Updated Q1 2011: Is Green IT Your Emperor With No Clothes?

Is green IT your emperor with no clothes? It is if you've invested in green IT with the promise of reducing energy costs but haven't measured your energy baseline. Without a baseline, IT leaders can't guide their green IT efforts with solid data, create realistic goals and metrics, or track successes over time. If this situation sounds familiar, you're not alone: Forrester finds that despite a steady rise in green IT plans and adoption, only 30% of organizations have taken a baseline measurement of their energy consumption. To get on the right track, you need to perform an annual estimate of energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and dollar costs of operating IT inside and outside of the data center. Forrester recommends that IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals own the green IT baseline process since they already manage their organization's energy-consuming IT assets.