KEY POINTS:
The plush hallways of Melbourne's Crown Casino teemed with tech-savvy young businesspeople this week as one of Australasia's largest green IT conferences got under way.
But it took a semi-retired, 45-year veteran of the retail industry to get to the heart of the matter when it came to explaining the need to go green in the IT department.
"The underlying principle seems to be wrong here," said Roger Corbett, after reading out a series of statistics illustrating how China's consumption of everything from beef to steel is increasingly outstripping that of the US.
"Is it wrong that the people of India and the people of China should have the right to live exactly the way you live?" Asked the 66-year-old Wal-Mart board member and man credited with reviving Australian supermarket chain Woolworths in the'90s.
The message was clear - if the developing world is to enjoy the same standard of living as we do, we're going to have to find a more efficient way of doing just about everything, including IT.
But the message from executives at computer maker HP, which organised the Technology@Work conference, is that the greening of IT doesn't have to be disruptive to business, or particularly expensive. Forget carbon neutrality for a moment and just think about recycling the old computers lying around the office.
"It's really simple stuff. It's setting your printers up as duplex and black and white as standard, enable the power-saving mode. It's not disruptive," said Jeff Healey, HP New Zealand's enterprise and corporate marketing manager and the company's local environmental spokesman.
Healey said that in data centres, which consume around half of a business' IT-related power needs, and in the office, relatively simple measures could save power and cut waste.
HP, one of the world's largest suppliers of Intel servers, had become expert at virtualisation and so-called high-density computing, where more applications are run on fewer servers using less floor space and power. But its engineers are also getting into the science of thermodynamics to better manage cooling in data centres, which can account for more than 60 per cent of its power costs.
For Healey, the key is better educating IT managers on the options for going green both in data centres and in the office, where tightening up workplace policies around printing alone can result in huge power savings.
"There's a lot of educating that hasn't gone on. What is your procurement policy? Are you buying Energy Star 4 equipment as a minimum? There are sustainable procurement guidelines for Government but how do you get that across to 4000 purchasing offices?"
For Corbett, who started out as a shelf stacker for the Grace Brothers department stores in 1961, IT and logistics had changed the face of retailing. It had also helped Woolworths cut A$7 billion ($8.32 billion) in costs from its business since the early'90s, he added.
Ten times the size of Woolworths, Wal-Mart is now one of the biggest logistics companies in the world and using IT to green its supply chain.
"They'll only be supplied by energy that is 100 per cent renewable," said Corbett. "Existing stores must be 20 per cent more efficient by the year 2012. They're committed to zero waste and the first step is a 25 per cent reduction this year."
Green technology is being pushed in earnest by the IT industry.
"Ten years from now, we will look back and credit 'green' IT for helping to mitigate the effects posed by climate change, strengthen global industries and chart a new and prosperous low-carbon economy," said Dell Computer founder Michael Dell yesterday in a speech to a sustainability conference in Los Angeles organised by Fortune magazine.
But a survey commissioned by IBM and released last week by the Business Council for Sustainable Development, shows that New Zealand IT managers lag behind non-IT management when it comes to reducing IT emissions.
"It's cool to be green at the moment but people need to get beyond the marketing hype and ask what it means in their environment and what policies they need to implement," said Healey.
"It's not the vendors' problem, it's not the consumers' problem, it's not the Government's problem, it's everyone's problem."
* Peter Griffin attended the Technology@Work conference as a guest of HP.
