Carl Weinschenk spoke with Deborah Grove, principal, Grove Associates, a consultancy that provides global strategies for sustainability innovation and green IT.

Weinschenk: What do you and your firm do?
Grove: I'm very interested in scenario planning and corporate strategy. Most people do not give a lot of thought to the fact that e-commerce is going to accelerate data center usage over the next three to five years. I liken this transformation to something I refer to as The 21st Century Silk Road. You want to be able to go up and down and sideways in the ecosystem. I see it not as vertical or horizontal movement, but really like a globe. It has to move in all directions to get value. What I want to do is talk to companies to guide them through the process of creating a smaller carbon footprint when they are growing exponentially. The only way to do that is to move more and more of atoms to bits, that is, to do more things online.

Weinschenk: Is the message resonating?
Grove: I don't think [companies] are convinced. I don't see it. Everyone has best practices, but they are still growing and eating up energy like you wouldn't believe. [The Uptime Institute's] Ken Brill says that for the last two years energy use has increased by 30 percent each year. We know what to do, but we do not follow through. The cost to not do it is not high enough yet.

Weinschenk: Why are companies resistant?
Grove: It goes back to corporate strategy. Companies think that they have to get into new markets quickly. The fastest way to do that is add more servers. We have to educate business unit managers. [We must convince them] to launch new campaigns that use internal resources that already exist and they have to understand that the ultimate goal is to cut down on people moving, people driving around. We have to look at a systematic change, a transformation instead of point-to-point solutions. For instance, as a consumer, if Amazon gives me the option of having something delivered Thursday or Friday, I could say I don't mind the extra day. They could say you saved 10 carbon units. We would transform logistics in many, many ways if consumers were part of that process. I would feel Amazon is serving me if the delay [helps the environment]. But nobody has gone around and done this type of thing industry by industry. Another thing is time-of-day issues. Financial systems run in the morning and all kinds of industries run processing in the evening or are non time-specific. If you can average them across the industries [it would save energy]. You can do that in data centers that serve non-competitive industries.

Weinschenk: What do you tell companies to get them on board?
Grove: You say that in the best of all possible worlds, there are plenty of financial resources and utilities and costs don't go up. That's scenario one. In scenario two, utility prices go up and 25 percent of the water needed for the chillers is unavailable because of drought. But the company still wants to grow 300 percent. They can play out that corporate strategy for 36 months. How do we plan for that scenario? The third is something in between those two. My point is that if you are going to think things through, if you prepare for [the worse case], it is going to be a much stronger company, even if the reality is in between scenarios one and three. Nimbleness beats size in the new economy. The ability to change rapidly involves thinking through things.

Weinschenk: But you suggest that planners still are resistant.
Grove: I had a conversation with an executive of a big company who talks to CIOs all the time. The executive told me that it is not on the top-five list of people's priorities and that it was low down in importance level of what CIOs are interested in. It hasn't reached the urgency level. I think that knowledge is there, but financial and economic uncertainty means people have put it on the back burner again. The thing that could move it up on the significance level is drought or adverse weather conditions closing down a data center or two and the price of utilities going up.

Weinschenk: So, unfortunately, there has to be a problem before the issue gets addressed.
Grove: I think Americans by and large are laissez-faire until something smacks them upside their heads. I want to work with smart companies, those that understand that the game is changing. I am an advocate of recognizing allies in the corporate social responsibility group. They want to see the same thing happen that we do. They want to see IT working toward smaller carbon footprints. They have visibility and sometimes even publish their own annual report.

Weinschenk: Is some headway being made among people who design data centers?
Grove: I see it among companies on the west coast, but you don't necessarily see it across the board. I was at the Labs21 conference. A preponderance of people in the west had moved a bit more in this direction, in my opinion. I talked to somebody who told me about a New York financial institution that moved to a new data center. I asked if they use outside air [to supplement cooling in a more environmentally friendly way], and he said no. I asked if they considered it, and he said no.

Weinschenk: Where should companies begin internally?
Grove: Novel innovative collaboration is helped by bringing new and unique partnerships together. It is not the usual suspects. If you are building a new data center, get university research people involved to get state-of-the-art suggestions and recommendations. Reach out to utilities, customers and telcos that have long experience in direct current. Just widen the conversation at the earliest stages.