Sustainability management is no different from any other type of operational or risk management. What is required is a reliable means of collecting lots and lots of data, preferably in real-time, constantly monitoring that data, reporting on it and using the information the data provides to manage down your impacts and risks. You would be hard-pressed to find a large business without an ERP system, so why are so many large organizations failing to use I.T. to manage their sustainability impacts. It seems the answer lies in a gap between intention and action.

On Monday, December 7, 2009, I chaired the Smart Grid roundtable at Green Monday. The topic I put forward for discussion was "Smart Grid: What the centralised smart meter roll-out means for utilities, consumers and the supply chain". Smart Grid is projected to be big business, worth several £billion per year over the next several years. Many also see the Smart Grid as key to enabling a low-carbon economy, and believe that British Industry can play a role in leading the charge.

When I tell people that I’m a Sustainable IT or Green IT expert, the immediate assumption is that I’m sort of techie and that gadgets, terabytes, server loads, redundancy, and disaster recovery are words that turn me on. But the truth is that apart from being very adept at troubleshooting my own PC – and now my Mac, a brief flirtation with C++ MANY, MANY moons ago and an occasionally dalliance in web development and html, I’m the furthest thing from a technical expert working in IT that you’ll probably find. In fact, I started my career in IT at Fujitsu Services, where I was hired as the first of ten Innovation Consultants brought in to introduce leaner, sometimes disruptive practices and new ways of thinking into the company.

With its unveiling of its Nightwatchman Server Edition on Tuesday night, 1e took one more step to extending its success in power management into the datacenter. Nightwatchman Server Edition is describes as “the first power and efficiency management solution to analyze whether servers are providing Useful Work and deliver actionable data that allows IT administrators to ensure that data centers are as efficient as they can be, reducing infrastructure and spending” (Source: Server Energy Efficiency Report”). Last night I went to the Nightwatchman Server Edition Launch party, staged by 1e, a power and patch management software solution provider.