I'll be honest, I don't have any sense how big a problem this is in Springfield, but I figure we're mostly an office-culture kind of place, so I thought I'd toss it out. InfoWorld has a piece on how bad corporate habits (and I imagine you can read "bad state government habits" here as well) eat up money through poor IT planning, adding extra computing capacity when the corporation may only be using 15% of their current capacity anyway. And, of course, "eating up money" means "unnecessary carbon pollution." If you do this kind of stuff, go read it.
For everybody else, though, there's this concluding paragraph:
One of the real take-aways for me reading this report, though, is a lot of companies are in need of a serious wake-up call if they're willing to tolerate the kind of costly wastefulness that the Gartner report describes. Someone at your company needs to take charge at devise a strategy. Perhaps it's your CTO. Maybe you need to consider enlisting some new blood, such as a chief sustainability officer, to shake up the corporate culture. But you certainly can't afford to rest on your laurels, waiting around for some magic technology or formula to make everything better.
This, I think, is the real take-away here. Companies and agencies are made of people, so they often replicate all of the problems that people fall into, and habit is a monster. Taking the time to stop periodically reassess what you do on daily basis can be invaluable to the company, agency, or individual interested in sustainability. It doesn't have to be an always-on thing--that route takes you to neurosis. But there are a few big structuring decisions that you only have to make occasionally, and for most people, these are ripe for review.
ALSO: In other corporate environmental news, check out Yahoo's commitment to becoming carbon neutral.