The industry’s green IT conversation has so far been dominated by tactical energy-efficiency and waste-reduction efforts. It’s past time for tech strategists to collaborate with sustainability execs in order to leverage technology’s “green” potential across the enterprise.

The intersection of IT and sustainability presents vendors a broad array of business opportunities that go far beyond improving the energy and carbon footprint of clients’ IT infrastructure. And these opportunities are ripening fast in the current economic and political situation as government spending is poised to stimulate green investments across a range of public and private infrastructure. The 2009 economic stimulus bill approved by the US Congress, for example, includes $11 billion in funding to modernize the national electric grid and almost $9 billion for improving energy efficiency in federal and military buildings and facilities.
It is time for IT industry strategists to organize their planning at the nexus of sustainability and information technology around two categories of opportunity, each made up of two elements (see Figure 1):

• Green for IT. This is the traditional “green IT 1.0″ world, which applies sustainability practices to a company’s IT operations and infrastructure. We divide this category of business opportunity further into two elements: 1) data center and facilities, and 2) distributed IT infrastructure.
• IT for Green. This is the new horizon of “green IT 2.0,” which applies information technology to improving the sustainability of company operations and society. Again, two elements define this category of opportunity: 1) business process and applications — supply chain, building automation, telework, and other business operations outside of IT, and 2) public infrastructure — capturing information technology’s role in creating efficient transportation systems, smart electric grids, and entire green communities built from scratch.

Figure 1: Green IT 2.0

As the opportunity to achieve sustainable business value shifts from green IT 1.0 toward 2.0, tech strategists and CSOs will:

• Improve the connection between tech execs and corporate eco-strategists that will be 2.0 drivers. While green IT 1.0 is largely an IT-driven planning and implementation exercise, the drivers of green IT 2.0 will hail from far outside the boundaries of the IT organization. Tech vendors and their sales partners must be comfortable speaking the language of the chief sustainability officer, the CFO, the corporate brand manager or CMO, and others for whom sustainability is becoming a strategic priority. Understanding their challenges and opportunities in environmental reporting, the costs and benefits of energy efficiency, or the green characteristics of their brand will be a prerequisite for IT suppliers to become partners in addressing green IT 2.0 opportunities.
• Create road maps for CIOs to tackle 2.0 challenges. For most tech companies, the IT organization is their customer beachhead. It will most often be with the blessing of the CIO and other IT leaders that tech vendors get opportunities to engage with the business sponsors that need “IT for green” capabilities. But most CIOs are not ready, and not eager, to become catalysts for enabling greener processes and practices throughout the organization. They don’t have the incentive structure, the organizational bandwidth, and, in many cases, the expertise to tackle the green IT 2.0 challenges for their companies. Vendors must lighten up on the big-picture vision and instead hone in on road maps that offer incremental steps for IT departments that will move them in the right direction.

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