A growing number of people in the workforce are finding that smartphones, iPads and apps like Facebook and Google Docs are helping them to do their jobs better and more efficiently than their organizations’ in-house computing platforms. What’s more: in some cases, their employers are discovering they’re right … and switching technology strategies to take advantage of the benefits.

A recent study from the global consulting firm Accenture, for example, gives the example of a nurse at a Canadian hospital who found a way to save time, care for patients better and reduce staff aggravation with her mobile phone. Her simple innovation? Take a cellphone photo of a patient’s wound before applying a fresh dressing. That simple action prevented the need for doctors arriving later to remove new bandages to check on healing progress, something that would require a nurse to once again dress a wound that had just been freshly covered. The hospital’s IT department has since set up a system where photos can be uploaded to a central location for doctors to view securely as needed.

IT departments aren’t always so welcoming of such innovations, though. Accenture cites another study that found that 80 percent of IT professionals oppose the use of consumer electronics like cellphones and iPads in the workplace. That’s likely to be an objection they’ll have to give up eventually. For one thing, it would be all but impossible to require workers to, say, check their cellphones at the front desk at the start of the day. But an even bigger reason is that BYOT (bring your own technology) is actually helping many organizations do things better than before.

In another example, a tech-savvy US Army captain used $26,000 of his own money to — in a matter of weeks — develop a smartphone app that helps troops identify the location of the enemy, know where to direct artillery fire and call for medical helicopters. Compare that to the US Defense Department, which has spent 12 years working to develop a battlefield radio system that would feature devices far heavier, and more expensive, than any smartphone.

“The genie is already out of the bottle,” one executive surveyed by Accenture said.

“IT consumerization will present one of the biggest tests — and most exciting opportunities — for business and IT executives within in the next five years,” the consulting firm’s study concludes. “Ignoring it … and resisting it … are not viable options for most organizations. In fact, both of these responses are tantamount to capitulation.”

Instead, it continued, organizations will need to develop “thoughtful, pragmatic strategies regarding consumer IT.” Doing that will not only help to attract skilled and knowledgeable employees but will help businesses themselves sharpen their competitive edges.”

California’s Chapman University, for instance, has 6,300 students and more than 2,500 campus-owned computers, including 850 in public-access labs. When green-minded students suggested to the university’s CIO that better power management could help the school cut its computing energy’s footprint, the IT department began exploring its options.

“Having been to countless higher education conferences that discuss conserving energy through the use of power management software, I also became curious about the process and its cost effectiveness for our department,” said Michelle Sypinero, manager of Chapman’s Student Computing Services.

University officials last December decided to test a system from Verismic, a UK-based power management software company with US offices in California. Several months later, they went ahead and bought and implemented 2,475 licenses for the company’s software. The software enables the school’s IT staff to identify and shut down computers that aren’t in use.

Since then, the university has seen its computing power-related costs drop by 62 percent … a total of $117,438.75 on an annual basis. The school now plans to expand its use of the software to Mac workstations in public areas, as well as to staff and faculty computers.

The software has paid off “both in a fiscal and environmental sense,” Sypinero said.

“Today’s students feel a huge responsibility to preserve the environment, and as a university it is important to take the necessary steps to lead by example, and teach ways in which this is possible,” she added.

Other investors in Power Assure, which provides energy management software for data centers, include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Good Energies, and Judith Point Capital all participated.

“The data center market continues to grow at 8 to 12 percent per year,” said Tarak Mehta, head of the low voltage products division at ABB. “However it is becoming constrained by the availability of power, especially in high density areas where space is a limitation.”

ABB has become a strategic partner of Power Assure to help strengthen its position in the server optimization and IT-focused energy management market.

Over the past six months, California-based Power Assure has announced a number of milestones, including the news that NASA has standardized the use of its software across all the space agency’s data centers. The company also launched PAR4, a new energy efficiency rating measuring server power use on a transaction-per-watt basis, and — with Underwriters Laboratories (UL) — released a new UL standard, UL2640, based on the PAR4 methodology.

Power Assure plans to use the new funds to expand sales and marketing, and to invest in further engineering to advance its technology.

In addition to ABB, Power Assure has also partnered with Cisco, Dell, IBM, Intel, In-Q-Tel, Raritan, UL and VMware.

According to the company, version 4.0 of the software offers additional stability during the data transfer process by identifying and controlling the connection type and managing device connections seamlessly as they move between wired and wireless LANs.

By using spare network bandwidth, Nomad Enterprise helps to deliver operating system upgrades, software deployments and patches to thousands of PCs and servers day or night with zero disruption, 1E says. This can remove the need for branch servers or desk-side visits, which can also help reduce an organization’s existing server footprint and administrative overhead.

“We developed Nomad Enterprise to take the pain out of complex operating system deployments and software patches even in the largest, geographically dispersed organizations, while keeping the costs down and with zero disruption to business applications,” said Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E.

HSBC is using 1E’s Nomad to handle “around 99 percent of all of our software deployments and patch updates to our fleet of desktop and laptop machines,” said Gary M. Phillips, the bank’s global head of IT operations. Before adopting the software, he added, “the only alternative was to deploy a software distribution point in every site.”

1E focuses on efficiency solutions to help reduce servers, network bandwidth constraints, software license bills, energy consumption and time-consuming IT tasks.

In addition to using green roof technology, energy audits and employee conservation, the USPS implemented three IT programs aimed at measuring and managing its power consumption.

“Our energy savings are identified, measured and managed using the Postal Service’s Utility Management System, Enterprise Energy Management System and Corporate Energy Interface … ,” said Thomas Day, the service’s chief sustainability officer. “These systems help the Postal Service measure, monitor and manage energy use, improving our ability to take advantage of future cost-saving opportunities.”

Other software strategies that have helped cut energy use include:

• Web-based software that optimizes sorting programs to reduce the number of partially filled mail trays and enables more mail to be delivered in fewer trips;
• An “Intelligent Mail” barcode and IT system to improve high-volume mail routing and tracking;
• A requirement that suppliers with contracts of over $500,000 provide the USPS with sustainability data by 2015.

The Postal Service’s nearly 2.5-acre green roof on its processing and distribution facility in New York is the city’s largest.

The USPS aims to cut facility energy use by 30 percent by 2015, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020.

EMC’s VNX unified storage replaces the utility’s previous 100 terabytes of NetApp storage.

One of the US’s 12 largest public electric utilities, NES distributes electricity to 360,000 customers in Tennessee.

According to EMC, the new information storage system will provide NES with:

• Scalable data storage capacity that can support the utility’s GIS mapping applications and coming smart-grid infrastructure.
• Backups that take one hour instead of four.
• Improved performance of test and development environments, as well as production systems.

With the new system, NES is seeing “65 percent to 80 percent faster production system backups and equal improvements to our end-users response times,” said Vic Hatridge, the company’s vice president and CIO.

“We add about 10 terabytes of data every twelve months,” added Ricky Davis, infrastructure manager with CIBER Inc. at NES. “Before we were worried about having to put a lot of new projects on hold due to overwhelming storage demand.”

The software is already being used by a number of nuclear power plants and utilities.

Wiznucleus’ software helps utilities identify which controls have been implemented for Critical Cyber Asset, demonstrate how electronic and physical security measures are protecting them, find where gaps in compliance exist, view compliance via a dashboard, manage access and mitigate the risks associated with audit record retention and availability.

Simple, yes. But it’s still anything but a habit with many people. That explains why New Zealand’s Kiwibank was using far more electricity — and paying much higher power bills — than it should have been. But with more than 300 branches and 900-plus employees, it seemed like a tall order to create a widespread change of habit across the entire organization. So what did the bank do? It found an automated way to change employees’ habits for them.

1E, an IT efficiency software firm, worked with its green IT partner Transend to deploy the automated habit-changers — NightWatchman and WakeUp — in the bank’s computer systems. Four weeks of benchmark testing showed the bank’s suspicions were correct: 52 percent of PCs were being left on overnight, and 50 percent remained switched on even during weekends, although only 9 percent were being used.

After launching the 1E system, which automatically switches off computers at a certain time then fires them up again before employees arrive in the morning, Kiwibank saw an immediate difference in its energy consumption and bills. Over the course of the first year, it expects the 1E software to help cut its electricity use by nearly 164,000 kilowatt-hours, reduce its energy bills by NZ$24,570 and shave 32 tonnes from its carbon footprint.

If every computer-dependent business in the country followed a similar strategy, the savings would considerably more.

“If all of the top 100 largest IT users in New Zealand were to use automated PC energy management software like NightWatchman from 1E across approximately 280,000 PCs, they would see a collective reduction in energy use of 51 gigawatt-hours (GWh) and savings of up to NZ$8 million per year in electricity costs; the equivalent of taking 3,000 cars off the roads, not to mention the positive contribution towards our national 50 by 50 carbon emissions reductions pledge,” said Matt Johnson, managing director of Transend.

How much potential savings are we talking? Well, the US Department of Energy (DOE) alone estimates that paring down its web presence for minimum duplication and maximum efficiency could save $10 million a year.

It’s part of a new initiative, the Campaign to Cut Waste, announced this week by President Barack Obama. The campaign includes examining IT spending to see where unnecessary or outdated expenses could be reduced or eliminated. Many large businesses could probably benefit, both financially and in terms of their energy/carbon footprints, by launching similar campaigns.

The US government’s web presence, for example, is likely consuming way more energy in terms of computing costs than it should. The White House estimates there are 2,000 top-level websites for the federal government, with maybe as many as 24,000 sub-sites or micro-sites below them. The Energy Department alone has some 86 sites and hundreds more sub-sites.

As Cammie Croft, senior advisor and director of new media and citizen engagement at the DOE notes in a blog post, “As digital communications becomes even more central to delivering information and services to the public, the Energy Department will need to make new investments in this area. The process we are undertaking now will put those efforts on a much better footing — rationalizing our approach, making it more strategic and avoiding costly redundancies and inefficiencies.”

IBM knows that too. And it’s now offering a tape library system with some serious data storage capacity: more than 2.7 exabytes’ worth.

That’s 2,700,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of storage or, as IBM puts it, “enough to store nearly three times all the mobile data generated in the US in 2010.”

Good thing, too, because global demand for data storage is projected to grow by compound annual rate of 49.8 per cent between 2009 and 2014. According to IBM, tape storage offers an inexpensive, efficient way to store massive volumes of data, and it’s unveiled seven significant improvements to its portfolio of tape and other storage archiving products.

For example, IBM’s System Storage TS3500 Tape Library is enabled by a new, IBM-developed shuttle technology — a mechanical attachment that connects up to 15 tape libraries to create a single, high-capacity library complex at a lower cost. The National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand uses two TS3500 Tape Libraries to support a sophisticated POWER supercomputer used to tackle challenges in such fields as energy, aerospace, weather and climate modeling. The libraries together hold 5 petabytes of data, the equivalent of more than 1,000,000 DVDs. This means that if a DVD were written to the tape libraries at the rate of one every minute, it would take more than two years before their capacity was exhausted.