Government CIOs lead green IT charge

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 12:42

IT Industry - Market

Federal government agencies are further advanced in terms of the march towards Green IT than their private sector counterparts – and three quarters of all agencies have appointed someone to be accountable for green IT – most often the CIO.

Fujitsu’s Green IT – the State of the Nation report released in Canberra today indicates that to some extent government agencies have been aided in the march to greener IT by the relatively large scale of their IT operations which has allowed them to benefit from Green IT strategies such as data centre consolidation and virtualisation. But attitudinal surveying has also revealed that there are fewer climate change sceptics among the ranks of Government CIOs than there are in either the population at large or among private sector CIOs.

While 52% of average Australians say they are very concerned about climate change, and 47% of all ICT managers are similarly concerned, a whopping 65% of Government ICT managers expressed “extreme concern” about the issue.

The report’s authors sheet home this greater than average concern about climate change to  the “better education” of Government IT managers and the release a year ago of the Gershon report which tackled the issue of the Government’s carbon footprint related to its use of IT.

Conducted earlier this month on behalf of Fujitsu Australia by Connection Research, the survey used a methodology developed by Connection Research and RMIT which has been designed to generate a Green Readiness Index which allows different organisations and sectors to be compared.

Alison O’Flynn, director of sustainability for Fujitsu, said that this report follows on from a survey released earlier this year which explored private sector attitudes to Green IT. Dubbed Green IT – the Convenient Truth, that report found that much of the motivation to adopt Green IT approaches in the private sector was motivated by a desire to cut costs.

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