If your company has a green IT initiative in place, odds are that the CIO was one of the staffers leading the charge: nearly two-thirds of CIOs at those firms said they were the main decision-maker or one of the key decision-makers for green IT programs.

That is one of the results of CIO Insight magazine's Green IT survey, which looked at the how the move toward green computing is playing out in companies today.

Among companies that have green IT plans in place, only 10 percent of CIOs said they were relatively uninvolved in the process, while only 4 percent said they simply implemented programs that were developed elsewhere.

Despite heavy CIO involvement in green IT, the survey also found that nearly a quarter of CIOs didn't know if there was a dedicated manager for green IT programs at their company. Even more execs -- 55 percent at firms with no green plans, 46 percent at companies with established green plans -- said there was no manager in place to track and ensure the quality of those goals.

Because green IT still seems to be at times a relatively unstructured process, it's no surprise that earlier this month, CIOs at the Environmental IT Leadership forum in London said that green IT still has some hurdles to overcome in order to expand further into the market.

The forum, organized by the U.K. NGO Global Action Plan, found CIOs and other IT decision-makers calling for benchmarks and standards for energy-efficient and low-impact computing, while ensuring that the greenest products can also be the most affordable ones.

In addition to suggesting that extending a standard hardware refresh cycle would boost green initiatives -- hardware being expensive and potentially tricky to dispose of in compliance with regulations and green goals -- a move toward writing efficient software code would be a boon to IT leaders seeking energy efficiency gains.

What it comes down to, as always, is making the business case for green Richard Steel, the CIO at Newham Borough and a panelist at the event, told ComputerWorld, “I think it's quite encouraging that vendors and system integrators are now responding to the pressures for change but, this is really about competition. How can they use the Green Agenda to gain competitive advantage?"