Microsoft UK Public Sector - Efficiency - Greening IT for the public sector

The government’s targets for a reduction in carbon emissions are onerous – but essential. We all know that the way we conduct our business has to change. Not only can technology deliver well over 50% of that target, but, as Kim Thomas explains, it can do so without forcing the painful changes in working practices which have held back so many environmental initiatives.

A 26% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020: that’s the legally binding target the UK government has set for the entire country. To achieve this requires some tough thinking about how we can reduce the amount of energy we waste – not least in government itself.

A good place to start is in the areas which are generally agreed to contribute the most to our carbon usage. “The key elements to measuring your carbon footprint are energy, waste and travel,” says Sue Welland, founder of The Carbon Neutral Company, which helps organisations calculate - and reduce - their carbon footprints. That means doing an audit of things like where the most electricity is being used, how much paper and packaging is being discarded and how much fuel is being spent in business travel.

According to analyst firm Gartner, IT is responsible for two percent of carbon emissions. So a good start on tackling that electricity bill is to be less profligate in our use of IT - by not leaving PCs switched on overnight, for example, or working to reduce the number of documents that end up being printed.

A policy requiring users to turn off their PCs can be hard to enforce, but technology can help. Windows Vista, for example, has more than 30 power management features that are switched on by default (earlier versions of Windows had some of these features, but users had to choose to switch them on). Charles Eales, head of public sector relations at Microsoft, explains: “In Vista, if I leave my computer, after a period of time it will automatically go into ‘Sleep’ mode and use very little electricity, whereas a standard PC will be running a screensaver or sitting there waiting for me to do something. Vista will do it for an individual PC but it also lets the group administrator do it for a whole organisation. That sort of group policy driven IT can deliver significant savings.”

How significant? Well, an independent study showed that by upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista, an organisation with 200 desktop PCs could reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 45 tonnes a year, and cut its electricity costs by an estimated £46 per PC per year.

Carbon-conscious organisations will also want to look at their data centres – another major source of wasted energy. Most servers operate at a grossly inefficient 10% of capacity. Power management software can help make servers more efficient, by making sure that the amount of power they use decreases as their workload decreases.

But many businesses have found that the most effective way of cutting emissions in the data centre is to adopt virtualisation technology, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V. This allows multiple ‘virtual’ servers to reside on one physical server, and so to do the work of what was previously several physical servers. Virtualised servers therefore generally operate at a much more efficient 50% of capacity.

This means fewer servers, which in turn means less electricity to run them, and a reduction in the amount of air-conditioning needed to cool them. And, at a time when the size of the server farm may be getting out of hand, virtualisation can remove the need to find new buildings in which to house servers. Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom says, “The rapid payback [from virtualisation] is phenomenal.” Perth & Kinross council would agree: as a result of its virtualisation programme, it expects to use 350,000-kilowatt hours fewer of electricity a year, which translates into an annual cost saving of £26,000.

Government organisations that outsource large chunks of their IT operation may feel that the opportunity for making it more efficient is limited. But you can exert control by requiring outsourcers to specify the actions they are taking to reduce their own carbon emissions. Are they:

• implementing virtualisation on servers
• using free-air cooling systems in their data centres
• buying hardware that is compliant with the Energy Star standard for electrical devices
• complying with the EU’s Code of Conduct on Data Centres’ Energy Efficiency, which specifies best practice for datacentre owners

All this is important. But to see IT simply as a problem would be a mistake – it’s also part of the solution. While you can make savings by reducing your emissions from IT, you can make far greater savings by using IT intelligently – as a lever to cut emissions elsewhere. Travel, in particular should be in the sights of environmentally conscious IT managers, as, according to Welland, it accounts for 25% of the UK’s carbon footprint.

Take Wakefield Metropolitan Council. Through its Worksmart programme, the Council has reduced its office space by 40% by introducing remote working and hotdesking – underpinned by a communication and collaboration system based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Worksmart has enabled many council staff to work from home, at least part of the time. As a result Wakefield has reduced the number of administrative buildings from 34 to six, and so dramatically cut its heating and lighting bills. But it has also meant that people who work from home no longer use up fuel in commuting to work. In one department alone – the e-Services unit – 81% of employees now work from home some of the time, between them saving 127,000 commuting miles, 35 tons of carbon dioxide each year. As a bonus, productivity has improved by 15%. “Staff like the idea of having more flexibility and being able to work in a more mobile way that fits their lifestyle,” says Eales.

Much business travel isn’t strictly necessary, but organisations have been reluctant to abandon it because of the perceived value of face-to-face meetings over phone meetings or videoconferences. But a number of collaborative tools are now available that make it possible for distant business colleagues to work together effectively – often as though they were in the same room.

Sharepoint, for example, enables employees to store and work on documents in a central repository, regardless of where they are based. New desktop conferencing technologies are sophisticated enough to give a real collaborative experience. Microsoft’s Live Meeting solution, used in conjunction with Roundtable, its high-resolution videoconferencing software, replicates the feel of a face-to-face meeting: remote participants can share files or electronic whiteboard space, while having a panoramic view of all the attendees. Carmaker Volvo, which now uses Roundtable and Live Meeting to conduct many of its business meetings remotely, estimates that it is saving 900 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions per month.

At the same time, the ‘presence’ functionality of a unified communications solution such as Office Communications Server (OCS) enables employees to see if a colleague is available for a phone call or a chat on Instant Messenger. The analyst firm Forrester estimates that simply by implementing Microsoft’s unified communications technology, organisations could cut travel costs by 10-20% a year.

According to Welland, it’s relatively easy for organisations to reduce emissions by about 20%. “Beyond that,” she says, “you need to make some quite striking changes.” And as Wakefield Council has found, those striking changes can lead to equally striking rewards.

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Kim Thomas is a freelance journalist, who specialises in writing about technology, business and education. Her clients include the Financial Times, the Economist Intelligence Unit and The Guardian as well as a number of B2B publications.