Scotland's Digital Future: Scottish Public Sector Green ICT Strategy

Ensure policy development considers Green ICT principles. Create technical standards which support interoperability to facilitate common design standards and consistency in accessibility, when verifying identity.

Where possible when considering options to deliver policy seek to reuse and build upon existing assets; where the need to procure is identified ensure this adheres to the principles outlined within this document.

Ensure green ICT principles are reflected in policy development. Deliver more sustainable, streamlined public sector online services and ICT projects through the consolidation of websites and CMS systems.

Develop policy which ensures technical standards support interoperability to facilitate responsible sharing of data for operational delivery and for research and statistics, where appropriate.

Embed green ICT principles into Senior Management objectives to promote joined-up ways of green working across all business functions within the organisation.

Embed green ICT principles into Senior Management objectives to promote joined-up ways of green working sectors and across sectors.

Match employees with appropriate devices to reduce device-employee ratios, and increase flexible working to reduce the carbon footprint of organisations.

Undertake green ICT skills audit to plan future skills requirements and inform change programmes.

Embed the principle of re-use before buy into all architecture and design principles and common standards to eliminate duplication and reduce spend.

Consolidation by migration to shared or 'cloud' services where appropriate, based upon Government buying standards, to facilitate identification of duplicate systems and applications, communication circuits and surplus.

Ensure responsible decommissioning of circuits/equipment enabling circuits, that have reached end-of-life point in line with waste hierarchies to minimise impacts on landfill.

Ensure network capacity, resilience and fault tolerance is not over specified to reduce power consumption.

Data centres comply with EU Code of Conduct. Ensure best practice energy efficient initiatives are carried out

Consolidate number of data centres and migrate services to cloud services

Procurement: Open source licensing enables re-use of solutions and also simplifies the creation of shared services.

ICT Operations: Open standards should reduce vendor lock-in allowing the Scottish public sector organisations to more easily transition to green solutions in the future (for example lower power consumption services).

Recycle: Open source licensing allows existing solutions to be refurbished or re-purposed to meet new requirements.

Monitor reductions in carbon savings, as a baseline for further savings.

Monitor reductions in ICT spend, via collaborative ICT procurement, as a baseline for further savings.