Progress – Slow Going

Focal Points:

• According to Uptime Institute's recently released 2012 Data Center Industry Survey, more than half of the enterprise respondents stated energy savings were important but few have financial incentives in place to drive change. Only 20 percent of the organizations' IT departments pay the data center power bill; corporate real estate or facilities is the primary payee. In Asia it is worse: only 10 percent of IT departments pay for power. When it comes to an interest in pursuing a green certification for current or future data centers, slightly less than 50 percent were interested. 29 percent of organizations do not measure power usage effectiveness (PUE); for environments with 500 servers or less, nearly half do not measure PUE. Of those that do, more precise measurement methods are being employed this year over last. The average global, self-reported PUE from the survey was between 1.8 and 1.89. Nine percent of the respondents reported a PUE of 2.5 or greater while 10 percent claimed a PUE of 1.39 or less. Precision cooling strategies are improving but there remains a long way to go. Almost one-third of respondents monitor temperatures at the room level while only 16 percent check it at the most relevant location: the server inlet. Only one-third of respondents cited their firms have adopted tools to identify underutilized servers and devices.
• A survey of 279 non-IT federal executives by MeriTalk, an online community and resource for government IT, finds more than half of the respondents said their top priorities include streamlining business processes. Nearly 40 percent of the executives cited cutting waste as their most important mission, and 32 percent said increasing accountability placed first on their to-do list. Moreover, less than half of the executives think of IT as an opportunity versus a cost while 56 percent stated IT helps support their daily operations. Even worse, less than 25 percent of the executives feel IT lends them a hand in providing analytics to support business decisions, saving money and increasing efficiency, or improving constituent processes or services. On the other hand, 95 percent of federal executives agree their agency could see substantial savings with IT modernization.
• IQNavigator, a contingent workforce software and managed service provider, released its second quarter 2012 temporary worker rate change index for the U.S. Overall, the national rate trend for 2012 has been slowly rising and now sits five percentage points above the January 2008 baseline. However, the detail breakdown shows no growth in the professional-management job sector but movement from negative to 1.2 percent positive in the technical-IT sector. Since the rate of increase over the past six months remains less than the inflation rate over the same period, the company feels it is unclear whether or not the trend implies upwards pressure on labor rates. The firm also points out that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BOL) underscores the importance of temporary labor as new hires increasingly are being made through temporary employment agencies. In fact, although temporary agency employees constitute less than two percent of the total U.S. non-farm labor force, 15 percent of all new jobs created in the U.S. in 2012 have been through temp agency placements.

RFG POV: Company executives may vocalize their support for sustainability but most have not established financial incentives designed to drive a transformation of their data centers to be best of breed "green IT" shops. Executives still fail to recognize that being green is not just good for the environment but it mobilizes the company to optimize resources and pursue best practices. Businesses continue to waste up to 40 percent of their IT budgets because they fail to connect the dots. Furthermore, the MeriTalk federal study reveals how far behind the private sector the U.S. federal government is. While businesses are utilizing IT as a differentiator to attain their goals, drive revenues and cut costs, the government perceives IT only as a cost center. Federal executives should modify their business processes, align and link their development projects to their operations, and fund their operations holistically. This will eliminate the sub-optimization and propel the transformation of U.S. government IT more rapidly. With the global and U.S. economies remaining weak over the mid- to long-term, the use of contingent workforce will expand. Enterprises do not like to make long-term investments in personnel when the business and regulatory climate is not friendly to growth. Hence, contingent workforce – domestic or overseas – will pick up the slack. IT executives should utilize a balanced approach with a broad range of workforce strategies to achieve agility and flexibility while ensuring business continuity, corporate knowledge, and management and technical control are properly addressed.