Turlough Guerin, Group Manager for Environment at Telstra, recently spoke at the Green Business conference in Melbourne, outlining the company's view that businesses should focus on three core Green IT areas: field workers, office space and business travel; and promoting their own solutions to help fill these gaps...
Focus area # 1: Reducing field impact
Telstra themselves have 14,000 vehicles and about 6000 field staff and found themselves needing to both reduce overall costs, and their environmental impact through transport emissions, which makes up 14% of their total carbon output.
To do so, they implemented Trimble Geo Manager, which relies on NextG (3G broadband service) & GPS to find the shortest distance between jobs, allowing them to match field staff to the next nearest job. In implementing this Telstra found a 6% fuel reduction this year and increases field productivity by 13%.
Focus area # 2: Reducing office space
Noting that 20-25% of greenhouse emissions come from buildings, Telstra promoted their work from home / flexi worker / remote working policy where they reduced their own office space by 75% and saved around 242kgs of carbon emissions per employee.
One question raised during this talk was 'green transference' - if they simply promoted employees working from home then surely they were just moving the carbon problem from Telstra on to the employee. However Turlough acknowledged this as a potential issue and stated that he believed there was still a net benefit based on the research they conducted during in-house trials.
Focus area # 3: Reducing business travel
The final area Telstra spoke about was the reduction of business air travel, mainly focussing on the video conferencing and telepresence solutions they provide to businesses, such as the Cisco Telepresence rooms. The immersive, dedicated room service is one of the more high-end but high quality services, scaling right down to smaller solutions like their media centre service.
Telstra believes solutions such as high definition video conferencing will provide CO2 savings of up to 2.4Mt over the five years from 2008-2014:
| Carbon Opportunity | Mt CO2 Savings | % National emissions |
| Increased renewable energy | 10.1 | 1.81 |
| Personalised Public Transport | 3.9 | 0.70 |
| Decentralised Business District | 3.1 | 0.55 |
| Presence-based Power | 3.0 | 0.53 |
| Real-time freight management | 2.9 | 0.52 |
| 'On-Live' High Definition Video Conferencing | 2.4 | 0.43 |
| Remote Appliance Power Management | 1.8 | 0.33 |
| TOTAL | 27.3 | 4.88 |
References:
Telstra, Corporate Responsibility - Environment, http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/csr/environment.cfm
Telstra, High Bandwidth, Low Carbon - a Climate Change report commissioned by Telstra, http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/csr/climate_change.cfm
