Kcom, part of the KCOM Group and provider of managed communications services is urging public sector organisations to review their carbon footprint and take appropriate measures to ensure that they are on track to achieve their carbon emissions reduction target in line with the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.

In advance of its ‘Savings and sustainability' webinar taking place on 9th June with Cisco and Camco on the economic advantages of implementing green IT initiatives, Kcom is offering advice on how public sector organisations can go about reducing their energy consumption.

With a number of customers across public sector departments, Kcom has a good understanding of the cultural and technological challenges for public sector organisations in deploying more environmentally-friendly IT policies.

However Paul Renucci, Group Executive Director at Kcom warns that failure to act now to reduce carbon emissions could leave organisations with not only financial penalties but with energy bills far higher than they need to be, potentially forcing them to make cost reductions in other areas.

"KCOM Group's Carbon Reduction strategy is supported by the use of Unified Communications coupled with home and flexible working. Not only has that resulted in far more efficient use of our employees' time and the rationalisation of our property estate, we've also been able to reduce our carbon emissions by over 2,000 tonnes a year," says Renucci.

"If our public sector customers could do the same this would equate to cost savings that could go towards their Operational Efficiency targets or better still, improving the service they offer to the public by making key people more accessible wherever they are. The fact of the matter is that much of the energy we consume through using IT can be reduced by sensible and easy-to-implement policies. What's more, organisations that embrace today's technologies can transform business practices which means that they can deliver results cheaper and faster for their customers".

Kcom advises public sector organisations to firstly ensure adequate systems are in place to accurately measure and monitor carbon emissions to target inefficiency and quick wins, but most importantly to monitor the effectiveness of any implemented solutions. Following this, Kcom recommends the following steps to ensure they fulfil their carbon reduction commitments:

1. Introduce or improve flexible working policies
Unified communications and collaboration, video conferencing, Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and mobile technologies have matured to the point that employees can work as efficiently out of the office as in. Moreover, remote workers can maximise their time, save on travel costs, reduce carbon emissions by not travelling, and work more productively through these technologies.

2. Maximise and consolidate use of office premises
By implementing policies such as hot desking and flexible working hours, companies can reduce the amount of desk space needed to accommodate their workforce. As a result they could potentially vacate some of their premises and consolidate their number of offices enabling energy consumption to be reduced through the reduced necessity for electricity, heating and lighting.

In addition, organisations can increase sustainability through improving the energy efficiency of their buildings. Technologies are available today that enable businesses to ‘power down' when buildings are not in use. By automating all facility controls such as heating, air conditioning and lighting onto the core IP network, the use of these facilities can be monitored and controlled to ensure usage is kept to a minimum.

3.Reduce IT power consumption
The amount of energy an organisation's network and data centre uses will often be one of the largest uses of electricity. By introducing more efficient technologies and designs, such as blade computing, virtualisation and server consolidation, this can be cut dramatically. End-of-life hardware and software across an organisation will also account for a significant amount of energy wastage. Replacing older technologies with more energy efficient solutions will help reduce energy consumption.

4. Transform and improve wider business processes through IT
Organisations can help reduce carbon emissions and cut costs through business improvement initiatives that involve investment in IT. For example, cloud computing, outsourcing and hosting models can help businesses run more effectively and efficiently while at the same time offer a means of significantly reducing their carbon footprint. By outsourcing IT operations and by hosting applications via the cloud at a third party site and managed by a third party IT team, businesses can make the carbon efficiencies associated with a reduced IT support team and consolidated IT set up.

5. Change working practices/office culture
Although many technologies such as unified communications, video conferencing and virtualisation have been available and mature for some time, they have to date been considered as ‘nice to haves' rather than imperative to working practices. As organisations face increasing pressure to cut both costs and carbon emissions, they will become increasingly dependent on these technologies. The biggest challenge now is getting employees to adapt to these new ways of working - particularly at non-office organisations such as hospitals and police forces. Organisations should therefore invest time and effort in empathising with their employees and in showing them how to adopt a greener approach highlighting the benefits they will see as a result.