Those of you who know me may now be wondering when I became a climate expert, but don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest forcing your IT suppliers to drive a Tesla or to become vegetarians to save the planet. I simply believe that we need to give more focus to the environmental impact of outsourcing (many other aspects of IT too).

We are all aware that advances in technology and the changing workplace can support a better environment, so let me dive straight in and give a few examples to show what I mean.

If you outsource (even if not) you will have some level of governance structure in place with multiple regular client/supplier meetings, often following a hierarchical structure. The larger the company, the more international this becomes and quite soon, you have account managers, service managers, and every other kind of manager flying to various meetings. If things turn for the worse or major transformational projects are started, the intensity of meetings increases, including the corresponding travel. Besides these structured meetings, I often see teams visiting offshore locations for teambuilding or developers visiting the customer in large groups to work together. Having done my fair share of travelling over the years, I recognize that probably only 30% of these trips are truly necessary whilst the remainder simply serves to increase the loyalty card status and could be done remotely. Video and audio conferences have come a long way in the past years and offer ideal alternatives to the extensive travel some companies still make, greatly reducing the corresponding carbon footprint. It’s fairly easy to track such travel, so setting up a policy on continuous travel reduction objectives or incentivizing suppliers to reduce their travel footprint (maybe even forcing alternative travel means to be used) is something that can be tracked and potentially committed to.

Then we have the infamous ‘innovation’ clause in most outsourcing agreements. A clause that suppliers often see as a sales opportunity and which clients often abuse for free consultancy (ok, some people really make use of this as it’s intended). Whilst there is a huge amount of innovation available that helps the environment, the focus is often only on CAPEX/OPEX, time to market or aspects such as enhancing performance. Including the environmental impact into such innovation clauses can introduce a new perspective. For instance, a Solid State Disk (SSD) is significantly better for the environment than a traditional spinning Hard Disk Drive (HDD). In terms of resource depletion and toxicity, an SSD is ca. 90% better for the environment than a HDD. Combine this with the reduced power consumption of an SSD (ca. 25% of a HDD) and reduced space and cooling requirements and the option of moving to SSD’s becomes more attractive for environmentally friendly/conscious customers (yes, I know SSD’s are currently far too expensive to replace all HDD’s, but increased adoption will drive down the price). The above also applies to clauses where technology refresh is mentioned but suppliers may be inclined to sweat the assets for economic benefit rather than timely refreshing to achieve other benefits. So, whether outsourced or not, we should really be forcing the identification and assessment of environmental factors into decision making. It is not difficult to create parameters regarding energy consumption, resource depletion and the like into the assessment criteria at a contractual level.

There are many more opportunities where attention can be given to and relatively easily measured regarding environmental impact. For example, digital only reporting is a very easy but effective measure (it’s amazing how many suppliers still bring paper copies to meetings) that a former colleague insisted on overnight, hugely reducing the volume of paper being thrown away for a single meeting.

Many companies ignore these simple but very impactful possibilities and opt to choose suppliers that give a broader environmental commitment. For instance, Amazon AWS committed to a 100% renewable energy approach in 2014 and anyone using their services can be proud of adopting the approach. However, realizing such a commitment is something different and as of 2018 Amazon had only achieved 50% of this target. This is still a great achievement, but if you’re ‘piggy backing’ on the commitment of someone else, you need to remain aware of the level of achievement to really understand if you’re living up to your own commitment.

So, if you’re revising your MSA/MFA, introducing a new service or product, or just refreshing some hardware, please consider introducing new metrics and requirements either into the assessment criteria or as long-term obligations. It’s really not that difficult. If you already have environmental clauses in your agreements, please share so that we may all benefit.