by Shane Henson — September 26, 2011—Fujitsu, a provider of ICT business solutions, recently released the second ICT Sustainability: The Global Benchmark Report, providing a comprehensive analysis of the trending maturity of sustainability of information and communications technology (ICT) in organizations across the globe.
According to Fujitsu, the research summarizes 1,000 responses to 80 questions about ICT sustainability policies, behavior and technologies. The data was collected through an online survey of CIOs and ICT managers in large information technology (IT)-using organizations across industry sectors in seven countries: Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
This is the second benchmark report and from this year’s findings there is a continuing relative lack of maturity in ICT sustainability. It is also clear there is a direct relationship between the visibility of ICT power costs and an organization’s overall awareness of ICT sustainability issues, the report notes.
The results may be of particular interest to facilities managers, especially those who manage data centers, who may, like more than half the respondents, have little understanding of how much power their ICT equipment consumes. Only one in seven ICT divisions included the cost of ICT’s power consumption in their departmental budgets. For the very small proportion (14.2%) where ICT has control and responsibility for ICT-specific power consumption, their performance was significantly higher.
The report also found that larger organizations, which have more sophisticated ICT functions and generally more advanced ICT sustainability practices, are more likely to be aware of the cost of ICT’s energy consumption. Organizations with more than 5,000 employees have an average score of 61.7 compared with 50.7 for those with 100 to 499 employees.
Best-Performing Country
The best performing country of the seven surveyed is Canada, with an overall ICT Sustainability Index of 60.3. Canada, the U.K. (58.3) and the USA (56.0) perform above the average, while Australia, New Zealand, India and China perform below the average.
Best-Performing Sector
The ICT/communications/media sector is the lead industry at 58.4 and manufacturing the lowest at 51.2, except in Canada. As with the findings of the 2010 survey, the relativities between industry sectors are generally consistent across different countries; the same industries tend to do better or worse in all countries.
