"There are trivial levels of understanding at the moment; in business very few people have thought about the problem. They don't understand the requirements and they don't understand abatement," said Geoff Johnson, Gartner research VP in enterprise communications applications, networking and telecommunications in Asia Pacific.

"First of all you need to wrap your mind around what your particular company's requirements are; if you are in the top 100 you are going to have to put submissions into the government through Treasury, so there's a very specific set of work to do."

The system is being implemented in three annual steps beginning with several hundred of the largest organizations, many of whom are well prepared for the requirements and have had reporting systems in place for some time. It's the estimated who are expected to be much less prepared for the reporting scheme.

"It's going to be on the agenda, and policy work inside the organizations of your readers," Johnson told Computerworld.

"If you are an enterprise today you are just starting to wrap your mind around what the cost of carbon is, what the government might be doing and what the Treasury spreadsheet looks like. But the mind hasn't yet turned to internal systems about how we capture this and deliver responses to government...I think there is going to be a massive re-jig in the CIO suite to figure out whose solutions and what packages to use."