Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate!

That’s the message Destination Green IT took away from an interview with SOCITM President and Hillingdon Council CIO, Steve Palmer.

Steve Palmer is an intuitive and award winning operator when it comes to ICT, and green ICT issues.  But it is his insight and opinions regarding subject areas like defining what is green ICT and his views on the future direction of green that are particularly interesting.

A major issue in the marketplace at the moment is a lack of definition of what green ICT stands for and Palmer believes the real challenge lies with CIOs in terms of unravelling what scope there is for green ICT in the workplace as a business aligned enabler both for internal and externally facing services. 

Palmer says: “Green ICT often falls down as it focuses on the traditional ICT industry and our pre-defined boundaries of it. In fact things that often have the biggest impact on energy consumption are tools that exist in the consumer world, such as smart plugs that shutdown appliances off-peak.  These can be applied successfully and simply to the B2B environment with massive effect.

“Sometimes the ICT leader needs to take a more holistic view and look outside of its traditional boundaries for solutions.”

Palmer also believes that green ICT can become more potent in achieving savings with greater collaboration between all parties, from within public sector and between supplier, specifier and end user.

He said: “We are short on effective collaboration in every direction.  It is about assessing a series of outcomes particularly focussing on the increasing financial pressures, which will inevitably impact on service delivery.

“We welcome and encourage more strategic and not silo style responses from the industry that say you need this to do X.  There also needs to be a greater focus on how community based programmes can be facilitated.

“Collaboration potential around video conferencing, for example, is potentially huge.  It’s about local, regional and national meetings and workstyle, and it is a basic holistic view that can reduce travel and CO2 footprint within the public sector.

“The public sector also needs to look at its existing technologies to ask how does this work on the ground, how can we improve on its use.  Likewise, suppliers need to ask end users how they can work with the public sector to pinpoint issues and overcome them. 

“The public sector needs the help of suppliers but appropriately.  That means less hard sell on the latest widget and more of a support structure.  However, there needs to be an appetite for working together.  Local democracy can sometimes be a barrier.”

Palmer also talked about the fact that despite asking for yet more collaboration it is in fact growing, though the successes are not being talked about as much as they should be. 

He said: “What is the cost of not working together?  There is an opportunity cost of not having taken certain opportunities forward already.  I think there is a greater cost of not collaborating and on-boarding initiatives.  This must be addressed as part of forward thinking towards transformation.”

Likewise, when it comes to the procurement of ICT, Palmer references the mystique behind ‘green’ is sometimes blinding better purchasing judgement.

Palmer said: “Some procurers use insight, cost models and lifecycle costs to consider whether product that proposes to be greener is in fact greener in terms of purchase cost and operational cost.  But it depends on the size of the organisation and personal experience.”

“It’s about adopting an increasingly larger stream of consciousness about issues like green within the purchasing of ICT.

“Manufacturers can assist here.  They are still not providing enough easily accessible information and little of it is provided on a like for like standardised basis, so purchasers have a very tough time in making genuinely reasoned buying decisions.  This in some ways fundamentally undermines the whole green movement.   

“If buyers don’t have the right information at their fingertips for an informed choice then how do manufacturers expect organisations to firstly judge whether one product is more efficient or sustainable than another at the same time as considering purchase price and ongoing operational costs.” 

Palmer also picked up on issues Destination Green ICT has covered before regarding the amount of convoluted green measures that ICT is being acknowledged by.

“There appear to be lots of well intentioned initiatives that make little sense to people at the hard end who are focussed on running services and buying ICT.  We need one set of industry standards. 

“Everyone understands on a basic level it is about reducing carbon emissions and footprint but no-one has the time to understand each measure as part of the buying process.

“The provision of standardised information is critical to the greater adoption of more sustainable technologies.  Particularly as green issues continue to remain high on the corporate agenda. 

“The carbon credits mechanism that is being introduced into the public sector is going to change the face and level on the agenda of ‘green’ in purchasing.  SOCITM is developing policy to address the priority for green and we see a win here to get procurement and opportunities around carbon reduction in place and contributing more to carbon reduction on the front line.”