Consider the following: AT&T expects to save $12 million per year and 123,000 tons of carbon emissions per year using 1E's PC power management software to turn off PCs at night. By turning up the temperature in the data center from 69°F to 74°F, KPMG realized a 12.7% reduction in cooling energy usage. And Citigroup expects to save $11 million and 3,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually by simply enabling duplex settings on printers and copiers.

How are they achieving this? Green IT. Even in the face of a weak economy, Green IT is on the rise with approximately 50% of organizations globally enacting or creating a green IT strategy plan. And don't be fooled: green IT is as much about the greenbacks as it is about reducing the environmental impact of operating IT and the business. In fact, financial motivation — not environmental motivation — is the driving force behind the pursuit of greener IT (see Forrester’s “Q&A: The Economics Of Green IT”).

But despite the optimism, IT “blowhards” across the globe are negating the carbon reduction benefits of green IT one breath at a time. While virtualizing servers or powering down your PCs will reduce energy spend and CO2 emissions, Forrester finds that these jabber mouths — speaking fast, loud, and out of turn using unnecessarily wordy vocabulary — are creating a zero sum game.