Evaluating Green IT Initiatives Using the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard

Performance evaluation has been done using financial indices which are generally regarded as inappropriate for the organizations which are innovative and progressive. Thus, the Balanced Scorecard(BSC) was developed considering long term performance and invisible performance. This BSC has four perspectives of finance, customer, internal operation, and learning. Based on the BSC, a new BSC has been derived with a fifth view of environmental and social perspective, which is now called as a Sustainability BSC. In this study, we evaluated Green IT initiatives using the Sustainability BSC. The initiatives are categorized as RFID, telepresence, paperless office, logistics management etc. The initiatives were evaluated from the view of five perspectives, resulting in high cor relationships among finance, internal operation, and environmental and social perspectives. Namely, good initiatives from the view of environmental/social perspective are also evaluated as good from the view of finance and internal operation perspectives. In this study, we recommend organizations to introduce Green IT initiatives by showing how Green IT initiatives have contributed to the organizations.