Using a tool inspired by Balanced Scorecard to assess Green IT: An implementation within a regional hospital in France
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POSTERabstract
In a context of global warming and depletion of resources, practitioners and researchers tend to worry in an increasing way in the role of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) to implement sustainability. Considering these new requirements and the challenges posed by sustainable development, information and communication technologies and wider information systems have a contribution to make. In this regards, organisations tends to develop Green IT policies which can be defined as "an organisation's ability to systematically apply environmental sustainability criteria (such as pollution prevention, product stewardship, use of clean technologies) to the design, production, sourcing, use and disposal of the IT technical infrastructure as well as within the human and managerial components of the IT infrastructure" (p. 5) (Molla, Pittayachawan, Corbitt, & Deng, 2009). But, as Daly and Butler noticed it, "the biggest problem faced by organisations is in measuring the impact of green IT policies" (p. 3) (Daly & Butler, 2009). As a consequence, this study tends to contribute to the ongoing research of Green IT assessment within organizations. More precisely this poster explores how a maturity assessment tool, inspired by the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1992) can measure the conformity of information system to sustainable development requirements. Through an engeneering research, we developed this scorecard that articulates four perspectives as the original model ("economic", "human" and "environmental" perspectives as the three pillars of sustainable development and "management system" perspective in order to drive change and continuous improvement) and which connect them to objectives, indicators, ratio and questions to evaluate the maturity of Green IT policies on a scale from 0 to 3 (Bohas & Bouzidi, 2012). The purpose of this poster is to test this assessment tool for Green IT policies. This is realized through a case study at a regional hospital in France. Through our work, we provide several contributions including: "An overview of policies, practices and technologies and systems adopted by the regional hospital in the area of Green IT; "The extension of researches about sustainable balanced scorecard (SBSC) to the field of Green IT assessment. The major interest of this tool is not to provide an exact measure of the sustainability of but to give a sense of responsibility to actors and to lead them to reflect on this subject in order to change their practices in a conscious way. Kaplan and Norton also emphasize that "the balanced scorecard should be used as a communication, informing, and learning system, not as a controlling system.
