Energy Consumption as Key Employee Performance Metric

An article published earlier this year titled "Green carrots needed for IT chiefs" by Tim Ferguson on silicon.com has raised the issue of IT department's not being fiscally responsible for the energy consumption of their equipment.  We often come across the complaint from facility managers that IT managers are not motivated to implement energy saving programs because it does not affect their budget positively (generally there is a cost and the benefits are gained by another department).  The article points to a survey completed by Quocirca that found "less than one in five IT decision makers have responsibility for the electricity bill, with 54 percent never made aware of it.¹"  Principle analyst, Dennis Szubert, suggested that data centre managers would be more likely to improve efficiency if they had to pay the bills.  

While we agree there is a need for increased visibility and knowledge sharing, we believe that rather than using a "stick" approach and transferring energy budgets to IT managers, this can be accomplished by incenting decision makers and employees to take on the challenge.   We recommend including energy consumption as a key performance metric for employee performance and rewarding employees for creative ideas that meet the objectives of reducing global impact.  In addition, segregating the budgets between IT and facilities departments will not encourage the cross-functional, innovative solutions that could have a greater impact on the over impact.

Szubert also points out that many businesses develop a charge-back method for energy consumption that is linked to floor space.  We agree that this certainly doesn't help business units understand the actual impact of their operation specifically for IT-related energy consumption.  By having IT decisions makers armed with accurate knowledge of the footprint of the assets for each business unit, they can significantly influence decisions about architecture and provide business units with options that would have a lower impact.  This, however, we believe can be accomplished without transferring budgets.  Again by including energy consumption or footprint metrics in all employees performance reviews, we can encourage a company-wide effort to come up with solutions.

Let's encourage the whole IT department to work with the business units and facilities departments to come up with the best combined solutions to reduce the overal energy consumption and environmental impact.

Are you looking for more information on how to implement Green IT?  Check out our comprehensive, step-by-step guide to implementing Green IT in our Green IT Guide and Toolkit.

References

1.  Freguson, Tim. "Green carrots needed for IT chiefs", available on-line here.