Page 36 - ITU Kaleidoscope 2016

2016 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference

In order to facilitate considering both aspects, frameworks, 2. SURF GREEN ICT MATURITY MODEL (SGIMM)
maturity models and their likes have been published both in
academic and practitioners literature. In addition, there are SURF, the Dutch higher education and research partnership
general impact assessment tools that can also be applied to for ICT, decided to develop a maturity model on Green ICT
ICT, such as life cycle analysis or green house gases audits after interviewing a number of Dutch higher education and
(see Ecofys et al. [8] for an overview of general tools applied research institutions. In these interviews the institutions ex-
to ICT). pressed a clear need for some way to know how well they
are doing in terms of Green ICT. SURF wanted to develop
Most of the specific models and tools focus on energy ef- a maturity model based on expert views and opinions and
ficiency and reducing the negative impacts of ICT, such as validate this through a survey spread amongst practition-
those developed by the Green Grid and the OpenDCME ers. The SGIMM was developed by SURF and a number of
model. While these are mostly focused on data centres, oth- Green ICT experts, both from the Dutch higher education
ers such as those developed by Gartner [9] and Molla et al. and research community as well as outside it. Responsibility
[10] capture the entirety of ICT but are still only limited to for ICT in organisations part of this community is typically
the direct impacts in scope or are very general/abstract. A delegated to an ICT department. The SGIMM was there-
few tools have been developed that also include the positive fore designed from the ICT department’s perspective. Even
impacts of ICT, such as those by UK HM Government [11], though the SGIMM is developed for higher education, it can
deMonsabert et al. [12] and Donnellan et al. [13]. Still those be used easily by other organisations as it covers topics that
mostly focus on the negative impacts, too. From a system are equally relevant for any organisation. More information
perspective or the total global footprint of human society on the model can be found at [14] where it is also available
this seems strange since the negative impacts are responsible for download to use freely under a creative commons license.
for 2% of that footprint, while the positive impacts have the The concept of the maturity model is based on the Capability
potential to reduce the global footprint by 16% [2]. Maturity Model, representing a framework with five maturity
levels for quality and process improvements. The five levels
As far as we can derive from research literature and prac- are (1) initial, (2) repeatable, (3) defined, (4) managed and (5)
tice, there is a lack of publications on assessing the quality optimising. At the lowest level, the initial level, the organ-
of the tools, if and how they are being used and whether they isation does not provide a stable environment for the activity.
achieve their intended effects. Similarly, there has not been At this level the process is ad hoc. However, at the highest
a lot of research on what capabilities companies need in or- level, which is the optimising level, the entire organisation is
der to green their ICT and how to measure these capabilities focused on continuous process improvement [15].
[5]. While such questions might be trivial for other assess- The SGIMM conceptually consists of four domains cover-
ment topics, this is not the case for the environmental im- ing negative and positive impacts and aspects of ICT. Each
pact of ICT. Environmental sustainability is typically multi- domain consists of attributes that have a definition, factors
dimensional and prone to local optimisations and it is there- involved and descriptions of each of the five maturity levels.
fore complex to assess progress. Three domains and attributes are generally applicable to
any organisation, being: ‘Green ICT in the Organisation’,
From the perspective of usability in practice, the published ‘Greening of ICT’ and ‘Greening of Operations with ICT’.
models vary in how abstract they are, their scope and ease of The fourth domain is sector-specific and covers ‘Greening
use. By looking at the meta-level, it can be seen that most of of primary processes with ICT’. For instance, for the higher
them have a very similar structure. Most of them have a gen- education sector, the primary processes would relate to edu-
eral idea of what should be included in Green ICT, and con- cation and research. The first three domains and attributes
tain a collection of several concepts which consists of several are summarised in Table 1.
components. Some of the models include extra aspects like A few models and frameworks exist that help apply Green
approaches or maturity levels. This could provide a standard ICT principles to primary processes in an organisation. For
structure for assessing, evaluating and improving the use of example, the framework in [13] contains the capability build-
green ICT. If many organisations use the same model or at ing block “ICT-enabled business processes”. They found that
least the same structure in their models, this could pave the involving the ICT department as well as ‘business’ raises
way for standardisation and eventually benchmarking. awareness on both sides of the potential of Green ICT. How-
ever, the framework seems to remain high-level and offers
In this study we want to demonstrate how organisations can little practical guidelines to apply Green ICT to business pro-
use a maturity model, the SURF Green ICT Maturity Model, cesses. In general, the impression we gather from other work
to assess and improve the use of Green ICT. As we wanted - and this is also what we experience - that it is difficult to
to know how organisations would respond to such a maturity apply Green ICT outside the datacenter.
model and whether it would be effective, we facilitated the The SGIMM is designed to give organisations insights into
use of the maturity model in four different organisations. The the maturity of Green ICT of the organisation. It is set-up
following sections describe the maturity model, the method as a self-assessment and enables organisations to have an in-
of the field study, the results and the discussion of the results. ternal dialogue, to gain agreement on the status quo and to

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