IT and the environment

‘IT can provide many solutions to climate change. It is our challenge to use it effectively, in a way that enhances our client services, is cost-effective, and sustains teamwork and the firm’s sense of community.’
David Hamilton, IT director

We continue to spend around £5m annually on information technology (IT) products and services worldwide and regard IT as an important means of reducing our impact on the environment.

Our IT procurement has been centralised in London and Germany, enabling us to have a more controlled supplier selection process, as we prefer to work with suppliers who hold similar values with regard to social and environmental responsibility.

Of our 10 key suppliers, eight have formal corporate social responsibility reports or departments. Our target is to work with the remaining key suppliers and all smaller, new suppliers to ensure they are as committed to social and environmental responsibility as we are.

Reducing travel

A variety of tools and services used in the firm is designed to increase efficiency, reduce travel, enhance home-working and reduce the amount of paper we use.

We are replacing our video conferencing equipment with the latest high definition systems to make the meeting experience more lifelike and improve its popularity. We are also working towards increasing the number of systems in our offices to make video conferencing more widely accessible. Additionally, we aim to offer desktop video conferencing for people who need to attend meetings at their desktops or from home or out of office locations.

We are already regular users of audio conferencing and recently increased capacity on our own conferencing bridge to meet demand. A further enhancement now available is web conferencing to allow remote sharing of applications with multiple parties over the internet.

Reducing our impact on the environment

We are also rolling out a new electronic filing system across the firm, which should reduce paper use and filing.

Other recent innovations include the following.

• Server consolidation: we have further reduced the number of servers by accommodating some 320 virtual servers onto 21 machines. This has reduced the amount of electricity we use. We have also started another project to virtualise a further 150 servers in the current fiscal year.
• Back-up tape storage consolidation: by purchasing a new tape library system, we have reduced the number of tapes we store from 12,000 to 3,000.
• General network infrastructure consolidation: we have replaced our old cabling system with a single CAT6T system, reducing significantly the amount of copper wiring we use every day. We have dropped from using 15 drums (each containing 400m of copper cable) to two drums a year.
• Printer consolidation: we have begun to consolidate our many local printers into fewer networked printers, which also saves electricity and enables better use of toners. Our target is to reduce the number of printers used in our offices by improving the ratio of networked printers to local ones.