Information system project's sustainability capabality levels

Abstract

Sustainability has been a major topic of discussion over the last couple of years. Project management is also a discipline that is starting to focus on sustainability, but the focus is more on the environmental aspect of the project itself. Information systems (IS) projects do not have such a major impact on the environment as construction and engineering projects do. There is currently little or no knowledge about sustainability within the IS domain and whether sustainability is incorporated. A structured questionnaire was adapted based on previous studies and circulated to the project management community. A total of 1099 responses were received. The responses covered all industries and for the purpose of this article, 387 IS projects (35.2% of the total projects) were analysed. The objective of the study was to determine the level of capability regarding sustainability. Determining sustainability project management capability provides insight into how project managers as well as organisations are incorporating sustainability. The analysis indicates that the focus is on the economic dimension of sustainability. The results also highlight the complete lack of integrating social and environmental sustainability into project management. The research highlights that sustainability in business or IS projects is not being considered. The second contribution is more of a philosophical nature. Exploratory factor analysis indicates that there should be five dimensions when it comes to IS project management instead of the usual three.