Thinking about sustainability earlier
Some of the biggest opportunities to improve sustainability arise long before a service enters operation.
Decisions made during concept development, architecture design and service planning can influence environmental performance, operational efficiency, and costs for many years to come.
For this reason, I believe sustainability should increasingly be viewed as a non-functional requirement, sitting alongside established considerations such as security, reliability, availability, accessibility, and safety.
Practical examples can be surprisingly simple. They might include designing software to use resources more efficiently, optimising cloud consumption, managing data throughout its lifecycle, avoiding unnecessary duplication of infrastructure, extending asset life where appropriate and applying circular economy principles.
These decisions often deliver benefits that extend beyond environmental outcomes, improving efficiency and reducing costs at the same time.
The opportunity in procurement and deliveryIn my experience, some of the greatest opportunities to improve sustainability come through procurement and delivery activities.
Sustainability is often considered during supplier selection, but its real value can be realised when those considerations continue throughout contract delivery and service operation.
Programme teams, project managers, service managers, and commercial specialists all influence decisions that shape outcomes. Routine supplier reviews, governance meetings, risk discussions, and performance assessments provide natural opportunities to consider sustainability alongside cost, schedule, risk, and service performance.
Where sustainability commitments have been made during procurement, these should continue to be monitored throughout delivery. Equally, where sustainability information is available, it should become part of normal management conversations rather than being treated as a separate reporting stream.
Balancing ambition with practicalityAnother lesson from experience is that sustainability measures need to be proportionate, evidence-based, and financially viable.
Environmental improvement remains important, but organisations must also consider operational effectiveness, resilience, affordability, and deliverability.
The objective should not be sustainability at any cost. Instead, it should be achieving the greatest overall benefit through solutions that are practical, affordable, and capable of long-term adoption.
Often, the most successful initiatives are not the most ambitious. They are the ones that can be adopted consistently and sustained over time.
Sustainability and resilience go hand in handOne observation that has become increasingly clear is that sustainability and resilience are often closely connected.
Many sustainable ICT practices can also improve efficiency, reduce operating costs, make better use of resources, and strengthen long-term affordability. They can help organisations get more value from existing assets while reducing dependencies and avoiding unnecessary waste.
Viewed through this lens, sustainability is not simply an environmental objective. It becomes part of delivering digital services that are resilient, supportable, and fit for the future.
As organisations continue to focus on resilience, efficiency, and long-term value, I believe this relationship will become increasingly important.
Looking aheadThe challenge facing digital organisations today is no longer whether sustainability should be considered. The challenge is how we make it part of everyday decision-making.
My experience suggests that the answer lies in integration rather than additional process.
By embedding sustainability within existing governance, commercial, delivery, and assurance arrangements, we can move away from treating it as a separate activity and make it a natural part of delivering digital capability.
Ultimately, success will depend on making sustainability business as usual — not something we do in addition to delivering digital services, but something that is built into the way those services are designed, acquired, delivered, and operated from the outset.
More informationChristopher Gale is an Acquisition Safety and Environmental Manager, Digital & Data, at the Ministry of Defence.
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seen at 09:31, 7 September in UK Government Sustainable ICT.