It's no good wanting to become efficient if you don't know why you're not at the moment. Now's the perfect time for the industry to arm itself with the right weapons for the job

The first responsibility of a chief information officer is information — and that goes for companies with 100,000-seat IT infrastructures, to those where the CIO is also the MD, the tea lady, the post boy and the marketing/research/production division. Yet when it comes to information about IT in operation, the level of ignorance at all levels is unmatched. That's not good enough, as a study about corporate social responsibility shows.

It's said that if civil engineers built cities the way software engineers wrote programs, the first passing butterfly would destroy civilisation. The same is often true for business information processes, with the added complication that the engineers don't know how many bricks to use, what size they should be or what strength they'll have once cemented together.

You may know how many transactions per second you'll need to process to conduct your expected level of business online, but characterising the hardware, software and networking requirements to provide that is still a black art. And while the principle of adding up the numbers from the vendors, multiplying by two and adding a bit for luck works, it's worse than useless when optimising for efficiency — the basis of IT's contribution to corporate social responsibility. Yet currently, there is no other way.

The answer has to be a revolution in thinking for everyone involved in IT, from users to designers to vendors to researchers. Every component that uses energy should be instrumented, exposing the details of that usage to the rest of the system. Everything that controls those components must be able to use that information to report and tune that usage. That means hardware that knows what it's eating, software that counts the calories, implementors that enforce the diet and users who choose the fittest.

A tall order? Hardly. Our technology is advanced enough that the relatively simple intelligence and communications required can be built into most silicon for effectively nothing. The software to make that information useful will be harder, but here the relative immaturity of the system management market becomes an advantage. With the Service Modeling Language going through its approval process at W3C, the industry is finally learning how to talk to itself about how things work. And with virtualisation a reality, we can do more with that information than ever before.

Now is the perfect time to build awareness of energy usage into the fabric of our systems. If we don't, then even the most well-meaning and responsible approach to IT implementation will be just so much hot air.

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