Simply Green -- A Few Steps in the Right Direction toward Integrating Sustainability into Public...

Simply GreenA Fe w S t e p s i n t h e R ig h t D ire c t i o n t o wa rd I n t e g ra t i ng S u st a i n a b il i t y i n t o Pu b l ic S e c t o r IT

A G r e e n P a p e r f r o m t h e C e n t e r f o r D i g i t a l G o v e r n m e n t

2 Simply Green

Executive Summary: Simple Steps 4

Introduction: Occam’s Razor 6

Step 1: Rules and Regulations 8

Step 2: Operational Optimization 13

Step 3: Acquisition and Disposal of Technology 17

Step 4: Home as the New Workplace 19

Conclusion: Stepping up to Simple Steps 21

Endnotes 22

Table of Contents

4 Simply Green

Executive Summary: Simple Steps“The question of how you persuade people that [climate change and sustainability] is to do with them is a very interesting one…. We need to know whether people’s at-titudes are the consequence of ignorance, disbelief or per-sonal self-interest and inertia. Even among those who do know about climate change, there is a yawning gap be-tween what people say and what they do. I don’t think there is any simple answer.”

John Leaman, Former Head of Research, Ipsos MORI Environment Research Team1

There may be no single, simple answer to the com-plex issue of climate change. Yet there are simple steps that the public sector IT community can take in responding to renewed concerns about environ-mental sustainability while institutionalizing greater efficiencies into its operations.

Those simple steps are the focus of this “green paper” — published primarily as a downloadable digital document with its hardbound version printed on post-consumer recycled paper — from the Center for Digital Government.

The naming of Simply Green was a deliberate choice. Simplicity confronts complexity, and there is more than enough of that to go around when thinking about the public policy implications of sustainability, global climate change, governments’ carbon footprint — the impact on the environment measured in units of carbon dioxide — and the so-called “greening” of IT.2

Consider that, with Al Gore’s climate change trifecta of a Nobel Peace Prize, an Academy Award for “An

Inconvenient Truth” and the Live Earth concerts, 2007 may be best remembered as a tipping point in envi-ronmental consciousness, complete with considerable attention to the greening of IT.

For his part, author Thomas L. Friedman, whose major works on globalization — The Lexis and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat — became recom-mended or even required reading in large swaths of state and local government, staked a claim for a new form of green economics. In an aptly titled essay in the New York Times Magazine called “The Power of Green,” Friedman writes about the need to reclaim green as a brand: “I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century.”3

Friedman is no more the last word on environmental stewardship than is Al Gore or a former rock star, Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett, who now serves as environment minister in Australia.4 But all have wid-ened the conversation by popularizing the issues for a broader audience.

Government leaders have been listening. Thirty-five states have adopted a climate action plan and more than 600 mayors are signatories to the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. The National Governors Association also recently signed on to sup-port the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

With popularization has come politicization and polar-ization, the latter bookended by casting sustainability as a “moral imperative” on one hand and opportunistically trivializing it through lip service or “green washing”5 on the other.

Indeed, inconvenient truths have become very conve-nient differentiators in the marketing of information technology under the rubric of the greening of IT — just scroll through your inbox or walk a trade show floor to see the selective claims made on behalf of any number of goods and services that are being recast as environ-mentally responsible.

The intent of Simply Green is to pursue a pragmatic path through this popularized, politicized and polarized envi-ronment that focuses on four primary areas that have a direct bearing on the public sector information technol-ogy community. The discussion that follows highlights four steps in the right direction.

The time has comeTo say fair’s fairTo pay the rentTo pay our shareThe time has comeA fact’s a factIt belongs to us allLet’s give it back

How can we dance when our earth is turning?How do we sleep when our beds are burning?

- Midnight Oil, “Beds are Burning,” 1987

The Time Has Come, 20 Years Later

A Few Steps in the Right Direction toward Integrating Sustainability into Public Sector IT 5

Step 1: Rules and Regulations: the environmental and conservation requirements that government imposes on itself and others;

Step 2: Operational Optimization: running the IT that supports the mission-critical work of government cleaner, cooler and cheaper;

Step 3: Acquisition and Disposal: standing on the shoulders of the federal Energy Star program, making smarter buying choices and paying attention to what to do with electronic waste (e-waste); and,

Step 4: Home: the place where public employees must inevitably work near or at if there are to be meaningful reductions in government’s car-bon footprint.

By definition, there are many important if controversial issues that are well beyond the scope of this paper and the authority of the Center — including but not lim-ited to greenhouse gas emission reductions, anti-sprawl land-use policies, green building codes, energy-efficient building retrofits and emission trading systems.

Those larger initiatives are properly the purview of more widely chartered organizations — ranging from the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change to Green Technology, a non-profit initiative to inform government efforts toward sustainability, and a myriad of grassroots organizations.

For its part, the Center for Digital Government is sim-ply focusing on its original wheelhouse — government modernization — and the synergies between a more pro-nounced hue of green and the practical considerations in meeting the policy, management and operational needs of doing the public’s business.

There are a pair of technology industry initiatives that can provide useful assistance on the road to simplicity: Climate Savers which builds on the pioneering work of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program for increasing PC and server power performance; and, The Green Grid which integrates sustainability into the operating disciplines of raised floor data centers.

While operational efficiency is only one of the four ar-eas examined in Simply Green, it readily points to the importance of simplicity. In terms of non-duplication of resources, these industry initiatives provide a starting point for large-scale purchasers and users of information technology in assessing their energy use, and planning for its reduction during subsequent investment cycles.

Simply put, the industry benchmarks, targets and re-lated metrics make it simpler for governments to assess

their own performance and goals in the context of other sectors. Governments can still choose to do more, but would be hard-pressed to justify doing less.

At the same time, Simply Green provides an oppor-tunity to take stock of other initiatives that have a bearing on government’s carbon footprint, including online services — the widespread adoption of which has replaced paper-intensive processes and reduced the amount of travel needed to do business with govern-ment. It also discusses the intersection of sustainability with teleconferencing technologies and telework, both of which reduce commutes by allowing work to be done from a distance.

A final note: There is an old advertising campaign from a national chain of oil change shops that ended with the tag line, “We don’t want to change the world; we just want to change your oil.” Such a campaign seems ironic in the current environment and would likely be rethought given today’s sensibilities around sustainability. But the line of demarcation is a useful one here. This paper makes no claims about contribut-ing to the lofty goals of changing or saving the world, but it does have something to say about helping the public sector IT community get its domain in order, come what may.

Big Picture Sustainability OrganizationsClinton Climate Initiative www.clintonfoundation.org

Pew Center on Global Climate Change www.pewclimate.org

And Those Focused on the Greening of ITGreen Technology www.green-technology.org

US Government’s Energy Star Program www.Energy Star.gov

Climate Savers Smart Computing Initiative www.climatesaverscomputing.org

The Green GridSM www.thegreengrid.org

UN Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) www.step-iniative.org

Carbon Disclosure Project http://www.cdproject.net

6 Simply Green

“All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” That is a contemporary paraphrase of Occam’s razor, a principle attributed to the 14th-century Eng-lish logician William of Ockham. Occam’s razor advises “economy, parsimony, or simplicity” in our approach to all things.6 It goes to the heart of being simple, but it is not easy. It assumes a disciplined approach to eliminat-ing things that do not matter in finding the simplest solution. Mathematicians prefer “irreducibly complex” in describing simplicity. Either way, these formulations point us in the right direction where environmental stewardship is concerned, as well as in the continuing campaign for government modernization.

Simply Green is the sustainability sequel to Simple.gov: It’s Time to Change the Story, an earlier white paper from the Center for Digital Government that explored the prospect of applying Occam’s Razor to the way govern-ment works in a digital, networked world.

A sequel is different than an afterthought. It builds on an existing back story. It relies on and requires work that has already been done. To paraphrase the late Peter Drucker, there is nothing as useless as sustaining some-thing that is not sustainable.

Simple.gov suggested that disciplined change was the only way to prevent complexity from spiraling into cha-os. It also recognized that modernization efforts were at an important junction. Enough work had been done to transition public administration to the point that ana-log governments were running on digital platforms. The challenge and opportunity that simplicity requires is to complete the transition or, more properly, transforma-tion to digital government.

It follows then that the Center would be interested in something that is simply green, in which the general principles of simple are applied to the specific area of the greening of IT.

Indeed, there are synergies to be realized by extending the same stewardship disciplines that guide the road to simple to operational policies and issues that have been bundled up and popularized under the rubric of green or sustainability.

Introduction: Occam’s Razor

Simply Green continues the Simple.gov story

Changing the story to focus on products and processes that are:4Simplified4Simple to use 4Sophisticated, elegant and straight forward

While recognizing that getting to “irreducibly complex” may be simple, but it is not easy.

The Center for Digital Government white paper Simple.gov — It’s Time to Change the Story is available as a digital download under the publications tab at www.centerdigitalgov.com.


2Operational Optimization

3Acquisition & Disposal

Rules & Regulations1

4Commute & Telework

Figure 1: The Dance of Simplicity and Sustainability: A Few Steps in the Right Direction

The Dance of Simplicity and Sustainability

To those ends, Simply Green offers a few steps in the right direction toward integrating sustainability into public sector IT. The four steps, as depicted in Figure 1 below, sketch out the opening moves in the dance of simplicity and sustainability:

Step 1: RULES and REGULATIONS: A clear-eyed assessment of the completeness and consistency of the policy environment in spelling out the expectations that government has of itself and others in environmental stewardship.

Step 2: OPERATIONAL OPTIMIZATION: With a major IT advisory house predicting energy costs could soon consume up to half of an organization’s IT budget, running cleaner, cooler and cheaper from the data center to the farthest reaches of the organization may make green the last best chance to stay out of the red.

Step 3: ACQUISITION and DISPOSAL of Tech-nology: A validation of the largely voluntary e-waste recycling effort to keep old technology out of landfills, and an embrace of industry-led initiatives such as the new Climate Savers Computing Initiative to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from commodity computing.

Step 4: HOME as the New Workplace: With much of government’s carbon footprint consumed in the commute, the greening of IT may fi-nally provide an impetus for telework that is equal to the resistance it has long faced by entrenched bureaucracies and work rules.7

Each step will be discussed in turn. The first step neces-sarily requires taking stock of the dance floor.

8 Simply Green

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change keeps a run-ning tally of climate change legislation from states across the country.8 Prior to the 2008 legislative sessions, the legislative action fell into three dominant categories: (1) the creation of climate change plans and commissions; (2) greenhouse gas reporting, registries and inventories; and (3) renewable energy and electric power performance standards. The mix will inevitably change when chambers are gaveled to order with the start of subsequent legislative sessions. For example, more than 26 states will consider e-waste legislation similar to that already adopted in Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Virginia and Washington.9

Public executives have been more likely than legislative bodies to set expectations directly related to information technology. Through executive orders and directives, a growing number of governors have directed agencies to reduce energy consumption across the board, includ-ing the power demands of information technology. Likewise, more than 600 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement,10 which includes commitments to commute reduction programs, purchasing only Energy Star-certified equip-ment and sustainable building practices such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating program.11

Elected officials and other public officials are in an unenviable position because there is no one answer to what the public expects from leaders, their neighbors and themselves. The public opinion research firm Ipsos MORI observes that, “While people voice concern about climate change but do little to change their behavior, they also bow to financial pressures whilst claiming to shrug them off.”12

For now the lack of firm consensus may provide some breathing room for the public sector IT community as it figures out how to best address climate change. According to Phil Bond, president and CEO of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), “I think it’s going to become a day-to-day con-sideration for most folks in government. I don’t think it is right now. I think it already is on the commercial side

due to initiatives all around the globe as we recognize the connectivity of everything in the ecosystem, whether that’s an IT system or the physical ecosystem so you real-ize the products that you use come back into that system [need to do so] in an eco-friendly way.”13

Saving the environment is a big job, and it lends itself to a myriad of possible metrics and measures to reflect the complexity of the underlying science. Resisting the twin temptations to do too little or too much makes it all the more important to take a programmatic approach while avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort.

For its part, one research and advisory company is more pointed in its assessment, cautioning that, “Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously con-strain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny.”14

As is often the case, advocates of point solutions — solving one problem without regard to related issues — often lack the ability or interest in helping us see the wider programmatic view. At the same time, there are competing interests that would create entirely new bureaucracies to monitor and assess just how green green is, or is becoming. Both alternatives add complexity when what is needed is simplicity.

The simplest solution for taking a programmatic view of green IT in the public sector is to adapt existing efforts to account for this new priority. As detailed in Table 1, 39 states have developed accountability or performance programs and 35 states have adopted a climate action plan. Among the 49 states that have one or the other, 25 have both.

Step 1: Rules and Regulations:A clear-eyed assessment of the completeness and consistency of the policy environment in spelling out the expectations that government has of itself and others in environmental stewardship.


Climate Action Plans

Accountability/Performance Programs

Alaska • Alabama • •Arkansas • Arizona • •California • •Colorado • •Connecticut • •Delaware • Florida • •Georgia •Hawaii • •Idaho • •Iowa • •Illinois • •Indiana •Kansas •Kentucky • Louisiana •Massachusetts • Maryland • •Maine • •Michigan •Minnesota • •Mississippi •Missouri • •Montana • •Nebraska •New Mexico •North Carolina • New Hampshire • New Mexico • •New Jersey • New York • •Nevada • •North Carolina •North Dakota •Ohio •Oregon • •Pennsylvania • •Rhode Island • •South Carolina • •Texas •Tennessee • •Utah • •Virginia • •Vermont • Washington • •West Virginia Wisconsin • Wyoming •

Sources: Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Urban Institute, Government Accountability Office, National Council of State Legislators, Center for Digital Government

Table 1: States with a Climate Action Plan and/or a Performance and Accountability Program

10 Simply Green

The 39 accountability and performance states would do well to integrate a green component into existing ac-countability programs rather than to create a new and likely duplicative oversight bureaucracy. The 25 states that have both have twice the incentive to integrate sus-tainability and accountability.

To be clear, this is not to argue that political subdi-visions should not create climate advisory boards and agencies, or positions for environmental stewards or chief sustainability officers, to the degree that they fit the administration’s priorities. The point here is that any such move should be, at a minimum, carbon neu-tral. Green governance should not increase head count or square footage and their attendant resource con-sumption. It represents an ideal opportunity to create virtual teams that use networked collaborative tools without expanding the government’s footprint. It also represents a stewardship opportunity to sunset existing functions and agencies that have outlived the original purpose and re-purpose those resources in favor of this new priority.

Put another way, public agencies can do better by the environment with only incremental effort by extend-ing existing programs — not building new ones. Not to integrate or streamline such programs would have the ironic side effect of growing the bureaucracy, increasing the need for energy-consuming office space and expand-ing governments’ carbon footprint. The irony would not be lost on the activist community or headline writers.

Green is good, but its purposes will not be well served if it becomes the basis of all new programs administered by all new bureaucracies that exist somehow separately from the real work of government. Surely, something green can grow on and through the 39 existing statewide performance and accountability programs that have been put in place over the last 15 years. For the pub-lic sector IT community, integrating green into existing policies, plans and processes is another opportunity to avoid building tomorrow’s organizational stove-pipes today.

Public CIOs, Green Czars and their Spans of Control

Chief information officers came into their own as organizations recognized the strategic importance of information technology. As organizations come to terms with the strategic importance of sustainability, it leaves open the possibility of the ascendancy of a “Chief

Sustainability Officer.” The proponents of such a devel-opment envision a “Chief Green Officer” as being on point for a broad agenda to “reduce the environmental footprint, engage with a diverse group of stakeholders, and discover new revenue opportunities.”15

On the downside, Green Czars represent the thin edge of the wedge in creating a new bureaucracy, the carbon footprint of which would have to be mitigated. There are other organizational constraints. The sustainability point person will be less likely than her C-level executive colleagues to be able to see into particular operating environments and understand the opportunities and pitfalls in harvesting environmental gains. Moreover, a chief green officer is primarily a policy and policing role, which makes it difficult to be genuinely collegial in the executive suite.

“I do not believe it is necessary to establish a Chief Green Officer position,” suggests Dr. Mike Mittleman, New York state deputy CIO. “Sustainability is a con-cern and responsibility of all organizational members. As such, it should be given prominence in strategic plans and policies. Various performance metrics can be established that will readily provide current state and trend information to management and staff. Measures should be global within an organization since all areas consume power and all parts can take steps to reduce consumption. The other reality is most power meter-ing and billing systems are not sufficiently granular to isolate power consumption by floor or office.”16

California CIO Teri Takai, who previously served in the same role in Michigan and is a past president of the National Association of State Chief Information Offi-cers (NASCIO), agrees. “I think a Green C [Chief Green Officer] is overkill. Once the governor sets a policy, it is up to the cabinet agencies to determine what their role is in energy efficiency,” says Takai. “I am [also] not sure that the CIO should be the focal point for all of the state’s greening efforts. I believe that the CIO should take a leadership role in ensuring that [everything IT is] ‘green.’”17

The Commonwealth of Virginia has found a different balance point. “We appointed a senior advisor to the governor as our ‘energy czar,’” remembers Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra. He says CIOs should not be confused with being Green Czars because “the skills are totally different,” but “the CIO is an important stakeholder for states that plan to lead by example in lowering our energy footprint.”18


Sustainability brings with it technologies of its own, particularly where green or energy-efficient buildings are concerned. Like physical controls in manufacturing and other mechanical processes, green technologies rely on digital technologies to control the controls — includ-ing a growing range of products alternatively known as operational technology (OT) or embedded IT. Digital physical controls have been outside the purview of CIOs in manufacturing, warehousing and the operation of bridges. The public CIOs interviewed for Simply Green agreed that the CIO’s span of control was unlikely to change as green control and other technologies become mainstream — nor should it.

Mittleman and Chopra pointed to appropriateness of fit between business needs and skill sets. According to Mittleman, “The CIO does not generally have special knowledge, training or skills that automatically proffer credentials for managing outside of the usual sphere of influence — that is, information technology.” For her part, Takai says the integration of digital, network tech-nologies into control technologies notwithstanding, state and local governments “all have an active facilities management organization who are responsible for over-all power consumption.” Her only caveat is that all such devices need to be well behaved as they connect to the state network. “My view is that the role of the CIO is to ensure that any devices that utilize state networks should be vetted by the CISO [chief information security of-ficer],” she says, but “the selection and control should be the responsibility of [the] facilities [department].”

Richard H. J. Varn, CIO for the city of San Antonio, Texas and long-serving senior fellow with the Center for Digital Government, says, “We are responsible for the flows of actionable data on which people or sys-tems depend. That’s where we have a role.” Noting that public sector IT [departments are] “already so big and inappropriately staffed,” Varn insists that CIOs should not buy trouble: “Sustainability is at the logical nexus of physics, fluid and thermal dynamics and mechanical engineering, not IT. But when the information systems on which that nexus relies need support, we’re there.” With a wink and a nod to the marketing campaign of a major manufacturing concern, Varn concludes, “We don’t make green technologies; we may make them more useful.”19

“All things technical are not IT,” agrees Mittleman, because chasing everything digital could take CIOs to places they do not want to go. “Automobiles represent compendiums of several technologies, including com-

puters, network infrastructure and software, but that does not necessarily translate to the CIO being qualified to manage the carpool.”

Moral Imperatives and Digital Technologies in the Public Square

We should have seen this coming. We could have. And some did, three decades ago. From 1972 to 1995, Con-gress was served by an Office of Technology Assessment that it charged with deep, comprehensive and technical analysis across five areas of research. The OTA delivered, in a myriad of reports over the years, a collective 100,000 pages of non-partisan, expert advice that won the agen-cy bipartisan praise and a reputation as Capitol Hill’s “best and smallest agency.” Regrettably, none of that was enough to spare the OTA from closure amid the govern-ment downsizing that came in the mid-1990s.20

Given the challenges of global climate change, globaliza-tion and the social impacts of network technologies that characterize our times, it is difficult not to wax nostalgic about an organization that was chartered to consider “the effects of technological change on jobs and training, and analyzed the changing role of electronic technologies in the nation’s industrial, commercial, and governmental institutions and the influence of related regulations and policies” under one program and examine “the role of technology in extracting, producing, and using energy resources; in designing, operating, and improving trans-portation systems; and in planning, constructing, and maintaining infrastructure … and recycling or waste management” under another.21

In the absence of the OTA or a successor agency, these issues have fallen to freelancers — grassroots organiza-tions, authors and activists — whose advocacy lacks the comprehensive view of technology assessment. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) stepped into the breach with the creation of its Greening of IT Working Group to “explore the role that CIOs can play in their states to preserve the environment while providing the technology that enables state government operations.” In a preliminary description of the group, NASCIO anticipated devel-oping a “call to action to raise awareness of the CIO’s role in green IT” and aggregating “policies, business and procurement strategies, and emerging best practices for state CIOs to green state IT.”22

12 Simply Green

Even an organization known for its measured approach flirted with the idea that the working group could help change the world: “As environmental concerns rise to the top of the agenda for lawmakers and citizens alike, the IT community must also reevaluate its energy consump-tion and use of resources. As ‘green’ becomes the moral imperative of the 21st century, the role of the state CIO will become increasingly relevant.”23 Such aspirations were tempered by NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson who explained that green did not make the member CIOs’ top 20 of strategic initiatives for 2008, “When you’re competing with front-page issues like IT security, consolidation, disaster recovery, ERP imple-mentation, ERP strategies, health information technol-ogy — that’s the challenge. It’s not as strategic as some of those; it’s much more tactical.”24

Contrast that with the number one spot given to green IT by one research and advisory company’s analysts in their rundown of strategic technologies for 2008.25 The difference in ranking may be best explained by how green is seen and understood. When green is elevated to a moral imperative, sales-related organizations see it as an opportunity to create, make or expand a market. In the public sector, a moral imperative can fairly be seen as a euphemism for an unfunded mandate (and few things are less welcome in the competition for scarce public re-sources). Given the still-unknown scope and economic impact of sustainability, it casts a dark green shadow over public organizations and their budgets as the mother of unfunded mandates.


Step 2: Operational Optimization:With a major IT advisory house predicting energy costs could soon consume up to half of an organization’s IT budget,26 running cleaner, cooler and cheaper from the data center to the farthest reaches of the organization may make green the last best chance to stay out of the red.

“Data centers are the energy hogs of the 21st century,” cautions Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s Secretary of Tech-nology, “And if we all believe we need to have renew-able energy and energy independence in this country, those of us in the IT community must step up and ac-knowledge that we are net consumers in a significant way.”27 Indeed, the hogs have a huge appetite. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put numbers to data center power consumption in a report to Congress. By its math, data centers used 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 — that’s 1.5 percent of all power consumed in the United States — at a cost of $4.5 billion. The EPA of-fered no estimate as to how much of that is attributable to state and local government, but estimated federal data centers were on the hook for 10 percent of that total.28

To the degree there is an imperative, it is over energy waste. “The information technology function is responsible for a major portion of an organization’s power consumption; often needlessly so,” laments Mike Mittleman. For the Empire State’s deputy CIO, the remedy begins with a “focus on improving power efficiency for those business aspects unquestionably under CIO control [which] should have a salubrious impact on the organization’s carbon footprint.” For Mittleman, it is a matter of proper public stewardship. “Given the spiraling cost of power,” he says, “the CIO is obligated to implement strategies that will reduce consumption; responsible organization citizenship demands nothing less.”

California CIO Teri Takai is less sanguine about the pros-pects: “We are the main power consumers in the state and our costs are rising. Replacing our old equipment with energy efficient equipment sounds great but is very hard to justify. Replacing old facilities is even harder. And while virtualization sounds great, we are still fighting to consoli-date physical data centers. How are we going to consoli-date across servers that we can’t get into the same room? I am a great believer that the CIO needs to get the IT shop in order before they branch out to take over the world.”29 These are very real challenges, but ones that government agencies can overcome. There is tremendous opportunity for energy reduction and increased performance.

In a meeting with technology firms in Silicon Valley, Andrew Karsner, an assistant secretary in the U.S. De-partment of Energy, characterized computer systems as

“‘an absolute juggernaut’ in energy consumption. He ar-gued that industry and the government shared a ‘moral obligation’ to ensure the country’s energy security.”30

Even as energy consumption and related costs rise, so to does the workload on the raised floor. In 2006, data centers around the world managed 161 exabytes, or 161 billion gigabytes. The information created, captured and replicated is on track to grow six-fold by 2010 from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.31 (See Big Number sidebar for context.) But there is no apparent correlation between workload and energy consumption. “In a typical data-center,” suggests Amory Lovins, the chief scientist of the sustainability-focused Rocky Mountain Institute, “the electricity usage hardly varies at all, but the IT load var-ies by a factor of three or more. That tells you that we’re not properly implementing power management.”32 The Robert Frances Group estimates that power and cool-ing costs for data centers consume up to 40 percent of the operating costs of the buildings in which they are housed.33 Moreover, Gartner estimates that 60 percent of a data center’s energy consumption is wasted.34 (See sidebar for energy best practices for data centers.)

A Big Number: 1,152,921,504,606,846,976

EXABYTE: (1) 2 to the 60th power (1,152,921,504,606,846,976) bytes. An exabyte is equal to 1,024 petabytes.

PETABYTE: 2 to the 50th power (1,125,899,906,842,624) bytes. A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes.

TERABYTE: (1) 2 to the 40th power (1,099,511,627,776) bytes. This is approximately 1 trillion bytes. (2) 10 to the 12th power (1,000,000,000,000). This is exactly 1 trillion.

Source: webopedia.internet.com

The operation of information and communications technolo-gies accounts for roughly 2 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, including PCs, servers, cooling, fixed and mobile telephony, LAN, WAN, printers, UPS, and storage.

Source: Gartner, 2007

A (Seemingly) Small Number: 2%

14 Simply Green

The figure excludes the energy used in the manufacturing and distribution process, the attendant extraction of raw resources for their manufacture, and in their disposal.

Always On vs. Turn It Off: Considerations for Compromise

The chief performance attributes of data centers — availability, reliability and sheer horsepower (perfor-mance) — are at odds with the conservation-based assumptions of sustainability. Through experimen-tation with available tools, and the promise of new functionality in subsequent “greener” releases, data center operators and their providers (plus analysts and other observers) are working on a number of emerging practices that may result in an honorable compromise between performance and sustainability. In broad strokes, the emerging set of greener practices suggests organizations build on long established data center disciplines. Here, in summary form, are 9 steps with which to start:

1. Take a broad, holistic view of the organization and its operations in assessing energy use, factoring energy and cooling cost reduction into lifecycle management;35

2. Consider power efficiency as a key placement attri-bute in scheduling server workloads.36

3. Balance energy consumption and utilization in pick-ing platforms. CPU utilization averages 90 percent

on a mainframe but as low as 5 to 15 percent on servers. At the processer level, activate “throttle down features [to] reduce energy consumption” and consider migration to “multicore processors that squeeze out better performance at lower clock speeds.”37

4. Be careful to compare blade servers and rack servers on the basis of computing capacity and power and cooling requirements, not on space. The calcula-tions, not to mention operational considerations, here are complex and deserve disciplined analysis. For example, blade and virtualization technologies result in denser data centers that require more power and more cooling but server consolidation through virtualization can result in significant energy savings.

5. Measure and monitor the energy consumption of servers at least once per year.38 Choose more efficient power supplies for servers and recognize that redun-dancy and load sharing strategies raise both uptime rates and energy use. Many rack servers ship with supplies that are 60 percent to 70 percent efficient — but the Energy Star 80 Plus requirement, which requires power supplies in computers and servers to be 80 percent or greater energy efficient, can save an esti-mated 301 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per server per year.

6. Use the operating system to ration the voltage going to the processor, particularly as new power management features in new operating system releases provide more finely grained controls.39

7. Take advantage of metrics and models developed by industry initiatives such as The Green Grid (see sidebar) to improve the energy efficiency of existing data centers and plan more effectively for new facili-ties, with a view to better management of “increased computing, network, and storage demands, low energy costs, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) — all while remaining … able to meet future business needs.”40

8. Adapt performance dashboards to reflect sustainabil-ity measures — including metrics that encompass metrics such as “energy and materials efficiency, carbon dioxide footprint, wastes, supplier manage-ment, staff development and projects.”41

9. And the classically simple (but often overlooked) answer: When not in use, turn it off. (See Step 4 for a more nuanced discussion of making use of power management functions, particularly those that ship with end-user systems.)

The Green Grid Technology Roadmap

Data Center Standards and Metrics Inventory: Identifies coverage gaps in existing energy efficiency standards and recommends future developments

Data Center Power Efficiency Model: Builds on metrics to model workload classification and data center segmentation

Energy Efficiency Operationalization: Maps requirements for collecting power consumption data

Efficiency Baseline: Assesses organizational motivation for greening data centers

Data Center Operational and Performance Best Practices: Right-sizing data centers through virtualization and consolidation, based on data center characteristics and performance schema.

Power Distribution Options: Describes qualitative advantages and disadvantages of data center power distribution configurations.

Cooling Options Study: Mirrors the power distribution study but focuses on data center cooling architectures.


Clearly, data center optimization is a much larger undertaking than can be captured in even the most refined bulleted list.

Enter The Green Grid, a not-for-profit industry con-sortium focused on “advancing energy efficiency in data centers and computing ecosystems,” which has completed the key elements of its technology road-map, the first priority of which is developing metrics for benchmarking, measuring and optimizing data center power consumption.42

The consortium was welcomed as a common aggregation point as the industry and data center operators struggled to come to terms with green. Even at that, some analysts worried that the consortium’s industry ties might hold it back from the kind of innovation needed to re-imagine the data center as part of a sustainable ecosystem.

It is worth noting that The Green Grid aspires not only to help tune up existing data centers but also to help

planners make smarter decisions when and if they are able to re-think data centers and build one from scratch.

A Green House for a Green Data Center

Virginia Secretary Chopra looks to the private sector for the needed innovation to fundamentally reform data centers, “We need to encourage our vendor community to build green-friendly data centers and server farms so we can be proper stewards of our resources.”

One example of such industry-led innovation is found at the intersection of modularization and sustainability. In late 2007, one computer manufacturer unveiled a full data center in a box — and delivered it on a truck. The big digital prefab is “a pre-configured, fully contained data center in a shipping container.” The manufacturer says the data center module “is optimized for maximum den-sity, performance and energy efficiency.” What’s more, it was built with “recyclable parts and components.”43

Energy Best Practices in Data CentersA Contrarian ConsensusAs a matter of first principles, the greenest data center is the one that you don’t build; the greenest server or storage device is the one that you don’t buy; and the greenest watt of electricity is the one that you don’t use.

Planning the Work, Working the PlanFewer than half of organizations monitor the energy consumption of their data centers.44 Co-location of data centers in dual-use buildings often makes it difficult to meter IT energy consumption separately. As a first step, uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems can act as a surrogate in monitoring power consumption by mission critical gear. What is a data center operator to do?

Draw on best practices• Assess and plan.• Consolidate and ladder refreshes with energy efficient

replacement servers.

Get Dense• If you must own, share.• If you must operate your own, consolidate, modularize,

virtualize and rethink floor space. • If you go after your servers, go after storage too.

Data centers were the original shared service where multiple public entities could avoid duplicate investments in raised floor space, uninterrupted power supply (UPS) and environmentals. Looking ahead, systems will consume available power supply much faster than floor space, and the cost of power is more volatile than real estate.

In one manufacturer’s assessment of what it characterizes as a typical data center, 15 percent was consumed by storage,45 26 percent by computing servers and fully 59 percent was consumed by cooling.46

Consolidation and virtualization matters because low server utilization rates waste energy and virtualization increases utilization. Finally, modular design lets systems run at load — where energy performance is at its peak — or, alternatively, turn off when not at capacity.

Cool Running, not ColdData centers should not be mitten or sweater cold, yet data center employees often sport the layered look to be comfortable at work. There is sometimes historic or cultural resistance to the idea of raising temperatures in the data center out of concern for the operating temperatures of mission-critical machines. Yet the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) may expand its recommended specifications for server temperature by as much as 80 percent and humidity ranges by 60 percent,47 suggesting there appears to be operating tolerances to be exploited.

To those ends:• Aggregate high-demand systems and use rack- or row-based

cooling systems to do what room-based air conditioning cannot.• Make sure HVAC systems are working for you, not against you.

Luke warm is no solution. Separate hot aisle from cold aisle.• Run chillers at off-peak hours and use stored energy during

peak loads.• The installation of blanking panels — pieces of metal

that prevent air re-circulation — can reduce energy loss through unused vertical space in open-frame racks and rack enclosures, which creates unrestricted hot air recycling and causes equipment to heat up unnecessarily.

• As Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory suggests, data centers can tap cooler seasonal weather to economize by using air-side economizers, which typically sense and filter outside air and allow it to enter the data center when conditions, such as temperature and humidity, are within acceptable engineering parameters.48

16 Simply Green

The modular approach, particularly if available as a leased product or, better yet under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, fits with the dual but conflicting demands for greater capacity amid oversubscribed budgets. Such a new modular infrastructure, with or without a new business model, comes with added sus-tainability benefits too.

Conventional public sector data centers tend to be on elongated amortization schedules and new or replace-ment facilities have very long gestation periods. “It’s a capital construction project,” reminds NASCIO Execu-tive Director Doug Robinson, “and it can take many years to get it approved.”

Timing may not be everything in a political environ-ment, but it is an important thing. Washington state’s timing could not have been better. With careful plan-ning and sophisticated stewarding through the state planning and budgeting processes, the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS) is expected to break ground on an all new and very green data center in spring 2008.

The new DIS 166,000-square-foot data center is the defining feature of a 456,000-square-foot, $260 mil-lion office complex, scheduled to be built on one of the last available spaces on Olympia’s capitol campus. That land scarcity was important to the project’s approval. The timely completion of the DIS complex in 2010 will provide new offices for the host agency as well as the Washington State Patrol, Department of General Ad-ministration (GA) and other smaller agencies. The State Patrol, GA and the others need a new home because their existing one — a non-descript, 1950s-era cinder brick building with spectacular views of Capitol Lake

and downtown Olympia — is slated for demolition to make way for a politically-prized Heritage Center, de-scribed as “the most important construction project in Olympia since the Capitol was finished in 1928.”49 The operational need to replace the existing 32-year-old DIS data center certainly factored into the decision but it benefited from being seen in the context of the larger capitol campus transformation.

Sustainability and efficiency were integrated into the bid for the new DIS complex, as they have been since 2005 under an executive order issued by the previous administration. The order requires, in part, that major construction projects “be built and certified to the U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver Standard…”50

DIS Director Gary Robinson says the return on invest-ment considerations related to silver certification “were addressed at the pre-design stage.”51 The project has transitioned successfully to the design stage, with the Seattle-based firm Wright Runstad & Company under contract to develop and build the complex.

In some pubic installations, LEED Silver compliance has led to operational savings of up to 35 percent.52

Gartner suggests that such savings do not come for free, estimating that “going green may add 10 percent to 15 percent [to] capital equipment and operational costs.”

Still, the analyst house estimates that, by 2011, a quarter of new data centers will be strikingly different than those operating today, with “mechanical, electrical, thermal and hosted computer systems have all been designed for maximum energy efficiency.”53

The new Washington state facility may be prototypical of the new green breed of data centers. It is scheduled to come online in 2010. The transformation will be tele-vised — DIS plans to maintain a live Web stream from the construction site.

The LEED Silver Standard

Certification at the silver level of compliance or achievement requires a building project to earn 33 to 38 points of a possible 69 across six areas of examination:

• Site Sustainability

• Water Efficiency

• Energy and Atmosphere

• Materials and Resources

• Indoor Environmental Quality

• Innovation and Design Process

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development prac-tices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.

Source: www.usgbc.org


Step 3: Acquisition and Disposal of Technology:A validation of the largely volunteer effort to keep old technology out of landfills, and an embrace of industry-led initiatives such as the new Climate Savers Computing Initiative to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from commodity computing.

The country’s largest states have among the most ambitious sustainability programs. California Gov. Arnold Schwar-zenegger laid out a broad agenda in an executive order on sustainability, which included LEED Silver certification for new buildings, Energy Star certification for new technolo-gy and an overall mandate to make California government buildings 20 percent more efficient by 2015.54 At the op-posite corner of the country, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer introduced his “15 by 15” plan to reduce state electricity consumption 15 percent by 2015.55

Information technology can both help and hinder such efforts. New York state Deputy CIO Mike Mittleman began what he called “after-hours thinking on one small aspect of the relationship between information technol-ogy, equipment selection and the environment.” The result was an intellectually and statistically rigorous examination of the difference configurations can make when compared on key characteristics:4 A Green Ratio focuses on energy efficiency;4 A Cost Ratio places a premium on procurement

expense; and4 A Green Value Ratio considers processing power,

energy efficiency and cost.

Of the three, Mittleman concludes that the Green Value Ratio is the most helpful in materially helping in making management decisions, while realizing other benefits along the way. “Factoring energy efficiency into enterprise information technology purchasing decisions is more than simply a way of demonstrating environmental sen-sitivity; it is consistent with the concerns and actions of the industry, in short, a best practice,” wrote Mittleman, “From another perspective, energy management offers an increasingly important cost-saving opportunity.”56

The promise of an emerging or best practice in the pro-curement of commodity IT has focused the attention of the industry on helping potential purchasers make better decisions. One manufacturer offers an approach called SWaP — Space, Watts and Performance. The metric considers three dimensions of space, power consumption and server performance.57

At the design, manufacturing and distribution levels, computer manufacturers face common challenges re-lated to embodied energy — that is, the energy used in

the manufacturing and distribution process, the atten-dant extraction of raw resources for their manufacture, and in their disposal. And their responses have coalesced around a commitment to environmental sustainability. Typical of the industry are policy and operational objec-tives to “design products with a focus on: safe operation throughout the entire product life cycle, extending product life span, reducing energy consumption, avoiding environmentally sensitive materials, promoting dema-terialization, and using parts that are capable of being recycled at the highest level.”58

Beyond company by company initiatives, the industry banded together with conservation groups in support of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. At its core, the initiative is about cutting the energy consumption

Simple Steps for Immediate Impact in the Office

Turn Workflow on its HeadThe Old Model – Print and distribute.The New Model – Distribute and print.The new model securely captures documents at the point of origin and manages the digital document through an automated workflow to the end user, while giving readers the discretion of whether and when to press “print.”

Minimize power needs by going MultiMulti-function printers or all-in-one machines (combining print, copy, scan and fax functions) use up to 40 percent less energy to operate because multiple machines are replaced by a single device, itself Energy Star rated.

Default to DuplexDefault settings for two-sided printing and copying saves paper and complements paper recycling programs. Centralized and remote administration of an organization’s entire fleet of printers and copiers offers both productivity and sustainability gains. Changes should begin by presetting all devices to the energy-saving “sleep” mode.

Alert but not AwakeOne manufacturer offers a proprietary “Instant-on” function that rouses sleeping machines quickly without impairing productivity. 59

Diet StuffingIncorporate requirements for eliminating excess packaging for equipment and consumables in purchasing and procurement practices. Look to third-party assessments of sustainability performance, such as those at the Carbon Disclosure Project.60

18 Simply Green

of commodity technologies in half by 2010. The startling starting point is that an average desktop PC wastes nearly half the power delivered to it. If successful in halving the half, PCs will only be wasting a quarter of their energy supply by the end of the decade. To get there, consumers and institutional purchasers are encouraged to purchase Energy Star 4.0 compliant energy-efficient systems61 and use the power management tools with which they ship.

Servers are more energy efficient than PCs out of the box — wasting only 30 to 40 percent of input power but Climate Savers has a program for improving energy efficiency in server rooms and data centers too.

Climate Savers estimates that the price premium for meeting high-efficiency targets will add less than $20 per PC and less than $30 per server — “and decline toward zero over time.”62

The choices made in purchasing commodity technolo-gies is the second most important sustainability decision an individual or organization makes. The first is the de-cision of what to do with a server, PC or peripheral when it has reached the end of its serviceable life. The problem is as large as the installed base — more than 800 mil-lion PCs worldwide will be replaced between 2007 and 2012.63 A global problem has attracted a global response. Various agencies of the United Nations, with the support of non-governmental organizations and major players in the technology industry, stepped up with a joint initia-tive for Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP). The solu-tions are measured by a three part criteria — they must be “feasible, just and environmentally safe.”64

Many U.S. states — Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Virginia and Washington — have already passed legislation for the sustainable manage-ment of electronic waste. As noted previously, e-waste legislation is pending in another 26 states.65

For its part, the industry favors options for recovering value and minimizing the environmental impact of IT products, listed here in descending order:4 Reuse of the product by others, including by other

businesses and consumers;4 Reuse of components in used equipment and

refurbished spare parts markets;4 Recycling of materials into raw materials for use in

new products; 4 Energy recovery (that is, heat is captured from the

recycling process and used for heating or other beneficial purposes); and,

4 Responsible disposal of obsolete computer equipment.66

Three other variations warrant mention here. Cascading aging machines within or across public agencies extracts the maximum serviceable life out of machines while manu-facturers and other third parties offer to place donated computers to suitable charities for their use. Some manu-

facturers will also act as brokers in reselling used equipment that still has commercial value and returning the proceeds to the original owner. All of these reuse and recycling approaches are predicated on careful attention to the docu-mented and audited overwriting, reformatting or wiping of hard drives to ensure that sensitive data is not left on unwanted equipment.67

State initiatives share with the UN StEP program a joint approach that brings together sectors around a common purpose. “We’re working with the private sector to make sure that when we put things to sur-plus, when we are actually disposing of equipment, that we are part of a process that makes sure that we are protecting the environment, says California CIO Teri Takai, “We’re seeing many states that, like Michigan, partner with the Department of Environmental Qual-ity and the Department of Information Technology to make sure we’re walking the talk. It is important to us to make sure that as we’re disposing of technology, we’re doing it in a way that fits within the environmen-tal quality constraints of the state.”

Many state and local waste departments will pick up or accept used computer systems and other hardware and refurbish them for distribution to underserved individu-als and nonprofit groups. In addition, many computer manufacturers now offer recycling or lease programs, and may even give discounts on the purchase of a new system with the return of the old one. By Jan. 1, 2009, electronics manufacturers will be required under Wash-ington state law to provide recycling services that make it convenient for consumers across the state to dispose of computers, computer monitors, laptops, televisions and other covered electronics. The services must be made available to recycle “computers used by households, small governments, small businesses, and charities.” Even at the state level, the implications are not trivial. The Washing-ton State Department of Ecology, which administers the state electronic product recycling program, estimates that, between 2003 and the end of the decade, “more than 4.5 million computer processing units, 3.5 million cathode ray tube monitors, and 1.5 million flat panel monitors will become obsolete in Washington state” alone.68

The improper or irresponsible disposal of old technol-ogy leaves communities and consumers subject to the whim of the law of unintended consequences. Consider the 2007 recalls of tens of thousands of lead-painted toys made in China, a country which is also a large-scale pur-chaser of e-waste products for reclamation. Just in time for the holiday gift-buying season, a study by professors at Ashland University in Ohio found “highly leaded trinkets sold in the U.S. bore the chemical fingerprints of lead from old computers.”69

That strikes very close to home.


Shorter is simply better when it comes to the distance between home and where business gets done. That is true in terms of the commute of public employees from their residences to their workplaces, as we will discuss in a moment, but it is also true of the distance between a resident and where she needs to go to complete a trans-action with her government.

The e-government initiatives of state and local govern-ments are paying a substantial sustainability dividend by eliminating trips between peoples’ homes and govern-ment facilities. Today’s digital majority — approximately 70 percent of all American homes are connected to the Internet,70 more than half using broadband71 — is both accustomed to and prefers online self-service to standing in line at a counter in a government building.

The average adoption of state government online ser-vices (see table) demonstrates how half or more of many transaction types have moved online. What was origi-nally conceived of as a matter of convenience for citizens in the mid-1990s at the birth of e-government — de-livering services at a time and place of their choosing — now helps in practical ways to save energy, reduce trips and contribute to the greening of communities and government. One example can be found in Utah, where an average of 60,000 vehicle registrations are renewed online each month. “By reducing the number of citizens who drive into a local office to renew their registration, our e-government services contribute to the air quality across the state of Utah by reducing gas consumption and emissions,” says Kevin Park, assistant director of the Utah Division of Motor Vehicles.

E-government also delivers paper reduction benefits. One example can be found at the Maine Revenue Ser-vices, where a single tax filing service is eliminating more than 40,000 sheets of paper per year from government’s process flow. Online services not only save fuel and the ozone layer, but many trees are being saved as a direct result of electronic government’s growth.

Average Adoption of State Government Online Services

Fishing & Hunting Licenses 54%State Parks & Campsite Reservations 56%

Criminal History Background Checks 90%Real Time Emergency Alerts 94%Sex Offender Look Up 98%VIN Validation Search 88%Vital Stats Certificate Ordering 56%

Hospital Accreditation Status Look Up 68%Credential Status Look Up (Medical) 93%Physician License Renewals 71%Nurse License Renewals 68%Contractor Status Look Up 88%

Job Search 84%Unemployment Insurance Application 52%Individual Income Tax Filing & Payment 52%Benefits application & Status Look Up 61%

Master Business Licensing 46%Business Registration Renewal 55%Business Tax Filing & Payment 44%Employment Tax/ Wage Report File/Pay 48%Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Filings 67%UCC Searches 93%

Source: Center for Digital Government, Digital States Survey, 2007

With much of government’s carbon footprint caused by the commute of public employees to and from concrete buildings and miles of asphalt parking lots, there’s still the issue of the proximity of home to work. Public trans-portation, informal car pooling and programs such as Ride Share and commute reduction incentives have all attempted to mitigate the effects of getting public em-ployees to work and back. Within the IT function, new generations of administrative tools allow staff to trouble-shoot and monitor PCs, printers, scanners and network performance without having to travel from workplace to workplace in the majority of cases.

Step 4: Home as the New Workplace:With much of government’s carbon footprint consumed in the commute, the greening of IT may finally provide an impetus for telework that is equal to the resistance it has long faced by entrenched bureaucracies and work rules.

20 Simply Green

What if public employees did not have to commute at all? Such was the promise of what originated as tele-commuting, which was subsequently rechristened as telework as it matured into a best practice that com-bined all the benefits of reducing the time and costs of commuting without sacrificing productivity.

An excerpt from the Center white paper, Telework 360: A Best Practices Digest and Guide to Getting Telework Right in the Public Sector, is instructive on this point:

Telework can and should be part of the overall policy platform for government. If telework is proposed simply as a way to reduce air pollution or traffic con-gestion the program will most likely never get off the ground. People just don’t seem to care enough about either of them to undertake such a fundamental change to the way government operates. That is not to say that telework won’t reduce traffic congestion or help improve air quality. It will.

A November 2005 report by the Reason Institute, “The Quiet Success: Telecommuting’s Impact on Transportation and Beyond,” details the positive impact telework programs can have on transpor-tation and the environment in a community. The paper states that “telecommuting may be the most cost-effective way to reduce rush-hour traffic and it can even improve how a weary nation copes with disasters, from hurricanes to terrorist attacks. It helps improve air quality, highway safety, and even health care as new technology allows top-notch physicians to be (virtually) anywhere.”

The report states:

Telecommuting expands opportunities for the handi-capped, conserves energy, and — when used as a substitute for offshore outsourcing — can help allay globalization fears. It can even make companies more profitable — good news for our nation’s managers, many of whom have long been suspicious of telecommuting. Other than

driving alone, telecommuting is the only commute mode to gain market share since 1980.

The Census Bureau notes that from 1990 to 2000 the number of American workers who usually worked at home grew by 23 percent, more than twice the rate of growth of the total labor market. Since 2000, telecom-muting has continued to grow in popularity. Roughly 4.5 million Americans telecommute most workdays, roughly 20 million telecommute for some period at least once per month, and nearly 45 million telecommute at least once per year.

And telecommuters drive less than office workers do. During the days they telecommute, workers reduce their daily trips by 27 to 51 percent, and driving (vehicle miles traveled) is reduced by 53 to 77 percent. Although they effectively receive no public subsidies, telecommuters actually outnumber transit commuters in a majority (27) of the 50 most populous metropolitan areas.

Telecommuters outnumber transit commuters in places like San Diego, Dallas, and Phoenix. They outnumber commuters by more than two to one in places like Raleigh-Durham, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and Nashville. In Oklahoma City, telecommuters outnumber transit commuters nearly five to one.

In addition to the more obvious benefits of reduced traffic congestion during rush hours and reductions in the associated pollution produced by commuter automobiles, telework programs can support public policy objectives in other areas.

Properly implemented, telework will meet the expec-tations of tomorrow’s work force and return benefits beyond just those enjoyed by the employee. It will provide for improved service delivery infrastructure making disaster recovery and business continuity more robust and sustainable. Telework will create eco-nomic development opportunities by encouraging the recruitment of well paying jobs — not just companies. It supports efforts to ensure a healthy environment and improved air quality. Telework takes pressure off overburdened urban transportation systems and saves governments money by reducing the demand for fixed facilities. Finally, telework saves employees money by reducing travel, parking and other personal costs associated with transporting themselves every day to and from the work site.

Telework 360

The Center for Digital Government white paper Telework 360: A Best Practices Digest and Guide to Getting Telework Right in the Public Sector is available as a digital download under the publications tab at www.centerdigitalgov.com


If green is at some kind of societal tipping point, telework would seem to be an obvious part of the strategy. But here again, simple may not be easy. So argues Jim Dillon, who retired last year from the role as the first state CIO in New York, which was the capstone to a career in public service that in-cluded 16 years in the state Assembly and senior po-sitions in the state Department of Labor. During a panel discussion at a recent meeting of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, Dillon said, “You must be dreaming if you think telework will take hold in state government.” In his judgment, the civil service rules are too inflexible, the cultures too entrenched and some incumbent players see such changes as running contrary to their interests.72

Digital conferencing services — teleconferencing, video conferencing and media rich Web conferencing — provide a platform for changing work patterns and reducing commutes. In a survey of private sector work-places, almost two-thirds of respondents (64 percent) said they had used Web conferencing to replace in-per-son meetings.73 Digital conferencing services have the advantage of being used both on an ad hoc basis and in support of full-time telework as work habits change.

“IT can help us green…. We still need more investment in basic research to get to applied research. We need to be able to reduce trips as much as possible, to replace getting in a vehicle and going from place to place. Use of the Internet and broadband technology has a lot to do with that. When we connect people so that they do not have to physically go everywhere, then we can have a much less impact on the environment.”

Sunne Wright McPeak President and CEO of the California Emerging Technology Fund

Conventional wisdom endures because of an underly-ing, undeniable truth. It is, in a word, simple. So it is with a phrase often invoked by leaders, “where you stand depends on where you sit,” which is well worn in organizations of any size, public and private, when deliberating on issues of common concern but where consensus is elusive.

If you sit within the environmental advocacy com-munity, you are likely gratified that sustainability has reached a tipping point such that awareness is being translated into commitments to change by individu-als and institutions. You are also likely wary that this “moral imperative” could be used opportunistically by

those motivated by other agendas at the risk of missing a rare opportunity to make meaningful change.

If you sit in a legislative chamber, you have likely noted the irony that disparate interests around environmen-tal issues have managed to fill your inbox with paper. For you, sustainability is about ensuring the long-term health of communities but it is ultimately measured by the budget. Can we afford to make public investments in green? Can we afford not to?

If you sit in the offices of a public executive, you worry about meeting the infinite demand for service deliv-ery in an environment of increasingly finite resources. Speaking of environment, “moral imperative” sounds to your ears like an unfunded mandate, even though you favor finding ways to operate more efficiently and effectively — and welcome opportunities to reduce energy consumption. You are becoming bolder in your convictions that online self service, Web conferencing and telework are changes whose time has come in support of the greening of government.

If you sit in a cubicle amid a sprawling bureaucracy, you may see the sustainability movement as an opportunity for upward mobility as new green programs are created and staffed. But you also know better. Despite noble

Conclusion:Stepping Up to Simple Steps

22 Simply Green

1 Lois Rogers, “Climate change: Why we don’t believe it,” New Statesman, April 23, 2007. (See http://www.newstatesman.com/200704230025)

2 Adapted from Paul W. Taylor, “An Inscrutable Hunch,” Government Technology, December 2007.3 Thomas Friedman, “The Power of Green,” New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007. (See http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60F1

1FE3E5B0C768DDDAD0894DF404482)4 “Australia’s Rudd unveils cabinet,” BBC NEWS, Nov. 29, 2007. (See http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7118265.stm)5 “Green-wash (green’wash’, -wôsh’) — verb: the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the

environmental benefits of a product or service.” See Terrachoice Environmental Marketing, Six Sins of Green Washing, November 2007. 6 See entry for Occam’s Razor at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam’s_Razor. 7 Adapted from Paul W. Taylor, “Simply Green and the Road Home,” Public CIO, August 2007.8 See the Pew Center’s listing of state legislation on climate change at http://www.pewclimate.org/what_s_being_done/in_the_states/state_

legislation.cfm.9 Simon Mingay, Green IT — Dealing With the New Industry Shockwave — Part 2, Gartner, Inc., April 2007.10 See the full text of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement at http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/agreement.htm.11 LEED is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. (See http://www.

usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=222)12 “Stormy Weather: Is climate change really the greatest threat to mankind?,” Ipsos MORI UK, March 26, 2007 (See http://www.ipsos-mori.

com/publications/jl/stormy-weather.shtml.)13 Interview by the author on March 19, 2007 in Washington, D.C.14 “Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008,” Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn., Oct. 9, 2007.15 John Davies, The Rise of the Chief Green Officer, AMR Research, Nov. 14, 2007.16 Interview by the author, Dec. 5, 2007.17 E-mail correspondence with the author, Nov. 27, 2007.18 E-mail correspondence with the author, Nov. 26, 2007.19 Interview by the author, Dec. 7, 2007.20 Adapted from Paul W. Taylor, “Does the Critic Still Count?”, Public CIO, February 2008.21 See the OTA archives maintained by Princeton University at http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/ns20/proces_f.html 22 See an overview of NASCIO committee and working group activities for the 2007-08 program year at http://www.nascio.org/aboutNascio/

committeeSignUp.cfm. 23 Ibid.24 Andy Opsahl, “Money Talking: Green IT emerges as a solution to rising energy prices,” Government Technology, November 2007: 38.25 Gartner, Oct. 9, 2007, Op. cit.26 R, Kumar, J. Hardcastle, and M. Bell, The impact of high-density server growth on data center power and cooling metrics, Gartner, Inc., 2006.27 Interview by author. Op. cit.28 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star Program, Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431,

Aug. 2, 2007 (See www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_Datacenter_Report_Congress_Final1.pdf.)29 Interview by author, Op. cit.

Endnotes

intentions, larger bureaucracies, new agencies and even the appointment of a Chief Green Officer ultimately expand government’s carbon footprint, unless existing units are cannibalized in favor of a new green group.

If you sit in a data center, you know that the energy consumption on the raised floor at existing rates is unsustainable. You are anxious to see the new product and service offerings that are in the pipeline from the technology industry and know of things that you can start with today, including making sure the staff un-derstands what they can do — and that it matters. But even as power pulses through the environment, you also know that these digital infrastructures are uniquely able to scale in support of today’s needs and tomorrow’s expectations for the delivery of public services.

But when you sit with family and friends at the kitch-en table, or on the back deck or in the neighborhood park, you realize that it is not at all unreasonable to take a few simple steps toward a healthy and sustain-able future. To paraphrase Warren Buffet one last time, it is simple, just not easy. But then again, if it was easy, anybody could do it.


30 Recounted in Nicholas Carr’s, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008: 178.31 Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), The SNIA Green Storage Initiative, November 2007. (See www.snia.org)32 Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, “Seven Steps to a Green Data Center,” Computerworld UK, April 24, 2007.33 Adam Braunstein of the Robert Frances Group, “The Greening of the CIO,” CIO Insight, July 11, 2006.34 Rakesh Kumar, Why ‘Going Green’ Will Become Essential for Data Centers, Gartner, Inc. Oct. 10, 2006.35 Info-Tech Research Group, Greening of the Data Center: Take an Asset Lifecycle Approach, April 12, 2007.36 Gartner Strategic Top 10, op. cit.37 Matt Stansberry, The Green Data Center: Energy-efficient computing in the 21st Century, 2007.38 A 2006 survey indicated that only 28 percent of companies do so. (See “The Greening of the CIO,” op. cit.)39 “Overview of Advanced Power Management (APM) and Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) Revision 3.3,” 40 The Green Grid Data Center Power Efficiency Metrics: PUE and DCiE, The Green Grid, 2007.41 Center for Digital Government (See Step 1) and Simon Mingay, Tutorial for the Environmental Metrics of an IT Organization, Gartner, Inc. Nov.

19, 2007. 42 “The Green Grid announces Technology Roadmap and Key Deliverables for 2007,” The Green Grid Association, Aug. 7, 2007.43 “The ‘Greening’ of IT,” Analyst Perspectives Consensus Report, November 2007. (See www.AnalystPerspectives.com.) 44 Fewer than half of companies (42 percent) monitor IT-related energy spending, according to a rack space study of 380 data center operators in

2007, Economist Intelligence Unit.45 In a separate study, storage is on pace to continue to grow at 50 percent annually but the installed based is running, by one industry estimate, at

only 30 percent efficiency. See Art Wittmann, “The Cold, Green Facts,” InformationWeek, Sept. 1, 2007 (www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201803326 .)

46 “Unlock Your Hidden Data Center,” Dell, Fall 2007.47 See ASHRAE Technical Committee (http://tc99.ashraetcs.org) and Matt Stansberry, “ASHRAE to expand recommended server temp and

humidity range,” SearchDataCenter.com, Nov. 2, 2007 48 Mark Fontecchio, “Cooling data centers with outside air gets the go-ahead,” SearchDataCenter.com, March 4, 2007 (See searchdatacenter.

techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid80_gci1246084,00.html.)49 “Washington State Department of Information Services Selects Developer to Build Data Center Facilities” (Media Release), Washington State

Department of Information Services (DIS), Nov. 19, 2007. (See http://dis.wa.gov/wheeler_site_dev_release.pdf.)50 “Executive Order 05-01: Establishing Sustainability and Efficiency Goals for State Operations,” State of Washington Office of the Governor, Jan.

5, 2005.51 Interview by author, Nov. 30, 2007.52 “San Jose to require LEED Silver,” (Media Release) City of San Jose, Dec. 14, 2006, (See http://www.usgbc.org/News/PressReleaseArchiveDetails.

aspx?ID=2812)53 Gartner, Oct. 9, 2007, op cit.54 Executive Order S-20-04, State of California Office of the Governor, Dec. 14, 2004.

(See http://gov.ca.gov/index.php?/executive-order/3360.) 55 “New State Plan Sets Goals For Reducing Energy Costs, Curbing Pollution And Addressing Global Climate Change,” State of New York Office of

the Governor, April 19, 2007 (See http://www.ny.gov/governor/press/0419071.html)56 Michael R. Mittleman, “The Greening of Information Technology: A Call for Energy Efficiency,” Office of the New York State Chief Information

Officer, March 2007: 13-14.57 SWaP (Space, Watts and Performance) Metric, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (See www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/swap)58 Michael S. Dell, Global Environmental, Health & Safety Policy, Dell, March 31, 2006.59 See HP’s Instant-on function described at www.hp.com/go/environment60 See the Carbon Disclosure Project at www.cdproject.net.61 Agencies of the U.S. government are required to purchase energy-efficient products and activate power management settings in furtherance of

two federal initiatives. The Energy Star program provides a guide to product purchasing and computer power management for federal agencies at www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=fed_agencies.fed_ag_index

62 See the Climate Savers White Paper at www.climatesaverscomputing.org/tools/index.html 63 AnalystPerspectives, November 2007, Op. cit.64 See the UN initiated Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) program at www.step-iniative.org. 65 Mingay, Gartner, Inc., April 2007. Op. cit.66 See the HP Global Citizenship Report on product use and recycling at http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/gcreport/productreuse.html 67 Joe Strathmann, “Making the Most of Asset Disposal,” GreenerComputing.com, Aug. 29, 2007.68 The e-waste legislation has been codified as Chapter 70.95N RCW Electronic Product Recycling in the Revised Code of Washington. The

program is described in “Focus on Washington’s Electronic Product Recycling Program,” Washington State Department of Ecology, Undated. (See http://www.ecy.wa.gov/pubs/0607017.pdf)

69 Scott Tong, “Our e-waste comes back to haunt us,” Marketplace/American Public Media, Nov. 14, 2007.70 Pew Internet & American Life Project, Feb. 15 - March 7, 2007 Tracking Survey.71 Neilson/Netratings, May 2007.72 Adapted from Paul W. Taylor, “Kermit was Right,” Forum Section, Texas Technology, July 10, 2007.73 Wainhouse Research, quoted in “Using Web Conferencing to Boost Productivity,” ThinkStrategies, Inc. 2006.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul W. Taylor, Ph.D., is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Center for Digital Government. A former deputy state CIO, he served as the Deputy Director of the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS) and Chief of Staff of the Washington State Information Services Board (ISB). He is also an affiliated expert with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) in Washington, D.C. and back page columnist and commentator for Government Technology and Public CIO magazine. He has been teleworking full-time since 2002.

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HP provides products and services with the environment in mind — from product design through manufacturing, distribution and recycling.

Microsoft provides software solutions for Public Sector organizations, addressing the citizen-centric demands of government while providing learning tools and infrastructure technology for schools and universities nationwide. www.microsoft.com/publicsector

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Simply Green -- A Few Steps in the Right Direction toward Integrating Sustainability into Public...

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