Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 3. Comparison of Strategic BSC, IT BSC, and Green IT BSC
Balanced Scorecard for Strategic
Management (Kaplan and Norton 1996)
Balanced scorecard for strategic IT
management (Van Grembergen 2000)
Green IT Balanced scorecard
Financial perspective
Mission: To succeed financially, how should
we appear to our shareholders?
Business contribution
Mission: to obtain a reasonable business
contribution of IT investments
Financial Perspective
Mission: What are the contributions of
the Green IT implementations from finan-
cial perspective?
Customer perspective
Mission: To achieve our vision, how should
we appear to our customer?
User Orientation
Mission: to be the preferred supplier of
information system
Stakeholder Orientation
Mission: Does Green IT efficiently and
effectively support stakeholders' needs?
Learning and Growth
Mission: To achieve our vision, how will we
sustain our ability to change and improve?
Future Orientation
Mission: to develop opportunity to answer
future challenges
Future Orientation
Mission: Is Green IT flexible enough to
integrate future change?
Internal business process
Mission: To satisfy our shareholders and
customers, at what business processes must
we excel?
Operational Excellence
Mission: to deliver effective and efficient
IT applications and services
Process Perspective
Mission: How effective and efficient is
the Green IT during its lifecycle?
impacts (loss of middle-class jobs, economic
security impacts).
To improve performance, top-level manage-
ment has recognized that it is necessary to better
understand the drivers of both costs and revenues
and the actions they can take to affect them (Ep-
stein and Roy, 2001). Several questions that must
be addressed before investing in environmental
technology are:
BSC, Green IT BSC emphasizes the environmental
aspects of IT along with the financial perspective,
stakeholder orientation, future orientation, and
operational excellence (Table 3).
We need to acknowledge that linking measure-
ments to strategy is at the heart of the success of
the scorecard development process (Kaplan and
Norton, 1993). The adoption of the original IT
balanced scorecard to measure the benefits gener-
ated from emerging environmental aspects into
companies' strategies may help companies to at-
tain competitive advantage (See Figure 1).
As a technological assessment, our Green IT
scorecard evaluates environmental risks, the
impacts of specific projects and facilities, the
potential for effluents, releases, and hazardous
wastes, and the product life cycle costs of technol-
ogy (Shrivastava 1995). Additionally, similarly
to other BSCs, each perspective must be trans-
lated into corresponding metrics and measures
for the evaluation of the current situation. The
relationship between the IT scorecard and the
sustainable business scorecard is shown in Figure
2. Although we adopted the cascade concept of
IT BSC, the flow- process of its formulation is
relatively different. Unlike the traditional balanced
scorecard cascade (Van Grembergen, 2000), we
1. How can top management get their invest-
ment on environmental technologies to
return some business value to them?
2. How does top management ensure that
investments in environmental technologies
are the right decision, not only to comply
with government regulations, but also to
achieve and transform those investments
into competitive advantage?
3. How does top management control the firm's
environmental technology investments?
Certainly, the effort to invest in environmental
technology and the decision to include environ-
mental aspects into companies' strategies requires
fundamental changes from the perspective of IT
governance. In comparison to strategic BSC and IT
