Abstract:
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.
