GreenITStrategy.com

There has been a great TechNet article posted by Michael Walsh and Eliza Walsh on the top 10 focus areas to becoming a leader on environment and sustainability issues. Below is an overview of my perspective on their focus areas...

#1 - Be familiar with environmental issues and #10 - Remain Current. There are any number of great publications you can subscribe to, and lots of different events and courses you could attend and they are increasing all the time. There are plenty of places you can look including energy standards websites, environmental group websites, "Green IT" news websites, Corporate Management Associations etc etc. On my website, I usually post a number of these events and links to great websites if they are relevant to environmentally sustainable IT issues.

#2 - Objectively assess your company. As well as the suggestions from Michael and Eliza, you may want to engage a professional environment consulting business, who is well aware of the environmental standards businesses should perform to. There are international standards as well which you can baseline against, both from a pure business environmental perspective (e.g. ISO14001 – Environmental Management Systems) or from an Environmentally Sustainable IT perspective (e.g. The Green Grid develops metrics for baselining your data centre power usage).

#3 - Envision where you want to be and when and # 4 - Develop a vision and strategy. One of the areas that is lightly touched on in this section of the article is the importance of feedback. However for a business’ environmental strategy I would strongly recommend more than just feedback after a strategy has been laid out. Involving your employees directly in both planning and execution is crucial to their acceptance of any potential changes. As an example, when Microsoft Australia embarked on their environmental program, they set in place a leadership team who became the core sponsors, including the Microsoft Australia GM, Tracey Fellows. Then they called for anyone willing to put their hand up to become part of the various action teams.  These teams would be brainstorming ideas and developing the high level strategy and action plans. And this approach meant people across our business, from many different departments, were directly influencing the program’s goals and outcomes. Our Environment and Sustainability Director was put in charge of all the teams and she and the executive sponsor team assigned team leaders, from the volunteer pool. The team leaders then ran sessions over the course of the program to gather, summarise and present the strategy back to the executive sponsor team. It was an approach that worked really well and generated fantastic discussion and many different but valuable views on our environmental strategy.

#5 – Evangelise the business imperative. Having setup these great teams of passionate and knowledgeable people, Microsoft Australia not only had 1 person evangelising environmental responsibility, but whole teams of people distributed throughout the company. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one. The environmental evangelism continues at MS Australia.

#6 – Manage your messaging. I think Microsoft may sometimes be perceived as not doing as much in the environmental space as some of the other technology companies. I know that’s what I thought when I first joined MS last year. And I was pleasantly surprised to find we do a tonne of stuff that never gets recognised – like how MCS recently developed a crucial environmental management application for one of our government customers.  They used Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide a single customer view and Microsoft SQL Server to provide comprehensive reporting.  And the impressive user interface and service oriented architecture was built on the newest .NET technologies of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).    I think those quiet achievements are sometimes so much better than the ones shouted from the rooftops.

#7 – Enable management through measurement and #8 – Analyze and report environment impact. If there is something that Microsoft technologies can enable then it’s this. I personally think this is one of the best areas where technology can play a role to environmental sustainability. Rock on reporting! One of the coolest solutions I have seen in this space from Microsoft is our Dynamics Environment Dashboard.

#9 – Be a thought leader. The best thing I could recommend here is to look at Michael and Eliza’s roles and think about which one you want to be. Then get out there and talk to people, join groups, volunteer your time with environmental organisations, RSS everything on “Green IT” and write your own stuff. Since I first got involved in environmental science two of the best things I have done were to develop my own website and become an advisory board member for a non-profit organisation. They both push me to keep learning new things and help me consolidate my knowledge about how IT and the environment can work better together. I can’t know everything and neither can you, but reading and writing about the environment and technology will help you develop your own theories and standards on what works and what doesn’t for your company.