Australia performs poorly compared to many other countries when it comes to ICT Sustainability (often called “Green IT”). Australia’s overall ICT Sustainability Index (ITSx) is 52.8, compared to the global average of 54.3. Canada does best, on 60.3, followed by the United Kingdom on 58.3 and the USA on 52.8. Australia is ahead of only New Zealand, India and China of the countries surveyed.
The findings are contained in Fujitsu’s annual Global ICT Sustainability benchmarking report, researched by Connection Research. The benchmark is based on a survey of 1,000 international ICT departments conducted by Connection Research over May and June 2011, and since supplemented by further research and analysis. The survey quantifies an organisation’s ICT Sustainability attitudes, policies, practices and technologies, in each of five areas: Lifecycle and Procurement, End User Efficiencies, Enterprise and Data Centre, ICT as a Low Carbon Enabler, and Metrics.
Australia’s worst performance is in End User Efficiencies, where it is last of all the countries surveyed. This indicates that Australian ICT departments are comparatively poor at implementing such end user sustainability technologies and practices as PC power management, printer consolidation and end user training programs. It seems many of the “low hanging fruit” of Green IT have grown back.
An analysis by industry shows that Australia does comparatively well in Government and Professional Services, but worse than average in other industry sectors. Australia has a long way to go in ICT Sustainability.
