Green spending swallows a fifth of IT budgets

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Dashboards are one of the ways companies could improve environmental performance through better use of IT, AMR's Nigel Montgomery suggests. For most companies, environmental issues are dealt with at a local level, often by an individual office, factory or store. Just one in five companies successfully implement environmental initiatives globally.

A lack of detailed environmental information makes it hard for companies to improve their green performance - or even to make informed decisions not to so, Montgomery says. And as data is often aggregated at a local office or plant level, senior managers may not have any visibility as to which parts of the business are doing well in environmental terms, and which are underperforming.

"A lot of reporting is done to a compliance level. When the company reaches its performance target, they stop counting," he says. This means that businesses are not able to be proactive in their environmental initiatives.

Companies that take a broader approach to the problem could, on the other hand, use their green credentials as a selling point. They could even start to factor environmental elements into day-to-day business decisions.

But to do this, environmental measurements would need to be available across business applications, in real time, rather than simply calculated and assessed after the event.

"This is about how do you as a manufacturer, a bank, a retailer, look at your own footprint, your own environmental impact, rather than counting it and counting the cost after the event," says Montgomery. Unfortunately, they are doing that without technology. Most of it is collected manually and locally."

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