One of my clients, an IT director, asked me a very interesting question this week: "Can cloud computing be called a green initiative?" My instant answer was: "It could." Not a straight answer, but enough for us to get into a conversation of whether cloud computing was a green IT enabler.

Cloud computing is certainly a hot topic at the moment. Oracle’s recent purchase of Sun points to the fact that more major players in the IT industry are focusing on providing business applications. Salesforce, which is one of the largest in the cloud computing space for business applications, will soon find itself with more competitors.

With all the talk in the news at the moment around Google entering, in beta form at least, the smart grid/power meter market, I thought it would be a good opportunity to provide some details of my experience using a smart meter.

Having spent a significant amount of time researching and reading around the subject of smart metering for the work I undertook for the World Economic forum, I decided to purchase a Wattson—one of the first consumer-type devices in the market. First off, it is a very smart-looking device that can be left anywhere in the house, providing a changing color display and LED readout. I have mine in my home office/study area so when I am working from home I can keep an eye on what is happening.

The ability to wonder about our future, to see it and to plan to achieve that vision, gives us the energy and focus to make it happen. Therefore, our actions reflect our will to achieve that vision; to bring the future into the present. I'd like to offer one vision for the green workplace.

It’s Monday morning, 6 or 7 a.m., your solar systems at home detect the presence of the sun and automatically opens the windows and shifts your energy source at home to use the energy from the great star. By the way, the energy company installed the all solar equipment at your house for free (via the tax credits it got from the government), and you get an additional credit—money back if you use the energy company’s “black box” that manages your house’s electricity usage, making sure you use energy when it’s most needed, for the best price and coming from the cleanest sources. Your energy plans are now like the mobile bills—you get the most of what is best for you.

Every article or note I have been reading through these days focuses on how hard 2008 was and makes predictions for 2009. One thing we can certainly predict is that 2009 is going to be a challenging year with economy issues to address, climate changes and—especially here in the United States—the expectations we have for America’s just-elected president.

2009 is also the year that the Kyoto protocol (which sets targets for cutting carbon-dioxide emission) will be reviewed—and hopefully replaced—by a more effective plan to tackle climate changes and gas emissions. On November 30, 2009, Copenhagen will host the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference, hopefully defining a better strategy to tackle global warming.

I read a great article in The Register this week regarding a data center strategy that is potentially being followed by Microsoft. The concept of putting loads[1] of servers into a metal box and shipping it to a data center park may seem odd to some, but I think it really has legs as a concept. You only have to drive down Route I95 in New Jersey to see that containers are pretty good at being stacked and ideal for international shipping.

What really grabbed me in the article was the concept of four generations of data centers with a focus on uptime, energy efficiency, modularity and mobility as the key characteristics of each generation—with the new model mentioned above being the fourth generation. I think that this is an interesting model to use when talking with clients but two things really struck me.

Computers have certainly changed the way we do a lot of things: how we work, shop, chat, collaborate and, nowadays, even make friends or find the love of your life. We always hear about their new upgrades, new features, enhancements, and in the end we get really anxious for these powerful devices to come so we can buy them and replace our old or obsolete ones.

What is really interesting, though, is that there is little or no information available on how PCs are built, and moreover, what we should do when they get old or obsolete. If you are a corporate user, it is very likely now that your hardware provider offers you a recycle/disposal program for your hardware—well, if you don’t have such a program, I suggest you look for one. But if you are a regular consumer, you probably don’t know about this, don’t know what to do with your obsolete PC. You probably first store it at home and later dispose of it in a regular trash can so it goes to one of a myriad of landfills. Is this a problem? YES.

A few years ago, as I was shouting to my kids to "turn off the TV when you're not in the room!" I started wondering how big a deal it really was. Did I need to focus my personal conservation efforts elsewhere? Turns out the little LCD light on the TV only draws about 1/20 the power of my basement lights. So, we still turn everything off we're not using, but now I know that forgetting to turn off the basement lights overnight equates to about four months of regular use of the little TV.

We're going through a similar thought process at Accenture where we have asked our colleagues to help "turn off the basement lights.”

In its October 11-17 edition, The Economist published an article essentially stating that we are finally moving in the direction of the paperless office. This is really great news, but why we are just starting to move in that direction when the concept has been around since 2001? Perhaps it’s because green initiatives are on top of the CIO agenda for companies? Or because workflow systems are more efficient? Cheaper? Easier to use? Not at all. These factors are part of the change; but the main contributor can be attributed to our changing workforce–the next-generation workforce.

As I wrote in one of my earlier posts, The Next Generation Workforce; the new workforce is digital, online and virtual. It does not want to use paper—as a matter of fact, the less paper the better. To members of this new workforce, it’s strange to see individuals print their e-mails, read them and then respond electronically. It may seem nothing, but if you take into account how many people print several e-mails a day every day, you soon realize that this practice costs thousands of dollars, several trees and a lot of waste to process and recycle—if it is recycled at all.

After having worked in Green IT within Accenture over the past 18 months, it’s clear that one of the main challenges is the difference in approach required by each of the geographies in which we operate. Working out of the United Kingdom, it is far too easy to take a view that what is happening locally is the view that is held by all of our clients, irrespective of where they are located or do business. While there are clearly some common themes—one being the current financial climate—much of the discussion around Green IT is driven by local influences.

To provide a snapshot of these differences I decided to ask four experts from the global team a set of common questions. Although not scientific in its approach, this exercise should at least provide an overview of some of the challenges that our international clients are facing when attempting to set a green agenda.

A lot has been written about the next-generation workforce: what it’s like and what a company needs to do to attract and, more importantly, keep it. Although old, there's an interesting article about younger, tech-savvy new workers in the September 19, 2006, issue of The Financial Times "They are the future—and they’re coming to a workplace near you." Only subscribers may access the full article, but there is a preview.

Bottom line, these new workers live online and are driven by results. They know how to use video conferencing, audio conferencing and any collaboration services needed to get work done. They are more than familiar with using software as a service (SaaS)—in many interviews with junior candidates applying for their first job in Accenture, I found that many of them did their final college work/thesis using Google Docs, sharing and reviewing it with their mentors online.

I recently read a very interesting article on Dave Ohara's Green Data Center blog about the measurement of Google's data center efficiency. It started me thinking about how the industry can move beyond the number of niche metrics that are in use today.

The famous quote often attributed to management guru Peter Drucker—"What gets measured gets managed"—is having a major impact on green IT. While many in the industry can see that there are benefits in changing IT systems to reduce power requirements, one needs an idea of the expected benefits to understand where changes should be made.

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to present Accenture's point of view on Green IT to an audience at the European Symantec Vision event. The key concept is that green IT is not simply about buying new hardware but should actually be about changing the way in which IT is used within the business. I introduced the topic with the example of a merger (clearly a very topical issue in the financial sector at present) to explain what I mean. The new organization would have two e-mail systems running on two sets of server hardware. Should the organization refresh this hardware to make it more efficient—or should it begin by rationalizing its applications?*

Discussions following the presentation took a very different direction than they normally do—in part because the people in the audience were not infrastructure specialists, but in a number of cases had come from the desktop/security side of the organization. Rather than thinking about the typical organization, we started talking about how the beginning of virtual technology-delivery organizations (as mentioned in my previous post on cloud computing) will support a move to much more efficient IT services, where niche organizations will be used to deliver specific services.

Did you buy the line that size does not matter? Well, when it comes to thin clients, the answer is yes, it does. You’re probably familiar with the concept of a thin client already: essentially, they operate in the same way as the old dummy terminals. What you may not have realized is that by making your IT more efficient, they can make your organization greener—and reduce costs. Let’s start with some facts supported by recent studies.

A study published in 2006 by the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT, in Oberhausen, Germany, shows that thin clients consume much less energy than the PCs—at least half has much and sometimes even three or four times less. This is still true even when one considers the energy required to run and cool the back-end server that supports the thin devices. Thin clients are also cheaper than a PC: some may even cost less than US$100; which can have a considerable financial impact because, in some countries, an item that costs that much is not even required to be depreciated over years.

Over the past couple of weeks the blogosphere has been buzzing with news about the deployment of a number of highly efficient data-centers based on containerization.

Much of the news has focused on the work undertaken by Microsoft in Chicago, where containers housing hundreds (if not thousands) of servers with associated uninterruptible power supply and air cooling have been brought on line. These containers clearly show what is possible when the rule book is thrown away, and power and cooling experts start from scratch without legacy facilities to consider. The numbers associated with efficiency look very good and demonstrate that when real thought is put into the design, the IT industry is able to change the game from green and cost viewpoint.

When you see someone throwing an empty plastic bottle on the street, or on the park grass, you will probably be really mad, ask that person to pick it up and put it in the trash can. One of the potential reasons is that you may think, “If everyone starts to do this, we will have a big problem on our hands—dirty streets and additional cleaning costs, to mention just two.”

Another person may think: “All this because of one empty plastic bottle. What difference will this make? It is just one!” Well, we all know the answer to this, and the correct way to do it. What we haven’t realized yet is that we can, and better yet should, apply some of this thinking to the way we currently use our PCs.

Green IT means so many things to so many people. For some, it is all about the data center—changing servers to be more energy efficient and reducing the power draw from the cooling equipment. For others, it is focused on changing the configuration options on the desktops deployed across the enterprise.

From the discussions that I’ve had with our clients, industry partners and within Accenture—together with research—there are some very different views within the marketplace. Each industry area and geography has thrown up different ideas and agendas; some rushing to change their energy requirements as quickly as they could, while others have taken a much more cautious view of the whole green marketing bandwagon.