I am constantly admonishing companies to take IT seriously, in the way that they would take accounting or marketing seriously. In fact, I would argue that technology management should be a core part of a modern business curriculum beyond generic "Management of Business Technology" courses. Most businesses I know take only a passing interest in trying to keep tabs on where they are in terms of the applications they are running, their infrastructure, and in particular, having any idea what their employees could use to do their job better. So when I saw this post on TreeHugger about major power savings being found simply by turning totally unused machines off, it seemed like a nice metaphor for corporate IT problems in general.? From the article:

In some companies it may be the case that there are many servers that are left on for no good reason, simply to serve legacy applications. Mark Monroe, Sun Microsystem's director of sustainable computing, gave a talk where he explained that they were able to tuen off 10% of their servers in this way. He called the phenomenon ?data center drift?.

He went on to explain that a survey had found two companies had 504 ?mystery machines? out of 4,300 servers. When they were turned off they had no actual impact on the companies operations. This is something that should be simple to implement, but can have a dramatic impact on energy bills.

I particularly love the characterization of the phenomenon as 'data center drift', as it transforms incompetence into something that sounds almost natural.? In the above example, nearly an eighth of their servers were simply doing nothing that affected a single person if they were turned off.? Imagine if the accounting staff did an audit and determined that an eighth of the corporate budget was just being thrown into a giant pit and buried every day, but that they didn't notice because it used to be that the money was funding things, and it slowly shifted to the pit.? They would probably be fired on the spot.? I somehow doubt any of the IT staff were taken to task for this gross oversight.