With rising energy costs and an increasing focus within corporates around sustainability, local consultancy sustainableIT has launched a Green IT Fast Benchmarking tool in collaboration with British Worldwide Computers in the UK.
The maturity assessment enables comparisons around Green IT activities across industry sectors and against peers, giving ICT departments a perspective on how they are tracking and where they should be focusing their efforts. It seeks to quantify current best practices and to better understand the role that ICT is taking in enabling sustainable business activities.
The solution which is delivered at no charge via sustainableIT’s website provides a report which gives a number of valuable insights into the comparative performances of ICT organisations. It takes respondents through a series of questions which rank companies based on Green Intent, Current Implementation, Adoption, Funding and Action. It also provides insight as to where a company ranks against nine key Green IT initiatives.
“Whilst Green IT has been highly topical in the last two years, real progress and action has been very slow” says Tim James, director at sustainableIT. “Many companies are battling to come to grips with where their energy should be focused. The Fast Benchmark service allows organisations to get a perspective of where they are, how they compare against their peers and provides clear direction around Green IT strategy”, James elaborates.
Many opportunities from an ICT perspective exist in terms of reducing cost, co2 emissions and energy. These range from PC power management and printing in the distributed environment to virtualisation, cloud computing and datacentre optimisation at the back end. The question is where does one start, and what needs to be done?
“Partnering with sustainableIT offers British Worldwide Computing a niche set of skills that understands not only the South African market, but also how sustainability and computing is intrinsically interlinked”, commented Martin Jackson, Managing Director of BWC. “We expect this strategic partnership to go from strength to strength”.
With the advent of King III, integrated reporting requirements and the increasing focus on energy and costs, ICT departments can no longer ignore sustainability. This is rapidly moving up the priority list on the CIO’s agenda. Fast Benchmark provides a valuable tool to get an organisation started.
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To access the benchmark tool click here