Green IT in Practice: How one company is approaching the greening of its IT

Chapter 11. IT as a Green Enabler

This is the section of the book where we allow ourselves to briefly stop self-flagellating, worrying about IT’s own carbon emissions, and turn our attention instead to some ideas for using IT to help reduce the other 98% or so of the organisation’s carbon footprint. This is ‘IT as saint rather than IT as sinner’; a phrase I first heard at a CIES conference^[15] on Green IT in 2008, and have enjoyed repeating ever since. Perhaps the carbon footprint of IT will even actually need to go up a little to make it all happen (‘silicon offsetting’). To get to grips with the 98%, we need to think a lot more about systems development, rather than just focusing as we have until now on infrastructure solutions.

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