How Deloitte's IT team has gone green

What has been the reaction so far to some of those user-facing initiatives like the PDA recycling? How are people taking to it?

People actually love this stuff. We've designed a program that is palatable to everyone. The only two that require them to do anything are the PDA recycling – and who's going to complain about that? We gave you a free PDA and now we're saying bring it back so you can get a new one and oh by the way we're going to save the earth when you do. The big one is getting people accustomed to duplex printing. People don't really like seeing print on both sides of the paper. But we have a built-in advantage. We are a growing enterprise, so we have a lot of younger people in the organization and they're much more attuned to a save the earth kind of campaign. We believe that acceptance of duplex printing is growing. And But the fact that we're making it the default on many of our devices just makes it easy. Once you get over the, "I got to remember to look at the other side of the page," it becomes OK.

You've also got a strategy to eliminate applications and centralize what's left. How does that relate to your green IT efforts?

Application centralization has several benefits to it. First, of the techniques one would use to do application centralization, the first is platform standardization. Instead of building multiple applications to do the same kind of collaboration, you build all of the applications on a common platform. The second is application standardization [as in the CRM example mentioned earlier]. That's just good business in my mind and allows us to be more nimble and agile. And if you standardize those platforms and associated applications, it goes a long way toward doing server virtualization and consolidation; that's where the green benefit comes in.

But it's not a silver bullet. Everyone is looking for some silver bullet. If I do this, I'll save the planet. It isn't like that. We're just approaching this in a pragmatic way. Are there ways we can reduce our emissions? The answer is yes, if we do these eight or nine projects in these three or four buckets, we'll do better. Let's just do it and make it good business and move on.

Our goal is simply year by year to improve all of our operations. We're going through some methodologies now to determine carbon footprints and such, but we are not going to let that drive us. We are not going to be in the press like others saying we moved from X carbon footprint to Y. And when you dig into the details, you find they contributed $10 million to planting trees somewhere to do carbon offsets. We're not into that game. We truly want to go through and do all of these things [to conserve energy]. And as the industry and other research reveals other areas where we can conserve, we want to do those things as well. We're much more into that than we're into tree planting.