How Do You Know When You're Really Green?

As the initiatives at both PG&E and Citigroup suggest, it makes a difference whether sustainability goals have corporate backing. Too often, CIOs who think green get neither credit for saving money when they cut energy costs, nor points for meeting environmental goals.

"It's definitely a big dilemma," says Ceres' Moffat. In fact, 80 per cent of survey respondents say they have no metrics to measure progress toward greening IT.

Moffat notes disconnects between IT and facilities managers, travel managers and other business leaders that make it challenging to assess the results of any environment-related technology investment. "You need to gather the folks that are procuring the technology with the folks that are paying for the energy bill."

Serious change also depends on more energy efficient hardware and software, along with metrics to judge whether they are worth the investment. Though major hardware vendors continue to introduce products from servers to power supplies that they say are more efficient, the metrics to measure their impact are immature.

Larry Vertal is senior strategist with chip-maker AMD and a director of The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. Vertal observes that many CIOs are doing "basic housekeeping." But he thinks they're holding back on new investments to avoid becoming locked-in to any one vendor's solution. "There is a bit of wait and see and it's largely dependent on metrics CIOs feel they can be confident in." "There's a trend to put a green label on something," says Lawicki. "What we're trying to get to is where we can actually measure the stuff. What did you really save? And what does it really mean?"