Wednesday 28 September 2011

ICT sustainability initiatives slowed by 'hidden' power bills

Fujitsu in Australia has published a second edition of its ICT Sustainability: The Global Benchmark Report, which analyses the extent of green information and communications technology maturity across the globe. The headline finding of the report is that lack of visibility of energy bills has slowed down sustainability initiatives.

The research is based on 1,000 responses to 80 questions in an online survey about ICT sustainability policies, behaviour and technologies. The respondents were chief information officers (CIO) and ICT managers in large IT-using organisations across industry sectors in Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, UK and the US.

The overall ICT sustainability index measured by the research across all countries and all industry sectors has declined slightly in the last year. It's down from 56.4 to 54.3 (out of a 100). It wasn't particularly good in the first place, but now it looks like organisations may be losing what focus on ICT energy efficiency they had, with existing projects slowing down.

The cause is put down to the fact that the majority of respondents were not aware of how much power ICT consumes. Only one in seven ICT departments includes the power cost in its budget. Performance was significantly higher for the small proportion (less than 15%) who did take responsibility for ICT-specific power – mostly larger companies.

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