To help separate green fact from fiction, Forrester Research's Christopher Mines took a closer look at tangible, current trends and impacts of the environmental shift within financial institutions' IT plans.

Perhaps what stood out most, Mines said in a new report based on a recent survey, was an awareness of greening in general. Chalk it up to discussions on global warming, high gas prices and/or an election year, but nearly 10 times the number of financial institutions answered Mines' survey in comparison to the previous calendar year, he said in the report, titled More Green Progress in Enterprise IT.

Mines' April survey of 738 enterprises worldwide– about 40% of them domestic and about a fourth in financial services–comprised these two questions:

How important are environmental concerns in planning your company's IT operations?

Are you aware of IT vendors' efforts to promote green IT in the design, operation, and/or disposal of their products?

In response to the first question, the vast majority of those surveyed noted at least one active effort by their financial institution to become more environmentally conscious. A whopping 91% of Mines' respondents indicated environmental concerns as either "somewhat" or "very important" parts of IT planning. Mirroring the response rate to his survey, this percentage represents a significant increase over previous years.

Echoing an old adage–and pun intended–of the proverbial tree falling in the forest, an organization's environmental efforts are only as effective as awareness about them. Publicizing and standardizing green efforts, Mines argued, is arguably the core to such initiatives being successful.

"The first step we recommend for companies looking to get going on green IT efforts is to create a comprehensive document or action plan that details the goals, priorities, and activities that the company will undertake," he said.

While awareness of trends resembled interest on the green front, procurement was notably absent from such discussions. Only half of those surveyed possessed clear procurement criteria for environmentally driven procedures. E-waste recycling efforts, however, bucked these figures and negative stereotypes, Mines said.

"Contrary to the conventional perspective that enterprise IT is squirreling away old equipment in closets and corners, unsure of how to get rid of it, we instead found that four out of five companies in our survey base had IT equipment recycling programs in place," Mines said.

The "greenness" of vendors also is now popping up on respondents' radars, the Forrester report found, and perhaps the greatest benefit from individual IT green efforts– like e-waste recycling–is the positive windfall they can generate across the enterprise.

Following Mines' advice, IT operations can jumpstart a credit union's other business operations to adopt similar environmentally friendly procedures, going beyond the obvious solutions such as e-statements and Check 21 solutions to such things as collaboration software suites and videoconferencing systems.

"IT organizations are stepping up to the challenge of making the business green and going beyond the data center and IT assets to tackle other sources of their companies' environmental footprint like employee commuting, business travel, and building HVAC," the Forrester analyst said.

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