Chief Information Officer

Think along the lines of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Finantial Officer (CFO)

We put 35% of our utilities costs into our CIO's budget at FY 07. He was enraged for a while, but he got over it. Dealing with real costs and real (non-virtual) products gave him a new outlook on life. He's now a much better person to work with and I'll dare say, he's a better person overall.

The IT world has been screaming for years to be viewed as serious business contributors and now they have a chance by dealing with the stuff that the "non geeks" (i.e. management) deal with. If they can actually save money, or even figure out a way to make money, instead of being a cost center the IT people will be HUGE.

It's up to them to fuck it up though. We'll see what happens.

I'm not sure if the 'what is a CIO' comment was made out of irony or not - but it is obviously a very good question when looked at in terms what the role should be nowadays.

That aside, as I think it diverts from the topic in hand, the fact the CIOs are not only not accountable for a significant proportion of the running costs of their operations, but are also not being asked to monitor their footprint (in carbon terms if nothing else) are serious issues which companies should be addressing.

The first of these issues are fairly simple - how can you measure cost-savings against value-delivery if you don't even measure these appropriately in your budgets?

The second is more subtle but I doubt anyone would doubt there is a carbon budget emerging and we will have to monitor these factors sooner or later. Thinking our supply chain will not pass on those costs is perhaps niave. This will also need to be international e.g. if we outsource to india (for example) then the carbon costs will need to be factored in.

One of the lessons of business is that targets become more challenging. Dell's "We were too early with the green thing" message is interesting on a second level: Currently, (as has been commented previously) electricity - for power and cooling - is a Facilities Management issue, and FM budgets are usually separate from IT budgets, even when FM and IT are in the same business division. So, there is no incentive for a CIO to reduce energy costs, and certainly not to replace an existing but ageing server with one that is smaller, faster and more efficient. "A capital spend out of my budget to make an operating saving in his budget" is crazy talk.

Now, here's the tricky part: Any CIO who implements green tech before being required to is hanging themselves. I know (because I've done the numbers) that I can wipe 60% off my energy costs, and that in doing this, I can refresh my entire server estate for zero cost over three years. But I also suspect that I'm going to be asked by the CIO to deliver energy efficiencies in the financial year 2010-11. So, if I replace the servers now, I take away my ability to deliver the savings then, because they've already been delivered.

Big businesses are stupid, but we've seen this all before with the "laser toner is a stationary cost" argument, and I for one am not about to bang my head against that wall unless explicitly asked to...

Our company (Emojo) has become considerably greener over the past three years or so since energy caps became the key element when using racks in data centres. We went from filling racks with servers one year to using only 30% of the rack space 18 months later. To get the most out of our data centre investments we've had to upgrade our entire sever setup.

The advent of low energy servers and virtualisation technologies means we typically double our capacity for every old server we swap out with a new one, and frequently we're replacing two or more severs with one multi-core, multi-virtualised replacement.

The same is true of the desktop computers we use which now use considerably less power than previously. The only exception are our screens which are getting bigger every time we replace them and that is no doubt reducing the overall level of energy savings considerably.

Facilities costs, in particular server-room cooling, is a MAJOR part of tech facilities expenditure. The monthly electric bill is not the immediate point. Dell trying to excuse its incompetence with this verbal footwork is just ridiculous. Are they getting their lines from the McCain campaign?