Is it possible that not everyone in your IT team cares about sustainability like you do?
Personal politics aside, I think it’s reasonable to assume those who remain at least hesitant or indifferent are that way because 1) they’re either too busy with their current remit and/or 2) they feel like they’re being asked to improve the company’s ROI and save the planet at the same time. The original job description might’ve asked for a DevOps Ninja, but Climate Change Superhero wasn’t even in the fine print.
One argument that’s often referenced by IT Leaders to act is that regulatory/political consequences might rain down on you if you don’t implement a sound sustainable initiative. While this might become a reality one day, I don’t think scare tactics are the most effective way to enabling change. It’s not like the government is peering through your company’s windows, monitoring whether that L1 support worker leaves their laptop running all night!
On the other side, the argument that’s cited the most for inaction, is that corporate IT doesn’t produce wasteful emissions, at least not anything like the big hungry data centers, so why fret?
If you hear such a thing said, you should politely, but vocally, debunk this myth. According to research from McKinsey, end-user devices—laptops, tablets, smartphones and printers—generate 1.5 to 2.0 times more carbon globally than data centers. More worrisome, emissions from end-user devices are on track to increase at a rate of 12.8 percent per year. But even if those figures were less, it would still be bad, right? Some emissions are unavoidable, but the point is to frame these conversations around what is avoidable (and what’s carelessly being wasted) at your organization.
Okay, so some stats on hand might win an impromptu debate at the water cooler, but you’re going to need something else to change the hearts and minds in IT.
Nothing turns the head quite like customers, who thankfully, are asking businesses to publish their Net-Zero targets and prove they’re making quantifiable progress towards those targets in their disclosures. A few years ago IBM published a study demonstrating that ‘almost six in ten consumers are willing to change their purchasing habits to help reduce negative environmental impact.’
Of course, executive boards know this but the problem now is that everyone has a net-zero target, even your competitors. But if you have just a minimally better critical reading skill than ChatGPT, you’ll quickly uncover that these plans are often vaguely written and intentionally stripped of any real metrics.
And that’s exactly where you can set yourself apart from the crowd.
IT is one of the few capable departments in any organization that can pin-point its ROI. By using LCAs (lifecycle assessments) and cradle-to-grave plans for hardware, for example, IT can measure and track every dollar spent and stretch its investments! According to McKinsey, 89% of organizations recycle less than 10 percent of their hardware overall. And yet, as Nexthink found in our internal research, on average only 2% percent of devices actually need to be replaced.
If this all seems too theoretical, then check out this report from Tata Consultancy Services. TCS sticks to a simple, yet tangible 4-point framework to turn doubters into believers and digital waste into savings.
