10. Governance and Management of Green IT

Sustainability has become a main pillar for the development of our civilization. It is increasingly evident that achieving sustainable development is not only necessary to have a future, but also helps us create greater value by being more effective and efficient. This has led to more and more organizations implementing sustainable practices across different fields. One of these fields with the greatest impact and which is evolving the most is Information Technology (IT). Through what is known as Green IT, organizations are implementing measures to reduce the environmental impact of their IT, as well as using their IT to be more sustainable in other areas. However, organizations are conducting these Green IT implementations at their own discretion, due to the lack of guidelines, standards, or frameworks in this regard. With the objective of helping organizations, this chapter presents a framework that guides the way in which organizations should properly govern and manage Green IT. To this end, we have developed the Governance and Management Framework for Green IT (GMGIT), validating and refining it through different case studies at an international level, obtaining several versions through an iterative and incremental cycle. The results of this development show that the GMGIT is a very useful framework for organizations to implement, evaluate, and improve the governance and management of Green IT.