Green IS - information system framework to support environmental sustainability of firms

Abstract

With increasing awareness of sustainability issues, businesses are being scrutinised to reduce their ecological footprints and resource intensity. Information technology and systems (IT/IS) being the backbone to support information needs of firms, cannot shy away from the responsibility of supporting firms with sustainability choices, much of which has remained confined to short-term strategies like reducing energy usage and carbon footprint of IT landscape. By leveraging process-oriented view of organisational functions, we explore how green IS can partner with the business processes (green or red) to encapsulate inherent and desired environmental considerations and bring other IS elements like technologies, systems and users together to interact. This, we postulate, not only introduces elements like uncertainty, complexity and dynamism, that characterises green IS (as a field of study) and differentiates it from traditional IS, but also challenges green IS to deal with a new and evolving information space.