Planet Tells IT Managers to Do Their Jobs (or Become Irrelevant)

So says Peter Sondergaard, speaking at the Gartner Symposium ITXPO 2007. His keynote was on emerging IT trends and how they will affect IT on a personal and professional level. Peter highlighted four major trends; green IT was one of them. Score one for the good guys.

Peter thought that this would play out in a few ways; he mentioned that "by 2009, organizations will be required to deliver scaled down versions of applications, content, and value added services to a customer's personal, virtual, or home computing environment", suggesting a lighter, "just enough" approach when it comes to computer use. He also warned that the strong public and political interest around environmental issues will affect all suppliers and users, and IT organizations need to be cognizant of its environmental impact. "IT directly impacts the amount of CO2 emissions and can impact the reduction of CO2 emissions." Green is big, and it is unpredictable," said Sondergaard.

Gartner has been promoting this sort of crazy talk for some time, where the IT industry needs to fully recognize how much waste they are creating (more than the airline industry.) Sondergaard ended with a quixotic warning; IT managers had better select and purchase IT technology on the basis of improving business performance, or else they will quickly become irrelevant. Aha - essentially revealing what every IT pro knows, that the trillions we blew on IT up and into the early 21st century was mostly a waste. Maybe he was going for a laugh at the end, but it really was a revelation.