Greening the data center will typically be a path of energy efficiency. A lower PUE. A higher performance per watt for servers. But, I don’t think I have ever heard someone say I greened our data center by reducing the fighting in our IT organization and data center groups. Think about it. How much waste is caused because one group hates another group and almost every meeting between these teams turns into a confrontation with little cooperation.

I have had this conversation many times and a friend sent me this article on IT Turf wars.

IT turf wars: The most common feuds in tech

By Dan Tynan

Created 2011-02-14 03:00AM

IT pros do battle every day -- with cyber attackers, stubborn hardware, buggy software, clueless users, and the endless demands of other departments within their organization. But few can compare to the conflicts raging within IT itself.

Programmers wage war with infrastructure geeks. IT staff butts heads with IT management. System admins battle for dominance. And everybody wishes security would just leave them alone.

What type of fighting? Here are two

One side of your IT department is laser-focused on keeping your systems up and your costs down. The other side wants to push the envelope until it bursts. Welcome to the war between your ops squad and your dev team.

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Most geeks wouldn't recognize a critical business process if it bit them on the nose. And though their boss may have "technology" or "information" in his job title, he appears to knows little about either. This is perhaps the most intractable battle in all of IT -- the war between the officer corps and the troops.

"The biggest conflict is between IT management and IT staff," says Pratt. "For some reason, the companies I've worked for seem to hire or promote people who are not technologically literate. It's like that person lost a bet or the president of the company has a half-wit brother who needs a job. You have the IT guys in the field saying, 'You really need to do XYZ,' and the managers saying, 'We're not going to do that; it's going to cost too much money.' They're constantly blocking things that have to be done just because they can."

Data Centers could be a lot greener if there was less fighting. It wouldn’t be so bad if the fighting only affected the fighters. But, fighting creates turf wars which in general makes things less efficient and wastes resources.