Environmental friendliness of IT based processes - a case study of Sri Lankan business environment

The global environmental crisis has been a hot topic for past few decades and it continues to attract attention of many individuals and institutions alike. One main reason for this is that its close association with global mega-trends; the crux of the matter has been shifting with the time. Undoubtedly, the current crisis incepted with the wake of the industrial era in late 1800’s and over time organizations have learnt ways to mitigate environmental damages. During the past couple of centuries, the world has shifted from industrial era to the new age of Information Technology (IT); with that, the core reasons for global environmental crisis are also changing. IT has been increasingly contributing to environmental problems to a greater extent. Finding ways to mitigate adverse environmental impacts of IT is indeed the need of the hour. In order to make IT more eco-friendly, IT should adopt the new concept called ‘Green IT’. Green IT is also popularly known as Green Computing. Many organizations are increasingly adopting Green IT practices due to the rising energy cost and the global warming issue. In Sri Lankan context, many organizations still don’t make a conscious effort to adopt Green IT practices into their business activities. This can be mainly attributed to their lack of knowledge and awareness on the subject. Hence, this paper intends to discuss the factors affecting environmental performance through IT based processes and to identify the areas where Green IT has already implemented in the selected organizations and their degree of success in adoption, in real life. Finally, the paper suggests simple practices, policies and technologies that organizations can adopt to fill up the loopholes relating to Green-IT. Although the majority of Sri Lankan organizations lack clear vision on the whole Green IT initiative, with these findings it will help their IT processes to move towards more greener alternatives in the future. The organizations would be able to ripe many benefits by adopting simple practices, policies and technologies, which are laid out in this paper. Therefore, the researcher strongly believes that it is absolutely necessary to carryout Green-IT based researches in Sri Lanka and sincerely hopes that this paper will be a foundation for future researches in the subject area