Green IS in Infrastructure Software

Abstract: As the world is becoming a more connected place, organizations become more dependent on infrastructure software such as operating systems and middleware. Infrastructure software and the hardware it is operated on consumes a lot of electricity and in a world where the climate threat is increasingly imminent, aspects of Green IS are more relevant than ever. There are a lot of research done on the characteristics of Green IS but not so much on what is practically adopted, especially not within organizations whose main industry is not IT. In this study, we examine to what extent retail and manufacturing organizations adopt aspects of Green IS to increase their impact on environmental sustainability. Four infrastructure software platforms were surveyed through four group interviews with a total of 25 participants, on their platform’s adoption of five Green IS aspects. We found that virtualization and cloud computing as well as efficiency and optimization are well adopted aspects, where automation and monitoring and KPIs are not as prominent. The last aspect, data growth management, was in all cases very little or not at all adopted.