Information and Communication Management

Green IT and Sustainable Information Management

The impact of the ever-increasing utilisation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and respective IT services is not limited to the economic domain - ICT affect the environment and raise social issues as well. Thus ICT companies, such as IT service providers and hardware or software manufacturers, have to consider the triple bottom line of sustainability, taking economic, ecologic and social criteria into account. The power consumption is of particular interest since ICT are responsible for 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions (comparable to the aviation industry), but missing recycling practices for electronic waste, scarce resources and continuously increasing energy prices are highly relevant issues as well. However, the demand for processing and storage capacity is constantly rising while stakeholders are demanding for ecologically and socially sustainable products and services. The recent discussion about Green IT can be seen as an indicator for a long-term evolution towards sustainability. Contrarily to other industries, such as the energy sector, the concept of sustainability is still new to the ICT industry and structural frameworks for holistically integrating economic, ecologic and social aspects into IT management are still missing. The development of a framework for a sustainable information management is indispensable for guiding decision makers in the ICT industry and politics.

The research in the area of sustainable information management is focused on the following areas:

  • Green IT management concepts
  • Competitive advantage based on sustainable IT management
  • Strategic Green IT alignment
  • Development of scorecards and maturity models
  • Sustainability reporting (definition and measurement of KPIs)

Publications

2013

Drenkelfort, G., Pröhl, T., Koray, E., Frank, B., & Zarnekow, R. (2013). "Energiemonitoring im IKT-Umfeld - Standards und Trends" in Proceedings 15. Tagung der Fachgruppe Betriebliche Umweltinformationssysteme (5. BUIS Tage), Oldenburg, 24. April 2013 - 26. April 2013 .