Enterprise IT organizations should think about how they can support green strategies across the company, and not just in IT, says research firm Ovum.

 

Many green initiatives can actually reduce costs and boost the bottom line and IT has a major role to play in supporting these practices.

 

“Most CIOs have looked at sustainability through the narrow lens of ‘green IT’ – the energy consumption and CO2 emissions directly tied to computing and communications,” said Warren Wilson, an Ovum senior analyst.

 

“What they’re missing is the critical role that IT can play in supporting green practices across the entire organization.”

 

He said sustainable practices required constant monitoring and analysis- “a data-intensive process and one that is very similar to… enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI).”

 

“Then, when you consider that companies will increasingly have to calculate and report the carbon footprint of products across their entire life cycle, the challenge becomes one of extended supply chain management (SCM), reaching all the way back to raw materials at their source and all the way forward to the product’s eventual disposal, reuse or recycling,” Wilson said. 

 

The selection, deployment and management of ERP, BI and SCM solutions is largely the CIO’s responsibility. Broadening these solutions to encompass sustainability should be the CIO’s job as well, but so far few have risen to the challenge, Wilson noted.

 

Most organizations are still in the early stages of understanding how to develop and implement sustainable practices.

 

“This leaves a leadership vacuum that CIOs are well positioned to fill.” They have an important role in determining how, when and how well their organizations succeed in adopting greener practices.