SDIA - Formulas Chair

In Short

As part of its the roadmap towards a more sustainable IT sector in the broad sense, the SDIA (Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance) what is necessary for our society to make the transition. One of the pillars in this is measuring your footprint in the first place. Without measurements, you will not be able to benchmark, improve nor even understand your current impact. Nonetheless, we do not need to be super-accurate, just enough to make informed decisions. (If you’re interested, I can recommend this book.)

Within my role as technical advisor to the SDIA on the topics of measurability and cloud, I have been chairing the SDIA Formulas working group for about 1.5 years. We would occasionally meet to share our findings, discuss progress on ongoing projects and give those pushing our overall IT emissions measuring capabilities a platform to showcase their work.

At some point, you start to notice that a lot of new people to the field tend to go through the same process. First you discover a tool that allows you to get some numbers, then you notice that it is not that straightforward to install, then you learn more about the reasons, perhaps you find some way around or start estimating. The whole process might take several years. As such, in order to benchmark and communicate the current overall status as well as which parties are showing promising results, I started to write a blog and later a paper to summarize it.

You can find the paper here: