Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
for a strategic measurement and measurement
system. This scorecard was created to supple-
ment traditional financial measures with criteria
that assessed performance from three additional
perspectives: namely, customer, internal business
process, and learning and growth perspectives
(Kaplan and Norton, 1996). This scorecard also
allowed companies to track financial results while
simultaneously monitoring their progress in build-
ing the capabilities and acquiring the intangible
assets they would require for future growth. These
intangible assets affect a company's performance
by enhancing the internal processes most crucial
to the creation of value for customers and stake-
holders (Kaplan and Norton, 2004).
The Balanced Scorecard has already been
implemented at corporate, strategic business unit,
shared service functions, and even individual levels
(Epstein and Rejc, 2005). Since the first introduc-
tion of BSC, the tool has undergone a significant
evolution, driven by a series of external factors
(Cram, 2007), including the IT environment. The
adoption of a balanced scorecard in IT functions
and its processes has been previously conducted
by some researchers (e.g. CIO, 2003; Martinsons
et al.
, 1999; Van Grembergen, 2000). The IT-
balanced scorecard has also been adopted as the
foundation of specific IT scorecards such as ERP
(e.g. Chand, 2005; Rosemann and Wiese, 1999;
Rosemann, 2001). However, until this stage, even
though this scorecard has successfully integrated
some important IT aspects and aligned them with
business strategies, this IT management tool does
not include environmental aspects as a component
of imperative business drivers. Environmental
concerns have become increasingly important in
the business world; however, those concerns are
only incompletely reflected in economic transac-
tions (Figge
et al.
, 2002). Therefore, in this paper
we have incorporated the environmental aspects
of technology into scorecard measurement, as one
of the soft factors that may ultimately prove more
important than the efficient use of investment
Balanced Scorecard
. In the next sections, we will
discuss in a step-by-step manner the development
of the Green IT Balanced Scorecard, including the
Cause and Effect Model, Green IT Metrics, and
a range of recommendations for the companies
when implementing this scorecard.
BACKGROUND
The Development of the IT
Balanced-Scorecard
Since its early stages, the IT balanced scorecard
has received a great deal of attention from IT
researchers and IT practitioners. One of the best-
known versions of the IT balanced scorecard is
the one developed by Van Grembergen and col-
leagues (1998, 2000). This scorecard proposed
four perspectives: the User Orientation perspective
represents the user evaluation of IT; the Opera-
tional Excellence perspective represents the IT
processes employed to develop and deliver the
applications; the Future Orientation perspective
represents the human and technology resources
needed by IT to deliver its services, and the Busi-
ness Contribution perspective captures the busi-
ness value of the IT investment (Van Grembergen,
2000). The working council for Chief Information
Officers (2003) conducted an extensive review of
IT scorecards and found that the most advanced
scorecards shared in common the following six
structural attributes: simplicity of presentation,
explicit links to IT strategy, broad executive com-
mitment, enterprise-standard metrics definitions,
drill-down capability and available context, and
individual manager compensation should be linked
to scorecard performance. Additionally, these
progressive scorecard practitioners track metrics
in five key categories: financial performance,
project performance, operational performance,
talent management, and user satisfaction, as well
as two additional metric categories--information
security and enterprise initiatives.
