Austerity, sustainability and the CIO wishlist

The 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Durban, South Africa at the end of last year may have been eclipsed by the Euro Crisis, but in the UK the large public and private sector organisations responsible for around 10% of carbon emissions are being held to account for their energy management strategies.

Approximately 5,000 organisations in the UK are required to report their carbon emissions under the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme. You may be working for one of them. You may also be working for an organisation that is looking to re-address its image, either because you work in an unpopular sector, or because key figures are embroiled in a scandal over pay-scales or unethical policies or because the organisation is accused of not paying a fair amount of corporate tax. Even if your organisation is not one of these, it is a fair bet that as fuel costs rise, you have been asked to look at ways to cut electricity consumption. So, in many ways 2012 looks like it may be a good year for corporate sustainability initiatives.

If your organisational management team is promoting the use of local produce, sustainable sourcing and ethical pay, how do you go about helping them track and manage all this? We know that many organisations are looking to create their own reporting tools using existing back office applications to collect and disseminate information. That is all well and good but there are SaaS solutions available that can offer more in the way of industry benchmarking and provide services that are fun for staff to use. And it is important to remember that employee engagement is a big part of the battle to become a more sustainable organisation.

For example, Peter Grant is CEO of CloudApps a UK software vendor providing a sustainability management and monitoring solution via the salesforce.com SaaS platform. CloudApps takes data from energy, transport and CSR initiatives to create baselines and can then put a service in place for you that aligns with best practice in your industry, sector and geography. The service helps your organisation set the carbon budget and measure activity against it – the information gathered can then be used to differentiate your organisation in the market.

In terms of data capture, if you can get the data out of your existing systems, CloudApps can get it into its salesforce.com engine using APIs or flat files, or by sending requests via workflow. The information is then sent back via dashboards. The service also has an interesting employee engagement capability, SuMo, based on a gamification engine that sets challenges to reduce carbon footprints, which are linked into rewards systems within the organisation.

CIO sustainability 'wish list'
Of course, as with any business issue that CIOs are involved with, what suppliers may want to sell you and what may be of most use to you often differs, so to restore balance here are some CIO suggestions to the industry for helping to reduce carbon emissions:

• "Heat resilient IT kit: servers, routers and memory."
• "An economically viable convergent device (to stop proliferation of end-user devices, such as iPhone + Blackberry + netbook + laptop, etc)."
• "Not having to put cable in everywhere - more use of wireless technology so that there is no need to fibre everything up. That would make a huge difference in terms of space and energy consumption."
• A lot more information from IT equipment manufacturers about the resources going into, say, new file servers and their real power consumption. It is very hard for me to work out whether it is more sustainable to keep using what equipment I have or whether to scrap and buy new. There is very little available information on this."
• Higher quality, lower priced video-conferencing: "Cisco TelePresence delivered via Skype business model!" as one CIO put it.