ated a real change in the sup­plier mar­ket place. 

Out­sourced ser­vice providers are increas­ingly begin­ning to real­ize that “Green Cre­den­tials” are a pre-requisite when it comes to deal­ing with large cor­po­ra­tions and the sup­plier com­mu­nity com­pa­nies are now invest­ing heav­ily in reduc­ing their car­bon footprint. 

Of the 4540 sup­plier firms ana­lyzed in The “Black Book of Out­sourc­ing Report” the fol­low­ing 10 orga­ni­za­tions are ranked as the most envi­ron­men­tally friendly within their par­tic­u­lar area of exper­tise and given the increased impor­tance of green cre­den­tials, this is an acco­lade that should not be under estimated: 

1. Accen­ture & Accen­ture HR (Score 9.66) Ser­vices: ITO, BPO, HRO, FAO, KPO
2. CSC (Score 9.54) Ser­vices: ITO, BPO
3. Hewlett Packard (Score 9.49) Ser­vices: ITO, BPO, FAO
4. SAIC (Score 9.41) Ser
5. Log­ica CMG (Score 9.37) Ser­vices: BPO, ITO, KPO
6. IBM Global (Score 9.35) Ser­vices: ITO, BPO, FAO, KPO
7. Pit­ney Bowes (Score 9.30) Ser­vices: Doc­u­ment Pro­cess­ing Out­sourc­ing
8. UPS Sup­ply Solu­tions (Score 9.28) Ser­vices: Sup­ply Chain & Logis­tics Out­sourc­ing
9. John­son Con­trols (Score 9.26) Ser­vices: Facil­i­ties Man­age­ment Out­sourc­ing
10. Unisys (Score 9.21) Ser­vices: ITO, BPO 

Pur­chas­ing orga­ni­za­tions are begin­ning to flex their envi­ron­men­tal mus­cle. This may be for altru­is­tic, socially respon­si­ble rea­sons, or it may be as a result of ris­ing energy costs and increased finan­cial pres­sures, either way the tide is turn­ing, aware­ness is increas­ing and tech­nol­ogy out­sourcers are slowly turn­ing them­selves green.