John Johnson enlightened attendees at INPUT's State and Local MarketView conference about the General Services Administration's(GSA) Greening of Government. Johnson serves as the Assistant Commissioner for the Integrated Technology Service (ITS) with the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), and discussed directions that the GSA is taking to infuse green products in the portfolio and foster awareness to 135 federal agencies and 1800 sub bureaus.

What is going green – in a nutshell Johnson stated that collectively as individuals and organizations we must become more mindful and understand how our consumption of products and services impacts the environment. Therefore, we must start with behavior changes to minimize further detrimental effects. This speaks to all of us, not just "tree huggers," as some still believe. Corporations have found that they can build teamwork through corporate social responsibility by promoting "green behaviors," which establishes common goals and reap multifaceted benefits - the intangible asset of boosting employee morale along with hard cash savings of power consumption and paper costs through efficiency practices.

GSA is positioned to drive more effective utilization of technology given the billions of dollars spent through procurement vehicles they negotiate. The groundswell of interest continues as officials are more tuned into the pressing need to improve energy efficiencies. Significant energy consumption is wasted by PC users and much inefficiency can be changed by simply using power saving features. Multiply Johnson's estimate of $75 annually, per pc user over all the units in circulation – that yields tremendous savings of energy and dollars, by merely using power management tools.

It is no secret that most data center operations substantially underutilize hardware processing capability. As our dependency mounts for servers to provide file storage and the power of search engines, changes must be made to minimize the average of 10 to 12 generators that are found in data centers. Less than 10 years ago 6 million servers were in use; today there are approximately 28 million servers, and estimates project the number to rise to 43 million servers by 2010. Not only is there enthusiasm mounting to support to go green, given growing climate concerns, but there are substantial financial savings that can be realized from reducing power consumption in data center operations. Government is now accessing the correct metric to use to measure efficiency, which is most often, Power Use Effectiveness, (PUE). These standards will be adopted by EPA to establish future policy and guidelines and were addressed in an EPA Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency.

Given over $17 billion of procurements through GSA Schedule 70, Johnson indicated that we can anticipate a greening of the schedule. Currently officials are working with the CIO's within federal agencies to bring this direction forward. The greening of GSA's Schedule 70 may spur additional State and Local procurements through Schedule 70 and cascade widespread green procurements, so stay tuned.

As more focus draws on the need to go green to support mounting environmental issues, vendors must also recognize the importance of deploying practices and building products that minimize power consumption and elicit users to embrace power saving features. Going green is mounting in importance and vendors need to establish practices and not consider them as merely as "a nice thing to do," but rather an important business strategy on all fronts. The Green Business Alliance fosters education and knowledge of how business needs to act. All roles of government and business from IT managers, procurement officials, program managers together with industry, can successfully deploy IT products and operate data centers that are environmentally sound and fiscally responsible.