Environmental Engineering Reference
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world leaders grapple with redefining the rules
for global finance, another way to move forward
policies that promote greening and sustainability
is to concentrate on bottom-up initiatives.
Toward this end, the authors of the study de-
scribed below have chosen to focus on a relatively
small area affecting global climate change: that of
managing Information Technology. Even a per-
functory review of literature shows that many an
IT manager have undertaken to increase employee
awareness of greening and sustainability issues,
and have worked to put in place policies and proce-
dures to enhance both outcomes. However, a more
thorough review of literature points to problems
and shortcomings. For example, there appears to
be no widely acceptable framework to help gauge
the degree of organizational greening efforts. How
are managers to know, how well they are doing in
this area? To help alleviate this shortcoming, we
propose a model - called the Greening through
Information Technology Model (GITM) - based
on the framework of Capability Maturity Model.
To be sure, ours is not the only effort to help
IT managers in their greening programs. For
example, consultants at Accenture have built
one model - called Green Maturity Assessment
(GMA) - for assessing greening efforts of an
Information Technology organization (available
at www.accenture.com/gmm). That model pro-
duces a greening effort rating, based on a series
of questions the responses to which are Likert-
scale answers from strongly disagree to strongly
agree. Even though the authors of this paper were
not aware of GMA's existence when GITM was
being developed, one could see GMA and GITM
as complementary in focus and range.
been of interest to various disciplines for many
years and as a concept has had many definitions.
In a general sense, sustainability is the ability to
maintain a certain process or state indefinitely.
In recent years, the concept has been applied to
living organisms and systems. When applied to
the human community, the most widely accepted
definition has been that proposed by (Brundtland,
1987) who defines the concept of sustainability
as “meeting the needs of the present generation
without compromising the ability of future genera-
tions to meet their needs.” The interdependency
of nations requires that sustainability become
the goal of all nations if the needs of present and
future generations are to be met. Sustainability
is a multifaceted concept. It rests on three pil-
lars: the economy, the environment, and society.
Thus, the achievement of sustainability requires
interventions in these three areas.
Greening is one aspect of sustainability which
typically focuses on environmental measures
(Ivanovich, 2008). Efforts to recycle and reuse
materials, to reduce if not eliminate toxic com-
ponents or to responsibly design products or
industrial processes are examples of greening
policies. Even though the concept of greening is
not immediately connected to costs, greening is
often about reducing consumptions and therefore
reducing costs.
Greening requires interventions by both gov-
ernments and organizations. From this perspec-
tive, governmental actions through legislation,
regulations, and executive orders can provide a
top-down approach to impact the achievement of
greening and sustainability while organizations by
greening through IT management can provide a
bottom-up approach to implement governmental
actions (Figure 1).
One area within organizations which appears
ripe for greening is that of technology. While
information technologies are critical to the op-
eration and success of today's businesses, these
same technologies are also often seen as a cause
of environmental burden (Boudreau, Chen, &
BACKGROUND: SUSTAINABILITY
AND GREENING
The terms sustainability and greening are often
used interchangeably; however, the terms are
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