Hey Uncle Sam: Incent Green IT for compliance efforts

Earlier this week, I participated in an IT management conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The second day of the event, which was organized by AIT Global, focused on Green IT issues.

One of the speakers that day, Thomas McDorman of Western Digital, made a salient remark about how the recent blitz of federal regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, has helped foster an exponential spike in the amount of corporate data that companies are forced to store.

Having covered SarbOx during the initial ramp-up period (2002-2005) for Computerworld, I’m all too familiar with the cost burdens and headaches these requirements to document corporate controls have placed on corporate IT managers.

So McDorman’s comments got me to thinking: if the federal government insists upon forcing publicly-held companies to dramatically increase their data storage, shouldn’t Uncle Sam provide companies with at least some financial incentives to adopt so-called ‘Green’ technologies to help support these efforts?

Part of my role at this event was to moderate a conference wrap-up, so I figured I’d broach the idea to McDorman and other panelists. For his part, McDorman said he was opposed to the idea of having the SEC or any other federal agencies provide Green IT subsidies to organizations that are forced to comply with regulatory requirements such as SarbOx or HIPAA.

But Ruth Harenchar, a fellow panelist representing Women in Technology International (WITI), said she believed that it would be reasonable for the federal government to provide Green IT tax incentives or tax breaks to corporations that are bound by law to expand their data storage footprints.