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  • An Introduction to Green IT

    An Introduction to Green IT

    However, given the ICT sector is responsible for 1.8-3.9% of global greenhouse emissions, this obviously isn’t the case. Given this, we thought we’d explain the concept of ‘green IT’ (otherwise known as green ICT or green computing) and look at some ways that you can make your systems more efficient.

    What is Green IT?

    Sleep mode is a ubiquitous part of using a piece of hardware. Whether it’s someone going off to make a cup of tea and finding their laptop locked when they return (me today), a person’s screen going blank when they didn’t interact with a Zoom call for a few minutes (me last week), or a child crying when their computer unexpectedly ‘died’ (me aged five), a device going into a low power mode after being left for a period of time is something that we now all expect. However, what many people don’t realise is that this is an early example of green IT, or the attempt to reduce harmful environmental impacts of hardware and software through reducing energy use, increasing efficiency, reducing waste etc. This can be done through making alterations to software as well as hardware, as different pieces of software require different amounts of energy to run (for example, a more efficient piece of software would require less energy to run than its less efficient counterpart).

    Apart from the obvious environmental benefits (which are becoming all-the-more important given both a looming climate crisis and a growing public expectation that organisations are trying to reduce their emissions), implementing green IT can increase efficiency and reduce costs, with this having a larger impact the more extensive your IT systems are. Therefore, green IT is something that many companies should consider implementing.

    Examples of Green IT

    Beyond more standard sustainability practices, such as turning devices off rather than leaving them on standby mode and ensuring that they are only turned on when in use, there are two key ways that IT can be made more eco-friendly: hardware manufacture and software configuration. 

    Green hardware manufacture consists in reducing the number of resources consumed by hardware manufacture through creating objects which last for longer and making these out of renewable or responsibly sourced components. This reduces the impact of the hardware itself. Software configuration consists mainly in moving away from individual servers towards cloud computing and server virtualisation. Cloud computing is when documents and apps are stored and run by remote servers and accessed via the internet (think about how you stream content on Netflix – rather than having the movies downloaded onto your device, they are streamed from the internet, often via a webpage). Server virtualisation is similar in that, rather than a computer having an individual server (or bit that does the actual computing), it connects to a shared server via an internal network. The environmental benefits of these are less obvious than with hardware manufacture but become clear when you think about economies of scale. As with the cloud and virtualisation computing resources are shared, less energy is consumed, reducing the carbon footprint of the computing. As well as this, when accessing a document via the cloud rather than downloading a copy, energy is saved as duplicates (and the energy required to save them) aren’t needed. Through configuring your software in this way (as well as ensuring that it is as efficient as possible), you can save energy, reducing costs and helping the environment.

    How Can You Implement Green IT?

    The best way of ensuring that your IT systems are environmentally friendly is taking this into consideration when setting them up. When buying hardware for your organisation, consider buying remanufactured (or hardware built out of both new and secondhand parts) or refurbished equipment. When setting up your IT architecture, consider moving your documents and systems to the cloud (for example, saving documents on Microsoft SharePoint or Amazon Web Services), and ensure that your processes are as efficient as possible. Delete any emails or files that you no longer need (or set up auto delete functions), as storing these (whether in the cloud or on your hardware) consumes energy. Finally, follow basic sustainability practices (such as turning devices off and avoiding the use of paper where possible) and encourage your employees to do this too. Through doing this, you can ensure that your IT’s carbon footprint is as low as possible.

    How Can {n}.bora Help?

    Through extensive experience providing IT consulting and services, we will be able to ensure that your systems are as efficient and sustainable as possible. This could be through examining your current setup and suggesting minor changes and quick wins that would reduce your carbon footprint or providing you with advice when setting up your architecture. Whatever we help with, we will be able to provide support that is effective and suited to your scale and needs.

    First published by {n}.bora December 09, 2023

    Image credit: SCREEN POST on Unsplash

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Agile

    What is Agile?

    Rather than being a single approach, agile is a collection of development approaches that were originally created for software development. Rather than designing and creating a product or solution in a single, multi-stage process, agile involves having multiple iterations of this process (called ‘sprints’). This aims at firstly creating a ‘minimum viable product’ (the simplest way of achieving the project’s aim), then repeatedly rebuilds this, creating a better solution each time. In these sprints, teams don’t necessarily attempt to build something that will be used in the final product, but rather create a solution that can then be rebuilt and improved upon. For example, if we were building a car according to agile methodology, we would create a skateboard in the first sprint as this is the simplest wheeled object that can get a user from A to B. We would then improve this solution with each sprint (for example, through adding an engine or a roof) until we eventually create something with all the features of a car. Small, multidisciplinary teams perform these sprints, working closely together to repeatedly plan and build a solution, learning more about the problem each time. In order to do this, teams are given overall control of their work.

    Why Do Teams Use Agile?

    The key thing about agile development is that it is, well, agile. As each sprint attempts to rebuild the solution from scratch, the solution has the freedom to change between sprints if necessary. This is crucial for software development for two reasons. Firstly, technology develops at an incredibly fast rate: between the beginning and the end of a project, it is likely that a better solution (using new or updated techniques) will become possible. Secondly, business requirements can change over the course of the project or can be too rigid to take advantage of technological advances. Businesses often make two mistakes about software development. Firstly, as a piece of software isn’t a physical object, they often underestimate how much effort it takes to create it. This means that they can expect their teams to make changes that are unfeasible as they overestimate how flexible software can be. Secondly, businesses can also underestimate how flexible software development can be as they expect it to be akin to developing a physical object, believing that teams will suffer from similar constraints. This means that they don’t allow teams to pursue opportunities for improvement. Through using agile development, teams can be as or more flexible than the business requires, meeting or surpassing business expectations and creating the best possible product.

    Two key things to remember about Agile

    1. Agile is as disciplined as other development approaches:

    With its emphasis on flexibility and giving teams the freedom to control their own work, you may think that agile takes less planning, organisation, and paperwork. However, if anything, the opposite is true. Although what may happen within each sprint isn’t pre-planned, the structure of the sprints (for example, the number of sprints, the timescale they occur on, how often the team will meet) is strictly defined. As well as this, an ‘agile roadmap’, laying out what each sprint will aim to achieve, is created before the project begins. This means that the team knows what the aim of each sprint will be. Going back to the above example, if we were building a car according to agile, we might know that we were going to aim at building a four-wheeled transportation device in the first sprint, then aim at building a four-wheeled transportation device with an engine in the second sprint, then aim at building a four-wheeled transportation device with an engine and a roof in the third sprint. This frees teams from having to worry about project management and planning, allowing them to focus on delivering the solution at hand. Paperwork is also key in agile, as it ensures that what the teams learn in each sprint is recorded and therefore remembered. Again, through having rigorous paperwork, the team doesn’t have to worry about remembering previous sprints, allowing them to focus on the work.

    2. Agile cannot guarantee specific outcomes:

    As discussed above, although agile plans how teams will work and what they will aim to achieve, it doesn’t plan how the team will achieve this, as they discover the solution as they execute it. This means that you cannot expect specific project outcomes, as the team doesn’t know what their project will involve precisely. Rather than expecting work x to be completed by date y, you need to trust that the team will find the best solution and give them the flexibility to do this. This also applies to planning the sprints themselves – due to the nature of agile (where solutions are discovered as they are implemented), it cannot be guaranteed that each sprint will achieve its aim without any issues. This means that there will need to be time allocated in each sprint to address any of the issues that are left over.

    How we can help

    {n}.bora has extensive experience in working with agile development methodologies. If you need support with managing your own agile project or want us to find a technical solution for you using agile, please get in touch and we will be more than happy to help you.

    First published by {n}.bora November 15, 2022

  • Our Story

    Our Story

    Our founder director Peter Hastings set up {n}.bora with the goal of bringing together select partners with true, meaningful experience of global organisational change management, innovation, operations, delivery, and best practice, and bring all that expertise to market for the benefit of enterprises and organisations in a way that is tailor made and customised to the scale of those organisations.

    For too long, fully advanced IT and business consultancy services have only been available to FTSE100 or Fortune 500 companies. Large corporate consultancies often view smaller organisations as “too small to bother.” {n}.bora aims to spread the love a little.

    Determined to make the most of life and fully explore opportunities, Peter’s work took him across the UK, as well as the United States, Europe, India, and the Middle East, and he built a substantial network along the way, which is now contributing towards the success and growth of {n}.bora.

    Before launching {n}.bora, Peter worked with an extensive list of global names, including M&S, AXA, GAME, ASDA, its parent Walmart and cousin Sam’s Club, John Lewis, the NHS, British Gas, Debenhams, JD Williams, Harrods, Next and Boots. As a consultant, he delivered for Charteris, Cognizant, TCS and UST Global. Since then, {n}.bora’s employees have brought additional world-class experience, having worked with WHSmith, adidas, ITC Legal, Jaguar Land Rover, QualiTest and Johnson & Johnson.

    Our work for these organisations has always involved developing their fitness for growth, whether it be completely overhauling ways of working to disrupt a failing culture, implementing processes to modernise and streamline, delivering 10x growth, building compliance as a core strength, defining, and delivering strategy, research and development, or project, programme, and operational delivery.


    Despite the size of companies and programmes that our team has worked on, with budgets often in excess of £100 million, the work has never been one-size-fits-all, and implementation has always been at an individual or departmental level, recognising the specific requirements of those units. Furthermore, the work has always involved the human-side with high pressure event planning and execution.


    Now, with a growing client list and multiple projects successfully delivering new dawns for our clients, {n}.bora stays true to four key tenets:

    • Strong direction, control and pace is essential to the delivery of any change or operation.
    • Strong relationships deliver outcomes.
    • Technology should not be implemented for the sake of technology.
    • Processes, Policies and Procedures should scale in line with volume.

    Our employees and associates share a passion for these tenets and walk together on their journey to bring their skills, knowledge, and expertise to businesses worldwide, no matter what the scale, delivering world-class guidance, delivery and execution in a way that recognises context, customises content and helps those businesses to grow. 

    nowydh bora – It means new dawn.

    First published by {n}.bora October 18, 2022

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Our team of employees, associates and partners across the globe provide a capacity to scale and deliver on demand across a range of business and IT consultancy services for a broad spectrum of industries.

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