Application of ISO 14000 to Information Technology Governance and Management

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2019.03.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • IT sustainability and, in particular, the Green IT philosophy have become slogans for executive, corporate, and service management.

  • The ISO 14000 family of standards can give a great contribution for Green IT, since the best practices that it proposes are very useful to consolidate the practices and techniques of Green IT.

  • The proposed adaption of the ISO 14000 family of standards to IT allows organizations of all types to manage the implementation of Green IT.

Abstract

Sustainability is a reality and a necessity for everyone in all areas. The changes that are taking place with respect to environmental sensitivity force organizations to adopt a new approach to this problem. This has led organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to develop standards that help all types of organizations achieve sustainable development, such as the ISO 14000 family of standards. However, the ISO 14000 family of standards is too generic and does not address specific areas that are highly relevant for organizations in the search for sustainability, as is the case of the area of Information Technology (IT). From the area of IT, sustainability and, in particular, the Green IT philosophy have become slogans for executive, corporate, and service management. Implementing Green IT initiatives has become a priority for the environmental awareness of organizations that want to stay ahead of the curve. That is why, in this study, the application/inclusion of the ISO 14000 family of standards to IT is carried out. The results obtained and the validation of this proposal by experts show an adequate and consistent proposal, which covers all areas related to IT. All this demonstrates the applicability of the ISO 14000 family of standards to IT through the Green IT and completes a developed framework that is useful in practice when implementing the governance and management of Green IT. Likewise, thanks to this proposal, organizations finally have a standardized guide when implementing Green IT, as well as when seeking for international and recognized certifications in this field.

Introduction

Since the “Brundtland Report” [1] appeared in 1987, defending the idea of sustainable development, the ecological awareness in favor of caring for and preserving the environment has turn into an issue that is gaining more and more ground each day, becoming, as many think, in the beginning of a new “industrial revolution”.

This concern for the environment has transcended all kinds of ideological, social and other frontiers, which has forced governments to make important decisions on the area. Some examples of this are the Agenda for the Sustainable Development for the year 2030 developed by the United Nations (UN) [2] and the Circular Economy Action Plan developed by the European Commission [3].

Also, in society, this ecological trend is becoming one of the factors that contribute to an individual choosing the consumption of one product rather than another, i.e. so-called “green products” are becoming increasingly attractive to consumers [4].

All this pressure for a healthier environment has forced organizations to modify their practices and to use less harmful methods with the environment in their daily operations through different areas of business [5], [6], [7]. In fact, it has been demonstrated that organizations that apply greener criteria in the development of their activities are not only gaining an advantage in the material and economic saving of resources, but they are also gaining a competitive advantage, differing to a large extent from their competitors [8], [9], [10], [11].

That is why the ISO 14000 family of standards [12] has been developed in this respect, to help accelerate the process of adhesion of organizations to such ecological practices, through the efficient use of resources and the reduction of the environmental impact.

While is true that this family of standards gives an overview to adapt to sustainable practices, it would be helpful to have specific guidelines in certain areas that may have greater impact and/or help more in the area of sustainability, such as the Information Technology (IT) area. An example of a similar application is the ISO/IEC 90003 standard [13], which establishes the guidelines to adapt/apply the ISO 9001 standard [14] to the software field.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the twentieth century, until today, technological advances have occurred with a constant rapid pace, and humankind, in most cases, has failed to adapt these advances with the conservation of the environment [15]. That is why, in recent years, the idea of Green IT has emerged for the protection of the environment [16], through which it is intended to contribute to sustainability in and by the area of IT, reducing or minimizing the impact of IT over the environment and using IT as a means to optimize the use of resources in other areas.

Over the last few years, Green IT has received multiple definitions from different points of view [17]. Of all these definitions, one of the ones that best describes this area (adapted from [18]), refers to the Green IT as “the study and practice of design, build and use of hardware, software and information technologies with a positive impact on the environment”.

This area of Green IT is a very young area that has rapidly gone from being just a trend followed by a few to a competitive need and advantage followed by many. However, as it happens in all the beginnings, Green IT area lacks standards and/or best practices (among others) that help organizations implement, evaluate and improve Green IT in their business models [17], [19], [20], [21].

That is why we have carried out the development of the “Governance and Management Framework for Green IT” (from now on, GMGIT) [22], [23], offering a framework to all types of organizations able to carry out the implementation, audit/evaluation and improvement of the Green IT from the point of view of the governance and the management of this area.

After validating the GMGIT through different case studies at several organizations [24], [23], [22], [20], demonstrating its usefulness and validity, we have obtained a series of lessons learned and observations from the organizations. Among these lessons learned, it is worth mentioning the comment/demand from organizations about the importance of continuing to evolve and expanding the scope of the framework through the inclusion/adaptation of international standards that allow standardizing and offering through the framework a guide to organizations that seek to obtain some type of certification in this regard.

Therefore, in the present study, we first analyze and classify the ISO 14000 family of standards and, secondly, we carry out a proposal on how to adapt/include this ISO 14000 family of standards to the area of IT, through the GMGIT.

In order to carry out the analysis and classification of the ISO 14000 family of standards, we have decided to establish 3 classification dimensions based on the stage of the life cycle affected, the objective and the scope of the standard. In this way we have obtained a more detailed overview, which makes it easier to analyze the rules to adapt them to a specific field.

On the other hand, to develop the proposal we have identified which standards are applicable to IT, through certain exclusion criteria, and we have analyzed in detail and applied each of these selected standards to the 35 processes of the GMGIT. We have also performed a validation with experts to verify that the proposal of this study to adapt the ISO 14000 family of standards to IT is adequate and consistent.

The rest of the present study is organized as follows: Section 2 contains the background about ISO 14000, Green IT, and the GMGIT; Section 3 shows the related works that currently exist in the Green IT area (from the point of view of governance, management and auditing); Section 4 presents the proposal for the inclusion of ISO 14000 to the area of IT, based on the integration of this family of standards within the GMGIT; Section 5 shows the validation performed for the adaptation of the ISO 14000 family of standards to IT proposed; finally, Section 6 presents the conclusions and the proposals for future work. Also, Appendix A shows in detail the inclusion of the ISO 14000 family of standards in each of the processes included in the GMGIT.

Section snippets

ISO 14000

The ISO 14000 series of standards [12] (see Table 1) is a set of international standards, developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and published for the first time in 1996, through which it is offered to organizations of all types and sizes a set of management tools to control their environmental aspects and improve their environmental performance.

The primary objective of the ISO 14000 family of standards is to support environmental protection and pollution

Related work

As previously mentioned, we have performed different research, based on Systematic Mapping Studies (SMS) [56], [57], in order to acknowledge the state of the art in the area of governance, management and auditing of Green IT [19], as well as about maturity models of sustainability and Green IT [20].

The first SMS [19], demonstrates the novelty of the area of governance, management and auditing of Green IT, due to the lack of studies, frameworks and standards in that area. This SMS highlights two

Inclusion of ISO 14000 to Information Technology

First of all, before carrying out the inclusion of the ISO 14000 family of standards to IT, we had to collect, analyze and classify each of the standards of this family. To do this, we have established 3 classification dimensions (as can be seen in Fig. 1):

  • First dimension: the ISO 14000 family of standards has been designed according to the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle [65]. Therefore, the first dimension is to follow this cycle to classify each standard according to what part of the PDCA

Validation

To validate this proposal of applying the ISO 14000 family of standards to the area of IT (through the GMGIT), we took into consideration a wide range of possible empirical studies [70], [71] and ultimately defined a questionnaire based on a Likert scale [72] which was performed with 6 experts in the area.

First, as with the validations carried out with the GMGIT [24], we have decided to validate the application of ISO 14000 on the processes of the first two maturity levels of the GMGIT [23].

Conclusions and future work

The changes that our society has experienced in recent years have been enormous. The vast majority of these changes have had their origin in the IT and the Technological Revolution that they have entailed. The rapid and vertiginous evolution of IT in recent decades has revolutionized not only organizations but also our lives in general. Our society, our jobs, our schools, our habits, and everything that surrounds us in general has undergone a great evolution.

A point of similarity could be

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We kindly thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, as well as the experts who have participated in validating this proposal. This work is the result of a PhD co-tutele agreement between the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the University of Bari “Aldo Moro”. This work is part of the Industrial PhD DI-17-09612, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities; of the project GINSENG (TIN2015-70259-C2-1-R), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy,

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