Hitting green targets

Davison: Carbon offsetting should be a last resort

It has been a little over a year since the cabinet office published its Greening Government ICT report, a strategy to enable the public sector to meet its green targets.

The government will soon announce that 10 of the targets are to become mandated to further strengthen their commitment to environmentally friendly IT. But what do the targets really mean, and how will organisations put them into practice?

It is estimated that IT will be responsible for three per cent of global emissions by 2020. In 2006, the Prime Minister set out new targets for Sustainable Operations on the Government estate (SOGE).

Key objectives included:

*energy consumption in all government departments must be carbon-neutral by 2012;

*extend the lifecycle of all IT purchases to their natural demise as opposed to automatic refresh and replacement;

*reduce the overall number of PCs and laptops used by the organisation to reach close to a 1:1 ratio; and

*see offsetting as a last resort and only through accredited schemes in line with Defra’s code of best practice.

When the Green ICT Working Group ­ part of the CIO Council ­ reports on the programme’s first-year performance, it will be interesting to see what progress has been made, and what plans are in place to ensure the government hits its targets.

Actions advocated by the strategy to achieve the SOGE goals include: enabling active power management; specifying low-power consumption CPUs and high-
efficiency power supply units; applying thin client technology; and using server optimisation techniques.

Already, Defra (one of the lead government departments on the green strategy) has decided against adopting thin client technology ­ less than a year after it was identified as a way of greening government IT.

Defra felt the extra cooling needed in central server halls would use up too much power. It was also under pressure from staff to retain its laptop estate: the department is more progressive when it comes to home working, with 11,520 staff registered and equipped for remote access.

Re-educating staff
However, if any department wants to hit green targets, there must be workforce education to change staff’s attitudes towards thin terminals. The fact is that if you work at your desk most of the time, you are not a mobile worker and do not need a laptop.

Occasional home workers can use remote access tools for access to applications and the office server. Road warriors may be better equipped with a Blackberry, iPhone or PDA -- ­ many of which can now provide direct access to desktop applications, and all of which use less energy than a laptop.

It will take time for the cultural change to occur, but green computing is possible, and within government’s grasp.

There is also reluctance from the major systems integrators (SIs) to move to thin client models.

While some SIs have created solutions based around thin client computing for the public sector, a large proportion of their revenue comes from break/fix (stuff
breaks, we fix it) work on existing government systems.

Bringing maintenance in-house
Thin client computing reduces the need for such extensive break/fix support: there are massive efficiency gains and energy savings to be made moving to a ‘hub and spoke’ model, where data is centralised and pushed out to devices as required.

It also means problems can usually be solved centrally, too, reducing the need for engineer call-outs and therefore lowering the department’s carbon footprint.

Despite reluctance from some departments and suppliers, thin client computing remains the best way to reduce energy use from PCs, and has been advocated by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).

Following the success of thin client implementations with smaller public se ctor bodies, such as the Rural Payments Agency, in May the DWP committed to switching 75 per cent of its PC estate to thin clients.

For the transition to be a success, the DWP must recognise that a change in people’s working practices can cause disruption. People get tied to their computers, but hot-desking is essential in reaching the government’s efficiency targets. The change needs to be handled sensitively and time allowed for both training on the technology and the potential impact on work patterns.

To fully realise the energy savings promised by culling fat client machines, careful project management by both the technology provider and internal team is essential. Hopefully DWP’s success in this area will inspire other government departments to
do the same.

Mark Davison is head of public sector business at Getronics