It's not all or nothing

Because of JohnsonDiversey's corporate commitment to sustainability, our leaders have been embedding it in more and more of our function objectives. For IT, this means looking at each project through a filter of how the project is affecting our overall corporate sustainability goal. This filter includes the standard measures of energy savings and carbon footprint, but we evaluate these factors across the whole solution. Shifting the impact to a partner or vendor is not a win in our book; a solution, such as our move to cloud computing, is only considered a success if it truly lessens our global impact on the environment.

But CIOs shouldn't be fixated on finding a 100 percent green solution for every IT or business need. Focusing that narrowly, and sacrificing evaluation of other potential solutions in the name of sustainability, will affect your company's performance. Backups and complimentary systems that are not green will often need to be part of the solution, and these should be factored into the larger environmental impact, not considered failures. The big question is whether or not your solution has had a positive effect on your company's impact, overall.

Wendell Fox, Senior VP of IR Shared Services, Marriott International ()

Think beyond Green IT