Green IT & ITIL

The use of ITIL can both facilitate and promote the adoption of Green IT practices. Indeed the key goals and aims of both ITIL and Green IT are essentially the same – that is to deliver highly efficient cost effective IT Services that are fully aligned to business objectives (and these objectives might simply be to reduce the overall Carbon Footprint of the organisation as a whole).

Below we have provided some practical examples of where we have used ITIL in order to either facilitate and / or promote the adoption of Green IT Practices.

The Service Catalogue

Rather than simply undertaking an overall IT Related Carbon Footprint assessment, where an organisation has a mature and well defined Service Catalogue we have broken this down to provide a Carbon Footprint assessment for each IT Service.

The value of this is that it allows the IT organisation to understand and compare the relative environmental impact of the different services that it provides. This can be then used as a basis for prioritising actions to reduce the emissions associated with a particular service – e.g. reviewing and revising operational support practices, educating users on environmental best practice for a particular services (e.g. illustrating the environmental (and cost) impact of storing an ever increasing amount of user e-mails, duplicate documents etc).

Configuration Management Database

When undertaking the initial Carbon Footprint assessment one of the major difficulties is to calculate the power usage of all IT equipment. Even for organisations that have a comprehensive Asset / hardware CMDB it is rare to find that the information held against each piece of hardware includes variable (full power, standby, etc) power usage.

In order to make future Carbon Footprint assessments as quick and easy as possible we encourage organisations that have a CMDB to include power usage as an Attribute of each hardware CI. For those organisations without an up to date CMDB we encourage then to develop (at the least) a basic hardware CMDB to hold details power usage per CI.

Once the power usage per CI information is held centrally it becomes a relatively easy task to run subsequent Carbon Footprint assessments to compare improvement over time.

Change Management

We strongly encourage organisations to include an environmental assessment of a proposed change as an integral part of the Change Management approval process. At the very least the Change Advisory Board should ensure that the environmental impact of a proposed change is understood and acceptable before any change is formally approved. This should be as an integral part of the change process as technical and financial approval of a change.

Incident & Problem Management

Many IT organisations mistakenly believe that the environmental impact of IT is restricted to the power usage of the hardware. In fact the working practices and efficiency of the IT support operation in itself also have notable environmental consequences. We have found that the optimisation of both Incident and Problem Management can lead to a significant reduction in the IT related Carbon Footprint.

By reducing the time required to resolve an Incident, and by reducing the number of Incidents themselves the time, effort, and energy requirements associated with supporting the IT Infrastructure are minimised and the environmental impact of the IT support operations reduced.

Supplier Management

As part of the supplier evaluation process an assessment should be undertaken to understand the environmental impact of the potential supplier’s activities. It is important to realise that this is not simply limited to hardware suppliers. It should also include an environmental assessment of the working practices of those suppliers engaged in providing support or management services (including suppliers of outsourced / hosted services).

When suppliers are engaged there should also be specific targets set (where relevant) to limit the environmental activities associated with their provision of services. These environmental targets should be as integral part of the service contact as ‘traditional’ service quality targets.

Part of the on-going supplier management process will also be the on-going evaluation of supplier performance in terms of meeting any pre-defined environmental targets associated with the provision of their services.

Many organisations believe that if they outsource services to a third party organisation they have no further obligation to ensure the services are being provided / supported in an environmentally responsible way. The belief is that environmental responsibility has passed to the supplier. This is wrong. You as a customer and consumer of the services still have the overall responsibility to ensure that they are being provided and supported in an environmentally responsible (and acceptable) manner.

The above are just a few select examples of where we have used ITIL as an integral part of the Green IT improvement process. If you want to know more about how to use ITIL to both facilitate and promote Green IT please contact us at enquiries@Greenwise-IT.com