A few weeks back I was sitting in the audience of a Pacific Energy Center meeting room listening to an all day workshop about data center energy efficiency. I have heard variations on this topic in this forum several times over the last few years, and it is about 80 percent the same, with changes coming from guest speakers. Mark Bramfitt usually introduces speakers and in this case, he was a guest speaker himself, having left PG&E late in 2009.

This time I had an insight that just refuses to let go. I heard Mark Hydeman of Taylor Engineering give his presentation and in one 45-minute talk, he articulated roughly five challenges that the industry needs to overcome in order to gain control of data center energy efficiency.

I realized he has a running "punch list" in his brain and that if asked to list all the obstacles, hurdles and challenges needed to create energy-efficient data centers, he would have a damn good list at the end of the day. But I've never seen the list. Have you? (For context, a punch list is all the things that did not get finished properly when you renovated your house -- items that the painters, plumbers, electricians, etc., forgot to complete or hoped you would not notice...)

This thought came back to me as I sat in on presentations at the Uptime Institute's Symposium 2010 in New York City. But this time I asked myself, "who else has a punch list?" No doubt Ken Brill has one. Albert Esser has one. Andrew Fanara has one. They are all in each respective brain -- not published anywhere and the rest of us can't possibly see what each considers important and how we, as an industry, can rank our challenges in a way to effectively overcome them.

If 30 self-nominated thought leaders put their thoughts on a single website, we could see how different or how similar those perceived challenges are, and make a comprehensive list on what needs to change over the next three years.

So here is my list of what the we in the industry need:

1. We need a definition of IT that works globally. The Europeans use ITC as their definition, one that encompasses so much more than servers that it changes their perception of the magnitude of the opportunity. I'd like to see the Americas and Asia synchronize their definitions of IT with that of the Europeans.

2. We all need better access to server sales predictions. In my work with the utilities across the USA, I can't imagine that the data center energy efficiency programs would be such low priority if key managers understood the growth curve for servers over the next decade. IDC and its peers need to open up that information for policy makers to understand that even with better designed servers, the enormity of social media usage is driving tremendous energy use.

3. We need qualified, experienced "Organizational Change" professionals to help us re-invent company structures to reward energy efficiency in IT staff bonus packages. That means HR, Finance, IT, and RE all have to redefine the solution set. To date we have talked around the problem without engaging Organizational Change professionals in the process -- I have not been to a single conference where they are invited keynote speakers to address this challenge.

4. We need to realize that water availability is a looming threat in many of the locations where data centers are clustered. But moving scarce water to data centers will be a much larger problem than building energy sources, so the solutions will take longer to implement. Let's draft a national plan to alleviate stress points in the data center landscape.

These thought leaders are the industry's most knowledgeable individuals, nothing short of national treasures, and we need to preserve what they know and move state of the art forward from their base. We have 30-plus individuals beginning with Amory Lovins who startled us all by convening a Charrette years ago to alert IT and utilities to the increased demand that would come from data centers.

We don't yet have a mechanism for gathering their ideas and discovering the commonalities in their perspective so that we can better articulate solutions. And then, of course, start over again 36 months later when all the dynamics change.

What would be on your punch list?

Editor's note: A version of this article originally appeared on Deborah Grove's blog.