The time has come for CIOs to get with green. But if you need help in figuring out how to make your IT operations more environmentally friendly, this article will provide you some help. Here are the answers to 12 fundamental questions around green IT.

Jayshree Ullal, senior VP data center, switching and services group, Cisco, is responsible for driving the direction and execution of Cisco's switching, security and the company's expansion into data center product lines. She believes that the next generation of data centers -- dubbed data center 3.0 -- will give enterprises more flexibility and reduce capex and opex.

Thinking about reducing your company's environmental impact can seem like a daunting task. So don't. Instead, here are three simple things IT departments can do today to start saving energy costs

Concerned about energy costs, IT organizations have begun to make significant changes to how their data centers are powered and cooled. But many IT departments haven't yet looked at saving energy throughout the rest of their companies' IT infrastructures. That's shortsighted. Although data centers may use more power per square foot, as a percentage of total power consumption, office equipment is the big kahuna.

The Facilitator of the Australian Telework Awareness initiative says telework is a very good idea, which Australian government CIOs should be promoting far more vigorously

In business circles Toyota is talked of with awe. Not for its cars or well-heeled Formula One team, but because it is a manufacturer that has a policy that has lifted it from Japanese almost ran, to serious rival to Ford in Henry Ford's home, the USA.

As a matter of personal belief, CIOs are free to count themselves among the diminishing band of troglodytes that continue to deny the reality of human-induced climate change.

Meetings are hard enough to run when the participants are all in the same room, fighting over the last chocolate doughnut. But any meeting you call, nowadays, probably has at least one person attending who works in a remote location. In some cases, everyone in the teleconference is dialing in. You may be great at orchestrating an in-person meeting, but running an effective teleconference requires new skills.

By 2003, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer found itself with a costly business problem: Paper. Reams of paper. Mountains of paper. Pfizer was up to its neck in the stuff

There isn't much about Tom Sanzone that bespeaks drama. The CIO of Credit Suisse is direct, meticulous and practical, and it doesn't seem as if he'd suffer fools gladly, an impression partly informed by his New York accent, nearly shaven head and confident demeanour

When it comes to cleaning up their act, many CIOs are recognizing data centres as among the lowest hanging fruit. IDC estimates companies spent $US26.1 billion to power and cool servers worldwide in 2005, with a monstrous $14 billion of that being spent in the US alone. In fact, data centres account for between 1.5 and 3 percent of all electricity consumed in the US. Should current trends persist, the research organization projects, that bill will soar to $US50 billion by the end of the decade