Solving Climate Change with IT Service Management

This is to invite comments on the first draft of my talk on "Solving Climate Change with IT Service Management" for the ITSM and IT Architecture Special Interest Groups in Adelaide on 21 April 2009 (free ACS talk). The idea is that the skills which IT professionals apply to management of projects can be used to estimate, report and reduce carbon emissions, helping organisation to meet the new requirements imposed by governments.

Masterclass on Climate Change with ITSM - Part 2

My draft "Green ITSM" talk will be used as a sample of work for a masterclass. on technical writing at ANU. So I need to write something. This is an adaptation of an existing talk on Green ICT:

Green ICT Strategies: Lowering Cost and Carbon Emissions with ICT

1. 25% to 50% CO2 Reduction needed by 2020
2. First global Green ICT Course
3. Green ICT
4. Business ICT Competencies
5. Learning by Doing
6. Students Teach Each Other
7. Online References Used
8. Some Green ICT Topics
9. Dematerialisation: doing more with less
10. More Information

To this I need to add new material on IT Service Management and ITIL. The first question is if anyone else has written on Green ITI or green ITSM. A web search for "Green ITIL" found only 42 entries. The first is a lengthy blog post "The New Color of ITIL: Green" By Denise P. Kalm and Marv Waschke in Mainframe Executive, March 12, 2009. This follows the same approach I was intending: explain where green can be fitted into ITIL's existing approach. The next is "Green ITIL" from the British Computer Society, March 2009. This takes a slightly different approach, saying even the latest ITIL (Version 3), does not include measures of environmental impact in IT service delivery. However, while the article goes on to claim this could be done, it does not detail how.

The next article of interest is a white paper "Green ITIL" from Capgemini (8 December 2008). Capgemini provide a far more detailed proposal of how ITIL can incorporate sustainability. They start with the concept of "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR), which I accidentally attended a conference about in Malaysia. Capgemini argue that CSR is the link from Corporate Governance to the IT Functiopn of an organisation. Within IT, there is IT social responsibility (which is not a term I am familiar with) then linking to, at the lower level, to Service Management Policy, which where ITIL comes into play. This provides an excellent way to link green ICT into wider corporate social policies, where such policies exist. It also provides a context for incorporating green ICT into ITIL and then being able to make decisions on IT resource allocation including sustainability issues.

However, Capgemini's approach assumes that green issues will fit withing ITIL's existing framework of services: IT Services, Application services, Infrastructure services, Network Services, Data Services and Security Services. It then firther assumes that ITIL's categorisation of Processes, Methods, Functions, Roles and Activities apply. Lastly it assumes that sustainability measures can be captured in the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for monitoring the IT service management, so that this can then be used with techniques such as Balanced Scorecard and, at a higher level, Corporate Balanced Scorecard.

Capgemini argue that measures such as "Carbon Score" can be used to include CO2e in a balanced scorecard approach. While this seems rerasonable for major new acitvities such as new equipment purchase, software development or service acquistion, by extending it to consideration of environmental impact of in Requests for Change (RFCs), Capgemini may have extended Green ITIL a step too far. It is unlikely to be useful to consider the envrionmental impact of every small change to a system.

Capgemini are on firmer ground with their example of an organisation deciding if an IT servcie should be provided 24/7. While customers would like service continuously, in reality most servcies are only heavily used during officie hours on weekdays. There is a high envrionmental cost in running these services after hours and on weekends. However, this analysis appears to be falwed. It would suggest that the logiocal conclusion would be to shuit down the computer system after hours. There would be few indsutries which such a proposal could be justified on envrionmental or other grounds. The real world solution would be to design the system to reduce capacity to match demand, thus reducing energy use automatically after hours and on weekends when demand is low.

Masterclass on Solving Climate Change with IT Service Management

I will be talking on "Solving Climate Change with IT Service Management", at the IT Service Management and IT Architecture Special Interest Groups in Adelaide on 21 April 2009. Therefore I need to adapt the usual talk I give on Green ICT to emphasise Service Management and IT Architecture. In addition the COMP2410 students at ANU asked for more help on how to write a report on an ICT issue. I therefore offered my draft for the Green ITSM talk for a masterclass. The idea is that my fellow lecturers will critique my work with the class watching. They can then get more of an idea of how writing happens. Also they will see that everyone makes the same mistakes and has to go through the sames process.

The topic:

Like the students I have a set essay topic for my rpesentation:

"Solving Climate Change with IT Service Management"

Green ICT is the study and practice of using computers and telecommunications in a way which maximises positive environmental benefit and minimise the negative impact. A common misconception is that Green ICT is for engineers and environmentalists, but this is a management issue where IT Service Management specialists can apply their skills to contribute to the business as well as the environment.

Green ICT seeks to inform accepted management practises to achieve efficient and effective business interaction. The same skills which IT professionals apply to management of projects can be used to estimate, report and reduce carbon emissions, helping organisation to meet the new requirements imposed by governments.

The Australian Computer Society has produced the world's first online postgraduate course in Green ICT, specifically designed for IT professionals. The course is modelled on the ACS's IT Service Management course and designed to align with the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). The course content is available free online.

This is for a one hour presentation. Normally I would prepare the equivalent of eight A4 pages of notes for a one hour talk. This is also about the average lenght for an paper in an ICT journal, such as JRPIT. The notes for a talk need not be as formally structured as a journal paper, it should still be defensible and readable.

Unlike the students I have some existing material to work from, rather than starting from scratch. But the students have been given a carefully structured description of the problem and suggested readings, whereas I have to make all that up myself.

As with any written work, the starting point is to decide what it is you are trying to say and who you are saying it to. With an academic paper, the audience is reasonably clear: it is the person marking the assignment, or the reviewers of the paper and ultimately your peers. n the case of this seminar, the audience is ICT professionals with a background in the specialist areas of IT Service Management and IT Architecture.

The aim of the presentation therefore is to tell the audience about Green ICT (which they are assumed not to know much about) and relate it to IT Service Management (which they know about but I don't). I therefore need to learn a little about ITSM and see if anyone has previously related it to Green ICT.

If this was a full paper I would do a literature search. But that is not needed for a talk. The structure of the Green ICT course I will be discussing was based on the IT Service Management.