Green scene: our new column on the growing importance of green IT

With green issues becoming ever more important, the NHS Resource Centre has asked journalist and green-IT specialist Andrew Donoghue to write a series of bi-monthly columns on greener IT and what users can do to reduce their carbon footprint while working with new technology.

In his first column, Andrew argues that developing new approaches to sustainable IT will require NHS organistions to challenge established relationships with vendors and service providers.

Vendors sell things. Customers buy them. It’s a simple allocation of responsibilities in which everybody knows their place. The basic idea is that one party comes up with a great idea for a great product and the other comes up with the cash to buy it.

While this might hold for most High Street or commodity transactions, things are a little bit more complicated when it comes to business-to-business deals. Most vendors, especially in the IT arena, like to talk about selling solutions rather than products.

Their customers have a problem and they have a set of services, software and hardware that can solve it. To come up with these solutions, vendors are keen to point out how much they want to listen. 'We’re the company that listens to our customers' is a common mantra.

Beware greenwash

The degree to which the customer and vendor relationship is a truly two way affair depends on a lot of factors. An important one is the maturity of the subject area. Sustainable and low-carbon approaches to IT are issues that are still very much in an emerging state. As such, there should be a lot of dialogue between customers and vendors as to how needs can be met in an environmentally friendly way. 

However, while there is certainly a lot of noise being made around green IT, the issue is plagued by a problem that tends to accompany any new or emerging trend. Namely, some vendors aren't interested in developing new products to meet the new gap in the market; some just want to use the momentum to sell products they have had around for ages.

In the green arena, the accompanying marketing gobbledegook has come to be known as “greenwash.” Depending on the size of the marketing budget and the brains behind it, greenwash can be easy to spot or virtually impossible to untangle from true sustainability.

Ask awkward questions

The best form of defence against greenwash is attack. Sustainable IT specialists believe that organisations such as the NHS - with its enormous budget and buying power - are ideally placed to bring the agenda back on track.

They argue that the NHS should not only be buying sustainable technology but actually pushing green IT concepts to vendors. IT providers should be encouraged to develop products that are not only energy efficient when operating - as many are at the moment - but energy efficient during production and disposal. 

According to a recent study conducted at the United Nations University in Tokyo, 75 per cent of the fossil fuel consumption of the average PC has happened before it is even switched on for the first time. The same study showed that the manufacture of one PC requires about 1.7 tonnes of raw materials and water; and ten times the computer's weight in fossil fuels.

Clearly the idea that large organisations should be helping to set the agenda around green IT makes sense. However, the problem with applying this thinking to the health service is that it isn't “one organisation” in the strictest sense.

Indeed, a recent report from Assist, which represents health care IT professionals, claimed that one of the problems with the National Programme for IT in the NHS is that it was based on the idea that the NHS is one cohesive organisation – a bit like a bank – when patently it isn’t.

Yet, challenging as it might be for organisations like the NHS Sustainable Development Unit to get procurement around IT aligned across the health service, it's a vital step if the NHS is to meet its commitment to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. 

Start working with vendors

The best companies are those that really deliver on their commitment to listen to customers, as they are the ones that realise they don't have all the answers themselves. Climate change is rewriting a lot of the rules around procurement, cost and efficiency.

Only when customers are prepared to sell their ideas hard, and vendors are happy to buy into meeting them, can we hope to get truly sustainable solutions to climate change.