Green IT 2.0 – people, not technology

Don’t you just hate the jargon and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that the ICT industry seems unable to do without? 

I guess most of us have come across one TLA we didn’t recognise at some time.  Try looking it up in Wikipedia and you’ll discover there are 10 or 20 possible meanings.  Why didn’t they just make it clear in the first place?

So it is with green IT 2.0.

What they mean is that green IT is starting to move outside the ICT department itself, specifically the data centre, into the other areas of the organisation where the application of ICT can reduce emissions.

You can see the logic – it follows on from web 2.0, where the internet itself entered a different phase of adoption and use.  But in the case of web 2.0 there were specific technologies behind the move.  The appearance of wikis, blogs, social networks, podcasting, RSS, multimedia sharing, online collaboration tools, etc, all supported by the rapid growth of broadband, created a new internet environment.

In the case of green IT, nothing has changed.  The means to help reduce emissions across an organisation has always been there.  It is not the ICT that’s changing but the external pressures on companies.  As we come out of recession, as carbon legislation bites, as carbon costs increase and as society as a whole puts pressure on companies to reduce emissions, so green ICT will grow rapidly.  It’s starting to happen now.

There is new technology that will help green ICT, but growth is much more dependent on people.