Financial Times article on 16th September 2009
Role Model: Gary Hird, IT manager and author
Gary Hird’s colleagues joke that his literary achievements pose little threat to Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code author, but he is still proud to have published his first book.
“Green IT in Practice” offers a no‐nonsense guide to how John Lewis Partnership, the UK retailer, has been tackling the carbon footprint of its technology operations at both its John Lewis and Waitrose stores since 1996.
Mr Hird, JLP’s technical strategy manager, points out that managers face a ”bewildering” mass of information to sift through on green IT: ”My goal was to fill
what I saw as a real gap in the market – not by providing a prescriptive, ’do this or the earth gets it’ set of laws, or a boast that I know all the answers, but by outlining our own experiences at JLP.”
Most IT managers have, by now, some experience of green IT projects, though few have documented them in such detail for the benefit of their peers. Trewin Restorick, director of Global Action Plan, a climate change charity, in his foreword to Mr Hird’s book, writes: ”If the IT sector is going to play the leading role it should in the fight against climate change, then more practitioners like Gary are needed to enter into the debate.”
What Mr Hird brings to the debate is a pragmatic acknowledgement that projects of this kind often involve compromise. ”A mantra of ’make do and mend’ is probably greener than one of wholesale replacement of hardware with more eco‐efficient models – but in the rush to achieve short‐term targets, that sometimes gets forgotten,” he says.
IT teams have limited time, he points out, making it vital to devise ways of selecting those initiatives that will bring the best “green return”. Others, he says, will have to wait, regardless of their environmental merits.
Mr Hird therefore provides readers with tried‐and‐tested metrics that can be used to establish a current carbon footprint baseline, set targets and measure progress. ”In my experience, establishing meaningful metrics is far, far harder than a lot of the technical work involved in Green IT, but without them, that technical work may not have the impact IT teams are hoping to achieve,” he says.
On some issues, he freely admits, the green IT team at JLP is still trying to decide the best way forward and he will continue his active participation in industry forums, such as Global Action Plan’s Environmental IT Leadership Team (EILT) in order to find the answers.
It is 20 years since Mr Hird joined JLP on its IT graduate training scheme: “From the moment I started hearing about green IT, I knew it was something I wanted to spend time on,” he says.
Outside of work, he doesn’t try to pretend he is a paragon of green virtue: he recycles packaging but he would still choose to drink “a nice Rhone Valley red over an English wine”.
However, when he needed to replace his home PC last year, he turned to green experts VeryPC for advice – “so I suppose, in that respect, I practise at home what I preach at work”.
One of his earliest memories of working for JLP were stickers on the light switches that read: “Switch Off! You’re Burning our Bonus!”
”I’m really glad that we’re now applying that ethos across the whole of our technology infrastructure. The debate may still rage over some aspects of green IT, but there is an abundance of projects that we can be getting on with in the meantime,” he says.