Reducing the environmental impact of IT activities while improving efficiency

Most large groups have defined or are in the process of defining a trajectory of zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030-2050. The ISD is a contributor with its own levers. To achieve these corporate objectives, we must therefore start now and on all fronts.

Being more frugal and efficient reduces the environmental impact per user. The cleanest energy is the energy we don’t use.

Employees and customers are increasingly sensitive and concerned about their direct and indirect environmental impact. They are keen to join a company or buy products from a company that also cares.

Regulations will require more and more involvement from IT departments on the environmental front. For example, the REEN law aims to reduce the environmental footprint of digital technology in France (1). It imposes changes aimed at limiting the renewal of digital devices, promoting data centres and networks that consume less energy, encouraging ecologically considerate digital uses and raising awareness of the environmental impact of digital technology. These obligations will only increase in the years to come.

Thinking under constraint poses a new framework that requires responses that break with what already exists. The constraint linked to limiting the environmental footprint leads to a profound review of habits and can be a source of innovation (e.g. completely rethinking the design of applications based on eco-responsible practices. Or working with its suppliers to implement a circular economy around certain high-value components. This is what Google does with the precious metals contained in the servers in its datacentres.

• Pool and harmonise the demands of the professions as much as possible and thus limit the number of new demands.  
• Challenge the service levels expressed: adapt the performance and availability levels of applications to their level of criticality and make them evolve according to needs during the day or over the year.  
• Limit the development of unused features: initially finance only MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) and not projects in their entirety over several years. This makes it possible to verify the real impact and use of the features and to stop making new developments when the optimum is reached. 

• • Develop new applications using eco-design practices. This requires training and coaching of project stakeholders in these practices.  
  • Identify the existing applications with the greatest environmental impact in order to evaluate the benefits of optimising them. Integrate this new dimension into the IS Master Plan to build a roadmap for the development of applications with regard to environmental issues.   
  • Analyse the real use of the functionalities (depending on the case: at the service, page or functional level) in order to provide factual decision criteria to the business departments and thus decide whether or not to perpetuate the existing services.  
  • For the most visited “front-end” applications: use a tool to measure eco-design metrics in order to progressively improve the service footprint (sprint after sprint, functional evolution after functional evolution).   

• Delete historical data: too old (e.g. those that have exceeded the limits of legal obligations), redundant and unused.   
• Change data distribution practices: limit the data displayed automatically (push mode) and make the rest of the data accessible after a specific action by the user (pull mode). For example, display only the 10 most relevant results of a search and ask for an additional “click” to access the rest of the results.   
• Reduce data replication: assess the opportunity to promote “golden sources” of reference data. This action will also improve the quality of the data.   
• Simplify data models and thus reduce the number of data calls per application.  

• Extend the duration of the assignment of workstations and mobile phones to employees: aim for a minimum lifespan of 6 years, while waiting for the manufacturers’ ecosystem to make it easier to go beyond that, and do not systematically renew them.  
• Limit the number of devices per employee: eliminate PCs supplied to external service providers in favour of virtual access on their own workstations (VDI virtual office), favour pro-personal uses for smartphones (e.g. COPE – Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled or BYOD – Bring Your Own Device), replace landline telephones with softphones, do not systematically allocate a second screen, and favour the pooling of equipment.  
• Turn off workstations at the end of the day.  
• Raise awareness and encourage good practice: replace email attachments with links to shared folders, limit the use of video during calls, limit stored data and encourage data cleansing, encourage wifi connection (4)   

• Choose hosting companies that seriously integrate environmental issues into their offerings   
• Consider with great caution the gains made through the purchase of “green electricity” (PPA – Power Purchased Agreement-, GO – Guarantee of Origin): this method of reporting GHGs in scope 2 according to the market based method (contractual allocation based on the emissions factors of the electricity supplier) is generally not very representative of the physical reality of electricity production. However, the physical reality is tangible when the location-based method (geographical allocation based on the global emissions factor of the countries) is used.  
• Limit the infrastructure footprint: conduct IT decommissioning and rationalisation programmes, limit the number of upstream environments, use high-performance virtualisation technologies, put servers on standby outside of production hours, use low-speed hard drives. 
• Migrate to the Cloud while being very careful to control the rebound effect (6) as well as the level of data replication, and play on the “GreenOps” levers.  

• Choose partners with a good carbon footprint: include the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions (scope 1, 2, 3) in the criteria for choosing suppliers (of hardware, software or services), and monitor the obsolescence policies of these suppliers.  
• Choose partners to take back, recycle and recondition used equipment so that it can be reused by employees, schools or associations (e.g. PCs, phones).  
• Deploy lean and agile operating methods: eliminate waste from the main IT processes, improve the productivity and performance of teams thanks to agility at scale, leading to performance gains of around 20 to 30%.   
• Encourage teleworking: reduce the number of kilometres travelled by employees and service providers, reduce the number of square metres of office space and the associated services (maintenance, company canteen); while being vigilant about the knock-on effects.