What this book covers
Chapter 1, Our Most Significant Challenge Ahead, teaches you about the basics of climate change and helps you to understand the breadth and depth digitalization and hyperconnectivity have on our society.
Chapter 2, Rise of Sustainable IT, explores the main drivers of a sustainable IT agenda and its importance in implementing sustainable IT into the overall corporate sustainability agenda. We will dig into three concepts: sustainability in IT, sustainability by IT, and IT for society. Finally, we will examine IT’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations.
Chapter 3, The Fundamental Building Blocks of a Sustainable IT Practice (an introductory chapter to Part 2 of the book), gives a brief overview of subsequent Chapters 4-9. This chapter will introduce you to several key concepts and tools to add to your toolbox to enable you to work toward a more sustainable future methodically.
Chapter 4, Data Center and Cloud, introduces you to the digital infrastructure within the data center and cloud realm, their benefits, and what sustainable IT benefits it can bring. We will explore the considerations available to transition data center estates to sustainable digital infrastructure.
Chapter 5, Application and Data, explains how we can optimize your entire application portfolio to a single application to run more sustainably, impacting energy consumption, resource consumption, and utilization resulting in emitting less carbon.
Chapter 6, IT Hardware Management, explains how you can reimagine your approach to managing your IT hardware by exploring different opportunities. You will start to understand the impact of IT hardware equipment and what the most significant environmental impacts are during the life cycle. Second, we will look closely at circular IT hardware management and what is required from your IT enterprise and vendors to transition from a linear to a circular economy.
Chapter 7, Energy Resource Management, enables you to better understand the energy consumption from IT assets and, primarily, your end user IT equipment. Second, you will start to understand how you can measure and understand your energy consumption patterns. Finally, we will look at the actions you can take to reduce your energy consumption.
Chapter 8, Leveraging Your Buying Power, introduces you to the different facets of sustainable IT vendor management and procurement and how these disciplines can be leveraged to make your supply chain more trustworthy and transparent.
Chapter 9, Sustainability by IT, explores to a large extent how IT can help reduce environmental burdens elsewhere in society by using innovation for sustainable business models. Technology, CleanTech or SustainTech, has an incredible opportunity to be an enabler in developing sustainable technology. Sustainability by IT is a vast topic that covers a broad spectrum, and it could easily be a book, but this chapter will provide a broad overview of the topic.
Chapter 10, Get Started Today, focuses on pulling all the pieces together by first outlining a Sustainable IT maturity model© to enable you to determine your current state and set out your future state ambitions. Second, you will learn how to establish your current state’s greenhouse gas (GHG)/carbon emission baseline. Establishing a baseline enables you to get valuable insights into your current state. The baseline will guide you towards what action areas should be prioritized and what actions should be taken and simulate your GHG/carbon emission target state. Finally, the chapter will conclude with how the established baseline can be interpreted and guide you on how to start thinking about formulating an actionable, sustainable IT strategy in the subsequent chapter.
Chapter 11, Putting a Sustainable IT Strategy in Place, enables you to create your own sustainable IT strategy and roadmap.
Chapter 12, From Strategy to Execution - Lead with Purpose, shows how the most essential step is to ensure your strategy takes flight. In this chapter, we will discuss how you can take your strategy to execution by starting to deliver global and impactful objectives and key results.