The Greening of the CIO

The notion of a corporate chief information officer is fairly new -- less than thirty years old -- but the CIO's role has grown in lockstep with the strategic importance of information and knowledge management inside companies. Their ability to think strategically about information technology can help a company innovate, grow markets, streamline operations, cut costs, and generally improve competitiveness.

Now, the CIO is poised to help companies be greener, too.

The energy use of computers and such is just the beginning. It seems there are other potentially powerful ways in which chief information officers can play a role in the greening of companies

I'm guessing that very few companies are thinking of their CIOs as strategic players on the green scene -- that most companies assume, as I did, that aside from the energy consumption of IT equipment, there aren't many other CIO linkages with their company's environmental performance. That's simply wrong -- and a lost opportunity. As environmental challenges and opportunities continue to spread across company functions -- well beyond traditional environmental departments to include every nook and cranny of business operations -- the information needs and capabilities will loom large. Along the way, CIOs will stand to become key players in the growing world of green business.

And maybe make their companies' sales team a little happier along the way.

Read more By joelmakower

Three Degrees Of IT's Environmental Impact

Businesses need to focus less on how IT contributes to their environmental impact and more on how IT can help lessen the environmental impact of business operations and the supply chain or that of enterprise products and services, according to Gartner Inc.

Analysts warned that although making IT more green must remain a concern, there are areas where deploying more IT can significantly contribute to making an organization more environmentally sustainable.

Chief information officers need to be aware of what constitutes the environmental impact of the whole organization and to what extent IT can be a liability or an asset in this respect. In order to do so they should consider the three degrees of IT's environmental impact.

First Degree Impact - Gartner defines this as the impact of IT itself which includes electronic waste and asset disposition; consumption of non-renewable resources such as energy in the data centre for desktop computers, printers and networking gear; the energy embodied in the full life cycle of each asset; and user behavior.

Second Degree Impact - This is the impact of IT on business operations and the supply chain, regardless of whether the end result is a product, service or combination of the two. This includes the environmental effects of material and energy consumption; emissions or waste from manufacturing and all operational processes; paper consumption for
administrative purposes; lighting, heating, and cooling for buildings; workforce commuting and mobility; vehicle fleets; supply chain impact; waste disposal and so forth. The energy component of this becomes part of the 'embodied energy' in a product or service - that is the total energy used in its manufacture and distribution.

Third Degree Impact - This is the environmental impact in the 'in use' phase or delivery phase of the enterprise's products and services - that is, the direct impacts of procurement and use of products and services.

Different industries will experience the degrees of impact in different ways and this will impact how an organization defines the environmental value of IT. For a car manufacturer, the energy that goes into assembling cars, manufacturing components by its supply chain and having them shipped, performing R&D and testing is all part of the second degree of impact. The fuel used for the cars and their carbon dioxide emissions are part of the third degree of impact and the IT that runs the factory, as well as all other processes constitutes the first degree of impact.

Green IT Blog's - They cleaerly never heard of me ;-)

Ever heard of Green IT Blog's?  

ecoIron (http://ecoiron.blogspot.com), is a blog discussing all aspects of green computing.

They've been around for almost as long as EcoGeek and covering a lot of the same stories. ecoIron links to a cool site (http://green500.org/Home.html) that measures the performance of various super-computers not by performance, but by performance per watt. The difference per machine is astonishing. Though, what's not surprising, is how comparatively inefficient the older machines are. If you're an EcoGeek reader with an eye for some high-quality IT ecogeekery, I suggest becoming an ecoIron reader as well.

Green Computer with Biodegradable Peripherals

Imagine this: you buy a new computer monitor, take your old one and just bury it in the garden. 3 years later the monitor has biodegraded and your prized tomatoes are growing better than ever. The world's first 100% biodegradable computer components have arrived from MicroPro, a company based in Dublin, Ireland who produces eco-friendly computers, keyboards, mice and flat-panel monitors.  » original news (VIA-hugg.com)

UN says western nations must stop dumping illegal electronic waste in Third World

The head of the UN Environment Program said today that technological progress and increasing western consumerism is leading to an increase in the amount of dangerous electronic waste being dumped on the world's poorest nations. 75 per cent of these items including old TVs, CPUs and phones are defunct - in other words e-waste, in other words long distance dumping from developed country consumers and companies to an African rubbish tip or landfill,' he said. Some 20 to 50 million metric tonnes of electronic waste are > Read the full article (VIA - www.vnunet.com)

Growing Problems With Electronics Waste

"The BBC is reporting that many countries are dumping their e-Waste in poorer African nations. From the article, 'The world's richest nations are dumping hazardous electronic waste on poor African countries, says the head of the UN's Environment Program (Unep).' The problem with e-Waste (versus other wastes) is that the gases and chemicals that make up a lot of electronics are particularly harmful for the environment. I suppose nobody takes their computer, TV or Radio to the repair shop anymore since a new one is a fraction of that cost down at the local convenience store."   Link

Should Google Go Nuclear?

Baldrson writes "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled 'Should Google Go Nuclear?'. In it, he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which, he claims, produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."  Link to full read