Are there internal cultural blockers within your organization when it comes to implementing sustainability initiatives?

Yes, the biggest one for us is lack of awareness of (a) what it means, and (b) does will it provide measurable benefits to the corp bottom line. Culturally it tracks to the sustained deficit with communication.

Sustainability efforts are more than an IT project and blockers are often more than cultural.   Many years ago we had a huge project to replace all of the paper towel dispensers in bathrooms with air dryers.  This was a huge success, until COVID hit and we went back and disabled all the hand dryers and installed paper towel dispensers.

More recently, I've been on the rampage to eliminate all desktop printers.  While we have considerable pushback, I have managed to get executive buy-in from my peers across the entire organization.  We now have sunset all desktop printers with a moratorium on purchasing new supplies for such equipment and installed high capacity, high efficiency MFPs at the department level.  Where currently have dozens of desktop printers on a floor, we are moving to two or three MFPs with print release stations for security and print anywhere capabilities.

Let me share 2 tales in diversity of thought and experience, both from personal experience:

First, the organization business (IT included) had high power consumption that made it an imperative to save electricity costs. The task for analyzing and creating initiatives around power savings was tasked with the CIO & Operations Head. Together we systematically tabulated consumption under each head and deployed rudimentary sensors to understand where we could create interventions. Across locations we were able to cut 15% power consumption. Within IT, we refreshed some of the servers and end-user systems with power efficient hardware (including the standard virtualization and moving parts to the cloud). Everyone was happy with the sustainable savings.

Second, the board reviewed and mandated green as one of the initiatives for the enterprise. Cascaded down to the CXOs, almost everyone cribbed about having to do one more senseless initiative of saving power or cutting paper use... ...  So the task was relegated downward to teams who did come up with some interesting ideas but did not have the authority to execute. The half hearted effort made sure that the initiatives did not give the potential benefit the enterprise could have enjoyed.

So what is the difference between the two ? In the first case, everyone felt the need for change and decided to do something about it. Today the company is a leader in sustainability within their industry.

The latter organization looked at the opportunity as a burden and no one wanted to get away from their comfort zone. Where did the cultural behavior emerge from ? It emanated from the CXOs, each of who believed they were too busy doing whatever they did and were not ready for the new. The company continues to foot high power bills as evidenced in their Balance Sheet.

Yes, unions and old school memberships. They don't and won't embrace change. New technology/initiaves equals machines taking a person's job.

We have significantly decreased our infrastructure footprint.  Our major datacenters are now outsourced, in the sense we no longer own major data center footprints.  Some small sites still have little server rooms for things that need to be local.   We are pushing our vendors to drive more sustainability.  e.g. AWS, AZURE, hosted PeopleSoft, Salesforce etc.   The internal cultural blockers disappeared as we disposed of our data center real-estate.