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This week I’m off to the Green IT Expo at the QEII con­fer­ence cen­tre in Lon­don and have been giv­ing some thought to what I hope to get out of it. On one level, I think we’re doing a pretty good job here at Ban­ner — we’ve addressed many of the obvi­ous issues (waste, recy­cling, power con­sump­tion etc), but there is always room to take things a step fur­ther and make improvements.

This got me think­ing about the sub­ject of ‘green IT’ and more broadly, ‘green busi­ness’ and the back­drop against which we make deci­sions and for­mu­late pol­icy.

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Chan­nel Reg­is­ter is car­ry­ing a story about some new For­rester research into IT buy­ers’ atti­tudes to greener products.

In a sur­vey of 124 IT buy­ers in North Amer­ica and Europe, they found good news in that 85% said green fac­tors are impor­tant. How­ever only 25% had writ­ten green cri­te­ria into pur­chases and only 15% were aware of ven­dors’ green initiatives.

For­rester senior vice pres­i­dent Christo­pher Mines said:

We heard two rea­sons why green mat­ters: effi­ciency and cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­ity. Most IT decision-makers told us that a green pur­chase would only hap­pen in the con­text of cost reduc­tion. These are hard-headed, ROI-driven busi­ness deci­sions.

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I pre-ordered World­chang­ing’s User’s Guide for the 21st Cen­tury some time back and promptly for­got about it (as you do). Then, last week, the Ama­zon fairy came and every spare minute since has seen my nose buried in it.

It’s a book that empha­sises the dire sit­u­a­tion the world finds itself in but is then both inspi­ra­tional and prac­ti­cal in chart­ing a path for­ward. From the introduction:

If we face an unprece­dented plan­e­tary cri­sis, we also find our­selves in a moment of inno­va­tion unlike any that has come before… Humanity’s fate rests on the out­come of the race between prob­lem solvers and the prob­lems them­selves. The world is get­ting bet­ter – we just have to make sure it gets bet­ter faster than it gets worse.

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