Why IT Won't Power Down PCs

snydeq writes "Internal politics and poor leadership on sustainable IT strategies are among the top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management — to the tune of $2.8 billion wasted per year powering unused PCs. According to a recent survey, 42 percent of IT shops do not manage PC energy consumption simply because no one in the organization has been made responsible for doing so — this despite greater awareness of IT power-saving myths, and PC power myths in particular. Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.' In other words, resources spent by IT vs. the permanent energy crisis appear to result in little payback for IT."

Comments

Re:harder than it seemed

[realmolo]

Your IT people are idiots. That's really all there is to it. All the problems you had are basically a result of them not doing their jobs properly. Pretty typical of IT employees in the "education" sector, unfortunately. If they were any good, they wouldn't be working at a community college.

I'm an Admin

[k1e0x]

Global warming is fraud.. however if they pay me the difference I'll shut down the work stations. No? then I could care less.

(Note for socialists here: responsibility makes people do good things, if I'm paying the bill I'll shut them down, if some anonymous ideological group like a corporation or government pays then I will waste.)

Re:IT is a customer service group

[rickb928]

I don't want you to access your PC from home. If you can, so can they. I'll block the popular free services to start with, and expundge the software whenever I find it. I'm responsible for security to people that will fire me without remorse. If you need to work at home, you will get a portable machine to do so. Remember, taking data home is either theft or exposing proprietary corporate data to LIKELY compromise. Not using the VPN when your portable machine is off-campus is also forbidden, especially to visit your Facebook page.

I don't set virus scan to stupid configurations. It takes 5 minutes to boot in the morning because you consider being able to open a browser and see your Facebook page the end of booting, past network logins, antivirus updates, the corporate IM tool, and everything else. I'll get around to blocking Facebook soon. The virus scanner is just about all that is between your clicking on everything in Facebook and infecting the entire corporation causing downtime. That and the filters.

You should petition for an exception for running simulations overnight. If you need it, I'll get it approved.

I run updates in the background because we test updates against your image to avoid downtime. When they are complete, you'll get a popup telling you your machine will be rebooted at the end of the day unless you do it sooner. Updates are as important as your work - your machine's security is critical to your work, not an interruption. Updates are your friend.

Besides, if you knew better, you would be my manager. You don't. You don't want me crafting our next product marketing campaign, do you?

-ps- I've been a user also. When you realize you haven't had an interruption in 3 years, you put up with a little more security. And when your customers regale you with tales of being down for 3 days while they got 'the virus' out, you empathize. And smile.