I heard on the radio recently that a growing number of IT graduates are choosing not to pursue a career in the industry. If it’s true, that would be a huge shame. Where did we go wrong? How did we kill the perception of IT as a desirable and worthwhile career?
Rant mode is now fully engaged, but to me IT seems like a fantastic career choice. The money’s OK, and you get the chance to work in an exciting area with generally bright and interesting people. A lot of them have a sense of humour (but not all of them would win “best dressed” awards I admit).
I think what we’re lacking is good role models in UK IT.
We need to celebrate the achievements of people or teams in the IT industry in a way that young people can relate to. The perception has to match reality more, in that an IT job really can be cool, fun, and rewarding.
Let’s examine some of the suspects with means, motive and opportunity in our murder mystery;
Number One - The recruitment process.
It’s not particularly easy to break into the IT industry. The talents and potential of prospective employees is reduced down to having X years of experience in technology Y. Not only does that create barriers, getting a job with no experience is hard, but it is incredibly restrictive and backward looking. Talented people might not want to define themselves in terms of a technology, be that Oracle administrator, Java developer, or whatever. Perhaps we’d have more luck attracting people to IT if we treated technical skills as only part of the overall picture when looking at the potential of talented people.
Number Two - Short-sighted IT vendors
When you are growing your business you need partners you can trust. They help you grow your business, you help them grow theirs, and everyone wins. A lot of vendors still don’t get it, though. They contact you on a quarterly frequency and align internally by product. You therefore need to talk to multiple people from the same company if (heaven forbid) you’re looking at more than one product. Some vendors even allow different countries within the global structure to openly compete with each other. It all wastes time - time that could be better spent pushing boundaries for your company.
I have to be honest. When people first started talking about green computing at the back end of last year, I was not sure what they meant.
Their enthusiasm often made the concept sound worthy, but it was only when the conversation turned to what we were going to do to monitor and reduce energy consumption that the lights came on – no pun intended, of course.
I then realised that if reducing energy use and cost was the definition of green computing, then the concept was already firmly on our agenda – at Betfair we were already examining the options and innovative technology available to help us use power more efficiently.
Every organisation should behave responsibly towards its customers, staff and stakeholders, and this ideal is very much part of our culture. But I certainly do not see myself as any kind of eco-warrior as we are, after all, a service business, not a factory-based organisation consuming vast amounts of power and pouring emissions into the atmosphere.
I could understand the incentive to reduce use of expensive electricity, but surely our impact elsewhere must be minimal?
However, when I read a recent report from a United Nations research group it shocked me to find that manufacturing the average PC requires 10 times the weight of the product in chemicals and fossil fuels.
Suddenly the banks of PCs sitting in our engineering department did not seem quite so innocuous.
The definition I find most useful for green computing is that it is the study and practice of using computing resources efficiently. And if we can find ways to address social responsibility and minimise environmental impact while also saving our organisation money, this is not just green computing – this is plain common sense.
So what has Betfair been doing to make its use of computer resources more efficient? There are two main technology strands to our efforts so far. These involve making better choices for technology and increasing our use of virtualisation.
We had a requirement to support 60 Sun Solaris databases; we estimated that running the systems would take 16 kilowatts of power. But after putting energy consumption on the agenda, we decided to become early adopters of Sun’s CoolThreads technology. This choice helped to reduce the power required to three kilowatts.
We also chose energy-efficient, four-core Opteron front-end web servers, which provided at least a 50 per cent energy saving against equivalent technology.
As well as focusing on more energy-efficient machines, we have introduced a policy of virtualisation to increase the use of our existing equipment.
This policy reduces the need to buy more equipment, and consequently also reduces the growth of our power requirements.
Storage virtualisation is a key technology for chief information officers to examine when they are looking for power reductions. The 40TB cut we have achieved at Betfair represents a power saving of more than 60 per cent.
However, even with these principles we cannot avoid the fact that some equipment must eventually be replaced. So in addition to developing a strong culture of recycling at Betfair, we have signed up to Computer Aid International.
Computer Aid has shipped more than 80,000 PCs to more than 100 countries for use in locations such as schools and hospitals. Any organisation can sign up on-line and it is certainly a great deal more attractive than the alternative of redundant kit languishing in landfill sites both here and abroad, leaking toxic chemicals.
All of these steps and decisions have been voluntary. But there are also compliance issues to be considered, such as the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive that restricts the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment. The directive has guided our major equipment purchases for a considerable period of time.
Staff responsible for improvements now have the green computing bit firmly between their teeth, and have galloped ahead with innovation to improve performance – and to increase the number of products we have been able to produce.
Of course, we can always do more. For example, we could enforce a mandatory requirement to turn off PCs and monitors at night across the company – something that is now under discussion. Overall, the future for the organisation is definitely green.