From Green Computing to Sustainable IT: Developing a Sustainable Service Orientation

Abstract

The primary goal of the emerging discipline of IT sustainability is to enable firms to use computing resources more efficiently while maintaining or increasing overall performance. The first wave of these efforts is commonly identified as "green computing" where the emphasis has been primarily minimizing power usage for datacenters and technical equipments (such as desktops, projectors). The benefits of green computing in terms of reducing power consumption and corporate carbon footprints are direct and relatively rapid to achieve. However, to move beyond internally focused green-computing initiatives to the realm of competitive advantage and corporate sustainability, more attention needs to be directed to how a second wave of sustainable IT practices can align with and enable corporate sustainability strategy. Moreover, sustainable IT strategies need to accomplish this while delivering on core IT performance requirements to drive business productivity. Increasingly, sustainable IT will be impacted by the shift away from product strategies to embrace an integrated service-science and IT-service orientation that has the potential to redefine how customer value is created and how quality of life is improved with service. This paper will explore the dimensions of sustainable IT, discuss its development as a service, and provide criteria for improving its alignment with corporate sustainability strategy.