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Green Government

The ABCs of designing green ICT projects

By Johanna Morden | 11 May 2011

While overall planning for more eco-friendly government IT certainly warrants applauses, Chris Chant, Interim Executive Director for Digital Government at the UK Cabinet Office, believes that public organisations should not wait for this before doing their bit.

“Start with focusing on what you can do here and now, focusing on what is big, and focusing on what is obvious,” said Chant, who emphasised that these initiatives would not only serve the purpose of directly reducing carbon emissions, but also change the mindset of civil servants and the general public.

He noted that green initiatives could be as simple as ordering its security guards to shut down machines that were left on running during off hours.

“The most important, and obvious, thing in greening IT is to make sure you are only doing what you need to do, only using what you need to use,” he said.

For Chant, overconsumption spells a real difficulty for an agency that is trying to be green. “The situation we know now is that the carbon impact of a typical ICT product in production is fat greater than its use,” he said.

Historically, government offices have purchased lots of devices which are not fully used, both in offices and data centres. Chant encouraged organisations to have the lowest number of devices or printers possible.

The UK government has had a ratio of 1.6 to 1.9 devices per person.

Chant also highlighted the importance of organisations printing in the most sustainable way. Many consider the use of recycled paper a great green initiative. However, the environmental benefits achieved by doing so is negligible when compared to the overall carbon impact of the actual production and transportation of paper.

“It is important to use recycled, but only when you really need to print,” he said.

For an organisation to succeed green-wise, Chant recommended it to cut their consumption through fewer devices, fewer data centres, and more sharing of services.

“Rather than build a new service, it is better to reuse existing services,” he said. “Repurpose them, make small adjustments, rather than build completely new systems elsewhere.”

Two major green initiatives are ongoing within the UK government. The first one is cloud computing, which lowers down the carbon impact by maximising efficiency. Chant said while green IT was not the main purpose of adopting the cloud, the potential of lowering carbon emissions by having shared platform should not be neglected.

Another initiative of the UK government is the Green ICT Workbook for state departments, which contains a set of guidelines that enables departments to assess what practices they can adopt to green their facilities and operations.

Recently, an updated version of the Workbook was recently distributed to departments all over the UK. Chant said this was well received because of the ‘clarity’ and ‘simplicity’, which allowed departments to quickly make assessments and act upon them.

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