We at CBR like to practice the innovation that we preach."

— Gabriele Piccoli, Editor

Loyal readers of Cutter Benchmark Review already know our process. The Cutter office and I select a topic that is of immediate interest and applicability to the daily professional life of our readers and, at the same time, has staying power rather than being a fad.

We then invite two contributors from the world of practice and academia, selecting individuals who have a carefully balanced blend of skills. Our practitioners are often Cutter consultants who have proven deep knowledge in the subject matter that we are investigating as well as the ability to convey their knowledge in a manner that is engaging and interesting. Our contributors from the practice side, while not academics, are usually well published and are accomplished trainers. We pair our practicing contributors with representation from academia, usually IT academics who work in business schools around the world. Our academic writers are often amongst the foremost experts on the topic we are investigating in that issue. They have significant depth in the subject, often having researched various aspects of the topic over a number of years or even decades. But like our contributors from the practice side, our academic authors have an uncanny ability to translate their knowledge for ready use by managers and IT professionals. Their writing is interesting, sprinkled with anecdotes and examples from their own research.

With the team in place, we ask the contributors to craft a benchmarking survey on the subject, which the Cutter office runs. Once we have collected the results we ask our team to analyze and comment on the findings. This model has worked very well for us over the past four years since I took over the editorship of CBR. I feel that we have been able to comment on the most important topics — both established and emerging — of interest to IT managers and IT professionals. We have benchmarked old favorites, such as security, privacy, and software development methods, as well as emerging topics such as massive multiplayer games, the 3D Web, and the mobile platform. We have even explored issues that have yet to show up on the IT press's radar screen, such as digital data genesis.

While I believe that the standard Cutter Benchmark Review model has worked quite well during my tenure as editor, we at CBR like to practice the innovation that we preach. We have started to work on a new production model for CBR that we will be introducing in the issues to come, a model that we will pair to our current survey-based approach. The new approach is designed to give us a bit more flexibility in both topic selection and survey design as there are some topics, particularly very innovative ones, that can be of great relevance to our readership, but at the same time don't lend themselves to in-depth surveying. Stay tuned for these changes. We seek to keep CBR fresh and engaging, and we hope you will continue to see the publication as a useful tool in your knowledge arsenal.

This month's issue, following our standard production process, focuses on green IT and its measurement. This is our second issue focused on green topics, following our first CBR survey on green IS in May 2008 (Vol. 8, No. 5). Our objective is to benchmark current practice and offer tangible guidelines on the measurement of green IT and green IS efforts. Our academic contributor is Brian Donnellan, Professor of IS Innovation at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Co-Director of the Innovation Value Institute. Our practicing contributor, whom you already know from our March 2009 issue (Vol. 9, No. 3) on the mobile platform and mobile technology, is Bhuvan Unhelkar, a Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant. Bhuvan, a 26-year industry veteran, is the founding Principal of MethodScience.com, a consulting and training firm based in Sydney, Australia. Bhuvan, a prolific writer, is now focusing his interest on green IT, composite software development processes for mobile applications, and the application of mobile technologies.

Brian begins his contribution by echoing the work of Marie-Claude Boudreau, Rick Watson, and Adela Chen, the University of Georgia team that provided the academic viewpoint for our first green IT issue, and drawing an important distinction between green IT and green IS. On the one hand, green IT is focused on reducing the environmental impact of increasing digitization of processes and infrastructure. On the other, green IS focuses on the proactive use of the power of IT to limit and reduce the environmental impact of organizational activity. With this distinction in place, Brian systematically evaluates the results of our survey, commenting on various approaches to green IT measurement in use today. In doing so he provides a useful framework for structuring your own green IT measurement processes.

Bhuvan organizes his work around the principal challenges to green IT measurement. He then takes an in-depth look at the survey and the results. On the basis of his findings and his own experience, he advances a set of possible green IT measures as well as discusses the challenges associated with their implementation.

While the response to our survey was very low, betraying the limited focus that a disciplined approach to evaluation of green IT efforts has received to date, I feel that our contributors were able to combine the results with their wealth of experience to abstract useful guidelines for you to follow as you engage in the design and development of green IT measurement systems in your own organizations.