November 11, 2008, 12:00 AM — Many agree with the concept of a socially responsible IT department, but putting ideas into action requires a vision and careful planning. Here's how to get started:
1. Begin simply. Few IT departments have the time, energy or money to instantly create a comprehensive social responsibility initiative. Strategies are best approached in stages, starting with simple tasks and working up to larger projects. Start with an overall assessment, says Tony Leger, leader of architecture and engineering services in the office of the CIO at Nortel. A lot of managers in the IT space, for instance, don't know what all those servers in their data centers are doing," he says. They also don't necessarily know whether their monitors are running all the time or not, so ask questions on how and why things are running."
2. Form a committee. Staff buy-in is critical and works best when people are energized in a team effort. "If you begin a committee, or just sort of let people know that you're looking to make some changes, you'll find people willing to participate," says Kevin Roddy, vice president of information technology for 3rd Federal Bank in Newtown, Pa. "Then, if you can turn that energy loose, you can really gain from it, because people really believe in this stuff, and they really want to make it happen and they don’t mind putting in the time and effort it takes to get results."
3. Create a strategy. Like any other major IT project, a social responsibility initiative requires a detailed strategy and timeline. This is something the committee should work on and reexamine periodically, Roddy says.
4. Seek management support. An IT department launching a social responsibility effort needs input from top management for business, financial and moral support. Management interaction is also needed to ensure that IT's social responsibility plans seamlessly mesh with overall enterprise goals. "Help the CEO and CFO understand how techniques like teleworking, for instance, can save on real estate space, energy usage and so on," Leger says. "If you start bringing that cost opportunity up to them, you'll find there is quite a bit of interest on the executive level."
5. Research intensively. Start by investigating how other IT departments have achieved social responsibility goals by networking with other managers. Non-IT sources can also provide helpful tips and insight, says Laura Folden, IT director for the Washington-headquartered Humane Society of the U.S.. "There are organizations, like the Sierra Club, and they do a lot of work on energy and recycling," she says. Folden says she gets lots of useful information from environmental organization publications and Web sites.
6. Consider seeking external help. An outside consultant can view your department's social responsibility strategy independently and dispassionately, and may be able to spot gaps and suggest strategies that would otherwise go overlooked. Roddy says his consultant showed him the importance of switching off workstation power strips every night. "He explained to us about the 'phantom loads' and other energy savings that we can realize."
7. Keep careful records. Document key program aspects, such as energy savings and recycling programs. "We try to keep as much [information] centrally, in a database, as we can here so we can do lifecycle management," Folden says.
8. Form partnerships. Urge vendors to embrace social responsibility and ensure that they're doing their part to help your department meet its goals. "We, as an IT group, work with our vendors by challenging them as to what are they doing around costs [and] what are they doing on footprint, both physical as well as energy," Leger says.
9. Reach out. Make your department a force for social good by encouraging employees to donate their time and energy to volunteer projects. Some initiatives can even be supported on-site. Folden and her staff, for example, make sure that all obsolete cell phones go to a battered women’s shelter."
10. Use technology to enforce policy. Monitoring software can be your partner in energy savings. The Humane Society uses software to shut off its monitors when they're not being used. "It provides a pretty substantial energy savings," Folden says.
