Abstract-SustainableEconomicICT-Zhang

= Sustainable economic ICT strategy: a proposed framework =

Bing Qian Zhang, Kay Fielden



Abstract
==**Keywords**: Holistic evaluation framework, Digital economy, Green strategy ==

In this proposed research framework sustainability is added to the list of OECD digital economic rankings (>100 separate criteria), which reflect the ability for the world’s countries to absorb information and communications technology (ICT) for economic and social benefit. The framework proposed adds three levels of environmental factors and categorises the existing criteria into clusters to form a holistic evaluation framework for setting sustainable economic ICT strategy. This framework has been developed in response to (Watson, Boudreau, & Chen, 2010), who have proposed that the IS community demonstrate how IS can contribute to creating an ecologically sustainable society. Whilst, Watson et al have suggested that a new subfield of energy informatics be established, the holistic framework presented in this paper incorporates energy informatics as one factor of many. Also, a sub-discipline of carbon-centric computing has been proposed by (Hasan, Ghose, & Spedding, 2009) in which the philosophy of think globally, act locally be adopted to introduce environmental awareness to a wide spectrum of IT research and practice. This framework is guiding postgraduate research in this area thus raising the level of awareness amongst upcoming IS researchers. This holistic sustainability framework, which incorporates the directions provided by (Watson et al., 2010) and (Hasan et al., 2009) will be trialled in a case study in New Zealand IT leasing companies. The main research question is: What Green IT strategies exist in New Zealand IT leasing companies?

This research is following the “Seven Steps” of the Soft System Methodology (Checkland & Scholes, 2000). Firstly, an observation of the problem situation will be conducted, and then the results will be used to draw a rich picture of the problem situation. Secondly, the data gathered from an online survey of different stakeholder groups (e.g. government bodies, environmental groups, leasing companies, customers of leasing companies) will be used to formulate root definitions of relevant systems for purposeful activity. Thirdly, based on the root definitions, conceptual models for each group will be constructed. Fourthly, these conceptual models, which have been evaluated against the holistic framework proposed, will be compared with the perceived real world situation. Finally, based on the differences between theory and the real world situation, analysis will be conducted and possible solutions developed. media type="custom" key="7496721" width="240" height="240"media type="youtube" key="lVMJg3cljtY?fs=1" height="385" width="640"