Rise of the Green IT Manager

Carbon reduction, green and sustainability are rising to the top of social and government agendas resulting in new legislation and business pressure through the supply chain. This is resulting in the need for organisations to prepare for the ensuing compliance and also to secure any business benefits, such as increased efficiency, reduced cost, corporate social responsibility, enhanced reputation and competitiveness that may exist.

Many organisations have already taken on Carbon Tzar's to address the wider issues in their infastructure and the development of EN and ISO standards, such as EN 16001 and ISO 50001 are testament to how seriously these issues are being taken.

However, these standards do not provide any real guidance for the data centre, which as a specialised environment is often left to the data centre management to address any issues that may affect it.  Carbon management is such an issue and now data centre managers are being tasked to deal with the new agenda being forced on them by their corporate colleagues.

To meet this challenge a new set of skills is being considered necessary to add to the data centre manager's remit.

These new skills, or possibly a completely new role - the Green IT Mnanager, will need to unite many management disciplines.  In many organisations IT potentially accounts for a large percentage of a company’s CO2 emissions and where this occurs engagement and access to specialist IT services and infrastructure skills will be mandatory.

However, adding headcount is always a difficult, costly and time-consuming response.

For IT, the Green IT Manager has considerable technical and managerial commitments to undertake including:

   
• Calculating and monitoring CO2 emissions.
   
• Delivery of reports, internally and externally.
   
• Developing programmes of change to incorporate CO2 reduction commitments.
   
• Aligning CO2 emissions with IT service delivery.
   
• Integration with IT service management.
   
• Keeping aware of new technologies
   
• Ensuring compliance and plan for new legislation
   
• Maintain carbon awareness programmes

These new responsibilities place increased overhead on already lean budgets without offering immediate or short-term ROI benefits.

Opportunities for business exist in managing their CO2 emissions efficiently and in order to adhere to the current directives and exploit their potential, careful and targeted use of resources will be necessary.

Although the issues raised by the carbon agenda cannot be ignored embracing the issues, possibly through the Green IT Manager, can deliver real business benefits.

Dimension 85 specialises in Data Centre Energy Efficiency Management.  and carbon reduction training in the data centre; You can contact Dimension 85 on the Dimension 85 website.