Synthesis of green IS frameworks for achieving strong environmental sustainability in organisations

• Authors: Grant Royd Howard;Sam Lubbe
• Venue: Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference
• Year: 2012

People are entirely dependent on the environment for existence. In spite of this crucial dependency, human activities are degrading the Earth's environment. The degradation now threatens the wellbeing of all people and possibly the long-term survival of the human race. Environmental degradation has many dire symptoms, such as anthropogenic climate change including global warming, deforestation, water and air pollution, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, and depleted fish stocks, all of which are intensified by an increasing global human population. Environmental sustainability is the solution to environmental degradation, and emphasises maintenance of the environment in order to support human life into the far future. There are several degrees of environmental sustainability, namely very weak, weak, strong, and very strong or absurdly strong. Of these, the overwhelming scientific consensus on environmental degradation necessitates strong environmental sustainability. Organisations are prevailing and prominent social structures that drive the world's economy. Nevertheless, organisations continue to degrade the environmental during the extraction of natural resources, production and processing, and the emission of wastes. However, organisations have considerable resources for achieving environmental sustainability, in the form of technology, global reach, knowledge, power, innovative capacity, motivation, and the capacity for change. Organisational change is impacted by Information systems (IS), which have been influential in enabling and transforming the world's organisations over the past fifty years. IS include information technology (IT) hardware and software, people, processes, and have specific purposes. Green IS includes Green IT, which focuses primarily on environmental sustainability throughout the IT lifecycle, and Green IS aim to enable and transform entire organisations toward environmental sustainability. Green IS present a fundamental solution to organisational environmental degradation, and researchers have developed numerous Green IS frameworks in this regard, each with a particular and significant perspective. This paper responds to the urgency of achieving strong environmental sustainability by synthesising the existing Green IS frameworks into a single Green IS framework that is purposefully aligned to strong environmental sustainability. This paper is theoretical and exploratory in nature, and makes an original contribution by providing a synthesised Green IS framework aligned to the concept of strong environmental sustainability.