Page 39 - ITU Kaleidoscope 2016

ICTs for a Sustainable World

of server hardware, free cooling in data centers (where pos- always there was someone or a group of people who were
sible), applying sleep mode in equipment powered over eth- giving good examples on how to procure more environment-
ernet (e.g. IP telephones), hot-cold-frozen data storage, pc ally friendly or dispose of equipment properly. However,
power management and centralising equipment such as print- their methods were not formalised in policies and enforced
ers (shared instead of private use). On the other hand, parti- and therefore this was a common suggestion for improve-
cipants found it difficult to balance reliability and availability ment. Similarly, communicating about what is already there,
(redundancy) with energy efficiency, which is reflected in not from policy documents to good practices was also a popular
so green solutions for key elements in the ICT infrastructure action to follow-up with. Especially in the ’Greening of ICT’
such as network equipment. Monitoring on green KPIs is domain, reduction possibilities were in place, but not taken
not very common as of yet, at max some general energy con- advantage of by users. The same goes for ICT facilities such
sumption figures were available. as videoconferencing to reduce traveling. Promotion of and
For the third domain ‘Greening of operations with ICT’ there communication about these solutions is a key activity for all
was much more variation in the scores. One organisation fo- participants (to different degrees). Since these are typical
cused more on support for video conference solutions and signs of bottom-up enthusiasm, the reverse may also be true
teleworking, the other offered flexible office space and a third that the main issue behind the above observations is a lack
had banned all paper work as much as possible. Often, the of top-down support. This was also sometimes mentioned
financial department is having difficulties to transform to pa- in the discussions, especially related to Green ICT Strategy:
perless. In terms of using ICT to reduce other energy con- with a strong and clear strategy it would become much easier
sumption, this seemed quite difficult for all participants be- to take the next step.
cause there is not a strong connection between those respons- Looking at the most common improvement suggestions (for
ible for ICT and those responsible for building and facility example: putting a green paragraph in project documents,
management. This is also something that is reflected in the fi- implementing total-cost-of-ownership in procurement, vir-
nal scores on Feedback and Decision Support where it would tualisation of servers, promoting teleworking, using power-
be beneficial to connect all the information systems that are over-ethernet solutions, improving asset management and
used, analyse behaviour and return this as feedback to indi- monitoring) a pattern seems to emerge that organisations
vidual users as well as higher management. While the parti- have started picking the low hanging fruits and are slowly
cipants recognised the potential, they found it difficult to take moving beyond these. Some areas are clearly deemed to be
action here other than to talk to other departments. too advanced to take on for now, such as green supply chain
The results for the questionnaire are summarised over all par- management and applying green principles in software and
ticipating organisations as they did not show any signific- ICT services. Participants also often stated that any green
ant differences between the organisations. 93% of all indi- action should go hand in hand with an improvement in either
vidual participants found it useful to use the maturity model. quality of service or financial sense. There is some room to
In their comments they commonly wrote that it helped their be lenient (for example in extending the return on investment
awareness and that it gave insights in where their organisa- horizon) but doing something just because it is the right
tion stood. This is also reflected in their answers to further thing to do from an environmental perspective is difficult to
questions where again 93% had learned about new possibil- achieve.
ities in using Green ICT, 73% was inspired to promote more
Finally, the questionnaire gave us insight in what the indi-
Green ICT activity and 67% was going to apply Green ICT vidual attitude of the participants was regarding Green ICT
principles in their daily work. The feedback on the matur-
and the maturity model itself. The results of the question-
ity model consisted of detailed comments that were used to
naire are quite clear: almost everyone found it a useful (and
improve the model and general comments that were on the
efficient) way to get an overview on where their organisa-
whole positive. Some found it difficult to fill out or said that
tion stands and quickly generate ideas for improvement. Fur-
they needed the evaluation session to fully understand the thermore, they increased their own awareness, learned more
model.
about the possibilities of Green ICT (beyond actions in the
datacenter and also apply ICT as an environmental solution
5. DISCUSSION in business processes), and two third actually planned to ap-
ply Green ICT principles in their daily work. Even though
The goal of the SURF Green ICT Maturity Model is to help this is a field study with limited participants, the general at-
organisations learn more about the possibilities of Green ICT titude is highly positive and seems a good indication of the
in a practical and efficient way. It gives an overview of the positive effects the use of such a maturity model can have.
most important issues and areas that can be addressed with Furthermore, the model can be applied in an improvement
Green ICT. As demonstrated in the results, organisations gain cycle. Measuring the Green ICT maturity repeatedly in a
insight in both the ICT-as-a-problem side as well as the ICT- standard way allows organisations to see whether they grow
as-a-solution side in their particular situation. in maturity. For extra benefits, the maturity model could
Looking at the things that were discussed in the evaluation also be used as a benchmark tool to compare multiple or-
sessions, the issues and solutions that participants talked ganisations. It could be especially effective to identify best
about were quite similar for the four organisations. Almost practices in this way and stimulate organisations to exchange

– 21 –