Facilitating Greener IT through Green Specifications

Current approaches for reducing IT's environmental impact typically are generic and rarely take into account services' actual functionality. To develop more powerful, service-specific strategies for reducing IT's carbon footprint, we need more complete and widely understandable specifications that describe exactly a service's functionality, the level of quality it achieves, and its environmental consequences. Such green specifications will allow more stakeholders involved in the delivery and consumption of IT services to understand their detailed functionality and the tradeoffs between quality of service and environmental impact entailed in their use. This will not only increase the opportunities for optimizing the delivery of services but also provide the foundation for new business models that encourage users to make greener consumption choices.