Research finds that firms are struggling to go green

A survey by IT reseller Bell Micro paints a bleak picture of green compliance in UK IT departments.

The survey polled IT departments from a cross section of 350 large and small organisations. Announcing the results, Antony Young, director of services at Bell Micro, said that very few firms had adopted a green strategy, adding that few more planned to do so, and that a hardcore sample had no intention of going green at all.

"The figures are dramatically low. The green message just does not seem to be getting through" Young said, "The fault of much of this ignorance is the industry", he added, "which does not know how to present itself, or its solutions."

Time may be running out for businesses to get moving on green plans, with the government looking increasingly likely to legislate in the area, firms should be preparing now, Young said, adding that this was the case in few of the firms surveyed. "A lot of companies just have not formulated a green IT policy. 79 per cent just have no policy, and of those that do, practically none are actually following it" he said.

Of the 350 businesses studied in the survey only 21 per cent have adopted a formal written policy for the IT department to follow, but under two thirds of these have not implemented the rules. In all, just eight percent of firms had adopted a policy, "in full", according to Bell Micro's Young.