Users Only For UK Green IT Group (20-Jul-07)

From Lauraibm

MI Summary

A group of British users have teamed together to create an environmental IT forum which deliberately excludes vendors. The purpose for excluding vendors being that users find it very hard to identify which vendors are telling the truth about being green and which are merely jumping on the bandwagon.

This environmental forum, known as the Environmental IT Leadership Team plans to survey the challenges and opportunities for reducing IT power consumption and to release case studies of “innovative and tangible” steps taken by user organisations.

Text of Article

Users Only For UK Green IT Group

Section: 07. Infrastructure

By Tim Stammers

A group of British users have banded together to create an environmental IT forum -- one that is deliberately excluding vendors.

The eight members of the group include Lloyds TSB bank, retailer the John Lewis partnership, Sony UK, the British Medical Association, gas and electric company E.ON, CQS, and the University of Cumbria. One member is not yet ready to show its hand as a participant. Two more organizations are interested in joining the group, which is calling itself the Environmental IT Leadership Team.

"The big difference to other [green IT] organizations is that this is all users. We're deliberately not going for suppliers," said Trewin Restorick, director of UK environmental charity Global Action Plan, which helped set up the EITLT.

"Users are telling us that there are many suppliers are making claims about being green, but that it's hard for them to assess who's telling the truth," Restorick said. "We'll help them do that," he said.

But the first piece of research to be completed by EITLT will be an estimate of the energy used by IT gear in the UK. This research will be launched at the House of Commons in around three months' time.

The EITLT also plans to survey the challenges and opportunities for reducing IT power consumption, to release case studies of "innovative and tangible" steps taken by user organizations, and to "cut through the techy and political jargon for creating a sustainable IT structure."

Restorick said that the group plans to keep its membership at around ten or less, but that the EITLT is likely to develop some form of second-tier membership in order to get feedback from a wider range of IT users.

Right now the EITLT estimates that IT accounts for around 2% to 3% of energy consumption in the UK. That may not seem very much, but Restorick there is more potential to reduce IT energy consumption than in some other high profile industries. "The airline industry has been the subject of a lot of environmental attention recently. But the IT industry has been ignored, and it's probably easier to cut IT power consumption," he said.

The EITLT is being sponsored by integrator Logicalis UK, which as services supplier is not taking an active role in the green body.

Our View

Even though much of the information that EITLT will eventually publicize will have originated from vendors, they are being kept of the EITLT. That is because the group does not want to risk the contamination of its work and activities with the empty and obsfucating marketing talk and bandwagon-hopping that is so common among IT vendors. The industry has only itself to blame when its customers keep it at arms length.

• Source: Computergram 20-Jul-07