What do Buildings and Sustainable IT have in common? Regulation!

When I tell people that I’m a Sustainable IT or Green IT expert, the immediate assumption is that I’m sort of techie and that gadgets, terabytes, server loads, redundancy, and disaster recovery are words that turn me on. But the truth is that apart from being very adept at troubleshooting my own PC – and now my Mac, a brief flirtation with C++ MANY, MANY moons ago and an occasionally dalliance in web development and html, I’m the furthest thing from a technical expert working in IT that you’ll probably find.

In fact, I started my career in IT at Fujitsu Services, where I was hired as the first of ten Innovation Consultants brought in to introduce leaner, sometimes disruptive practices and new ways of thinking into the company. The person who hired me, Marc Silvester, was particularly interested in my varied experience – which ranged from four years as a Smart Start Analyst at JPMorgan Chase, a teacher to learning disabled teenagers in Florida, a stint as a Project Manager and Coordinator for Biosphere 2, a highly successful environmental program that my alma mater, Columbia University once managed, to a half-finished Ph.D in Political Science and a very rewarding period as a Research Officer in Education at the University of London. This richness of experience means that I can draw on a variety of real-world experiences and approaches and apply them to new problems, questions, issues and areas of interest.

Yet even the variety in my professional life doesn’t fully capture the range of experiences that I sometimes bring to my work in IT. Take my interest in the built environment and real estate, for example. Very few people know of the many years I spent on construction sites with my father in Jamaica as he and my mother designed, built from the ground up, lived in for a few years then sold only to repeat the cycle all over again. I guess they were property developers long before the term was popularised! I have fond memories of that time and still have a fascination with blueprints, architects and yes – buildings.

So that explains why after participating in a 2degrees web forum linked to Cisco's Annual CIO Conference in San Diego till past midnight last Tuesday, I found myself sitting in a room at Linklaters on Silk Street at 8:30am waiting for the kick-off of a breakfast seminar titled “Climate, sustainability issues and real estate”.

As you might suspect, there were architects, representatives of construction firms – large and small, some folks from private equity firms and strategy consultancies, and me – the lone representative of IT.

I think the lack of representation of IT in seminars like this one is indicative of the inability of many IT firms to engage with topics and in areas that are outside their comfort zone. Yet this inability to engage is – I think – a huge missed opportunity. And I’ll tell you why – because while IT is a huge contributor to the emissions of buildings, well-designed, properly procured, well-run IT estates can play a significant role in helping organisations to reduce the emissions of buildings. And while – with the exception of some notable legislation – there is little regulation to stipulate efficiency standards around IT specifically, IT will ultimately be affected by legislation in other areas.

I’ll give you a few examples. At this seminar, the speakers Vanessa Havard-Williams (who is the Global Head of Environment at Linklaters) and her colleagues ran though a raft of legislation – current, draft and future -- that affects buildings. For example, Mayor Boris Johnson’s draft of the London Plan calls for a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2025; some new planning guidance calls for developments to achieve BREEAM Very Good Standard and continue to maintain that standard, which has implications for – among other things – energy usage in buildings. Part L of the Building Regulations aims to achieve zero carbon homes by 2016 and zero carbon non-domestic buildings by 2019.

It is expected that much of the reduction in CO2 emissions will be achieved through the reduction in energy use and an increase in energy efficiency, areas in which IT has a role to play. Interestingly, the proposed changes to Part L, which would come into force in October 2010 include:

• a further 25% incremental increase in energy efficiency
• energy efficiency requirements that apply to all building spaces where energy is used to condition indoor climate and not just those areas used for human comfort

What this means is that if the proposals are accepted, the New Building Regulations would also impose energy efficiency requirements on server rooms and potentially, on datacentres. Server rooms and datacentres, and the IT equipment in them would need to be more energy efficient, dissipate less heat and require less cooling. There are also significant implications for areas in buildings with large, concentrated IT requirements – think trading floors. The proposed changes to Part L would have the greatest implication for equipment manufacturers, but also, huge implications for IT Services companies like mine, Computacenter, who often operate server rooms and datacentres on customers’ behalf. As Huw Baker, the Linklaters Construction attorney noted, the desire of some large clients to move from their old premises into new ones is often driven by their need to cope with the ever-increasing capacity requirements of their IT systems.

And we haven’t even mentioned CRC! Clearly, IT is part of the problem. However, what’s clear to me is that IT has a significant role to play in delivering part of the solution. There’s clearly a need for innovative thinking here. Even though it isn’t part of my job title anymore, I for one am playing an active road in getting the IT industry to recognise and seize the opportunities. I believe that the first step on any road to innovation is understanding – awareness of the scale of the problem and the size of the opportunity. Over the next few months, I’ll be doing just that at Computacenter with a Green IT roadmap and a series of thought leadership pieces that I’ve been asked to put together. Which means I’ll be going to even more of these Linklaters seminars! Next one is 3 November 2009 on Carbon Capture and Storage.