Three quarters of chief information officers believe that green computing is an important part of their IT strategy but just eight per cent say they have a policy and 20% admit they couldn't implement a green policy within one year.

The conflicting findings are the result of two separate surveys among IT managers.

One report said it found 15 per cent rated eco-friendly operations as their top priority and that one in five of the 245 managers questioned have absorbed green IT processes into their business strategy, while a further third of respondents said they planned to do so within the next two years.

However a second report found that just eight per cent of UK companies have a complete green IT policy, while more than half feel that computers are not to blame for their businesses' carbon emissions.

The same report found that a fifth of the 350 executives said they would be unable to implement a green policy within 12 months, should legislation demand it.

“Whilst Green IT practices such as energy-efficient hardware, hosted infrastructure, and data centre virtualisation have all been around for a while now, it is only recently that companies have begun incorporating Green IT in their core business strategy. Green IT is now being driven as much by an element of business strategy as by a sense of corporate social responsibility”, said Vamshi Mokshagundam, technology analyst at Datamonitor .

Datamonitor questioned 245 executives and found the majority of CIOs adopting green strategies while distributor Bell Micro polled 350 UK IT managers.