We’re delighted to introduce the newest edition of our ‘3 questions’ series, in which leaders at ManoMano tell us about their journey to where they are today.

This month, we’re meeting Jérôme Moly, Sustainable IT Manager at ManoMano.

Tell us about your career before ManoMano and your current role as Sustainable IT Manager
I have a technical background. I trained as an engineer and started my career as a developer, before becoming a project manager and then working in presales in the ESN world. After my daughter was born in 2012, I started to question the meaning behind my actions, and my work became more and more out of sync with my personal aspirations. In 2018, the Shift Project’s ‘Lean ICT’ report came out and I found out about the environmental impact of IT for the first time. I decided to leave my job at the time and train in Green IT, hoping to find meaning. And that’s where I found my ikigai. Afterwards I spent 3 years as a freelancer and started my adventure at ManoMano in 2022, taking over as president of the GreenIT association at the same time.
My role at ManoMano is pretty broad: I take care of measuring the environmental impact of our IT and I then analyse it to find out where we could optimise: the cloud, hardware, our website… I also propose optimisation paths to our teams to reduce the impact of our IT. And finally, I provide training and activities to raise awareness so that our teams tackle our mission ‘for a better tomorrow’.

What are you most excited about in the industry in the coming years?
Sustainability in IT has been a hot topic for about a year now. More companies are showing a growing interest and policymakers are starting to lay out the first legislative building blocks. I think Green IT will become a default practice. A few years ago, some ideas about data security and the protection of personal data seemed completely unrealistic. But now it’s normal to be ‘secure by default’ and ‘private by default’. I believe that sustainable development will follow this same path and in several years time we’ll ask ourselves how we ever managed before.

What do you do in your free time after a day’s work at ManoMano?
I’m very busy but focused! I volunteer for Green IT and in an eco-citizen school where I’m one of the co-founders. And when I’m done, I help out with renovating (sustainably!) the ecovillage I live in with two other families.