CIO's role in delivering green buildings

Not so long ago green IT was hot property. CIOs who had introduced energy-guzzling hardware were keen to get the kudos for reducing electricity bills by switching the hardware off again and replacing it with something more efficient.

Now sentiment is changing: analyst firm Forrester Research has gone as far as to issue a report asking, ‘Is Green IT Your Emperor With No Clothes?’ and Gartner has voiced concerns about “greenwash”. The CIO’s contribution to greening the IT estate has become a given and CIOs ahead of the curve are looking beyond green IT and towards leveraging the IT infrastructure to control the building environment, from heating to air-conditioning and ventilation through CCTV and access control.

Rakesh Kumar, Gartner research vice president, says, “A small but select group of CIOs, probably about less than five per cent of the clients that we deal with, realise that their responsibility lies in being able to green the entire business.

“We are at the start of that curve as the CIO becomes the technology arbiter and gatekeeper of appropriate and relevant tools to be used in the rest of the business because there is no one else able to evaluate them in the same way.”

Kumar believes it is critical that CIOs start looking at this now. “If part of the organisation starts bringing in tools that may not be compatible with tools in other parts of the company, we start down that horrible minefield of integration,” he says.

“It is a little bit like the Wild West with people coming out with point technologies. Then we have the added complexity that the marketing is slightly [away] from the reality of the products.”

At BT, CIO Al-Noor Ramji says, “In tough economic times intelligent building management can play a key role in delivering whilst reducing costs. Green IT should to my mind have become business-as-usual for any CIO.”

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