First two sessions of the second day – Green IT, and Strategic Planning.
Green IT – Rob Bristow, JISC
Rob talked about a number of drivers and resources relating to the need to improve the ‘green’ credentials of IT, and how HE IT can be a leader in this respect.
One major point Rob made was that green/sustainability issues need to be included in strategic planning, not be of and for themselves as standalone issues. He made quite a lot of reference to the Suste IT project, that reported in January this year.
The EU code of conduct in relation to data centres and some key points; running warmer at operating temperatures up to 27C, no new single use servers, increasing humidity ranges, and only provisioning up to 18Â months ahead using a more modular approach. All very relevant to us as we prepare to plan for what we will do with our data centre provision in the future.
Some interesting data on the carbon comparison between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ clients (all on the Suste IT site I believe), and information such as that the production of paper is the majority source of the energy consumption for printing – so the single biggest improvement we can make to ‘greening’ printing is to simply use less paper. Print less, print more double-sided.
‘Cloud’ is often cited as a more sustainable model in terms of being mass provisioning rather than local ’silo’ provision duplicated. Rob quoted Nicholas Carr in terms of that not everything will be in the cloud, but the cloud will be in everything. Carr obviously has some well known views on the consumerisation of IT. However, we are all grappling with whether Cloud has (some of) the answers, particularly in the current economic climate.
Some comments from the audiece were interesting.
* Universities are built for inefficiencies – everytime we get a new grant we buy new hardware.
* The perception is, when there’s concerns about timetabling capacity, that we should just put in another PC lab.
Does Your Strategy Really Drive Your Institution – Steve Bailey, Jisc InfoNet
This was quite a general session about the potential disconnect between the high-level strategic planning done and the experience and engagement staff may have with those strategies.
Today saw the launch of the new strategy toolkit from InfoNet, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the session focussed on what the tool offers to help us.
It offered a useful reminder, to me, of one of the purposes of this blog in terms of trying to create a sense of discussion with the ‘Information Systems and Technology Strategy’ across the University. Hopefully, people reading this should have more of a sense of where we are trying to move things to, what’s involved and how it is getting done.
I do talk to people face to face about what’s here and it has served to make more information available to people. However, we do need more voices involved, to turn this into a conversation not a monologue.
Tags: cisg2009 cisg09, green, infonet, jisc, strategic planning, sustainability, toolkits, UCISA