Strategic IT Management and Information Systems for Sustainability

“Sustainability” takes on greater significance within modern strategic management. This also holds true for information technology: companies make investment decisions in order to achieve long-term business value, e.g. regarding seminal IT infrastructure investments. Especially when economic and ecological objectives are well aligned, companies decide to invest in energy-reducing and less resource-intense technologies. The research group SSIM deals with both, measures of strategic IT management that ensure the businesses long-term success, and the identification and valuation of innovative approaches to achieve ecological sustainability.

The challenges en route to economically sustainable IT management practices are manifold: For example, outsourcing strategies were initiated euphorically around the millennium and turned out to be unsuccessful in many cases. Today, the focus has shifted to sustainable partnerships and alternative cooperation models. New technologies as e.g. cloud computing present new challenges to vendors and clients. The research group SSIM therefore addresses problems ranging from risk/return management within IT-projects to the selection of IT-project portfolios and from outsourcing strategies to cloud computing or even the transformation of the overall IT-landscape.

Aligning IT strategy to objectives of ecological sustainability is not limited to the ecological footprint of IT („Green IT“). Reducing the use of resources through “smart” IT-adoption bears a much larger potential. This area of research is mostly referred to as Green Information Systems (“Green IS”). In close cooperation with the institute of materials resource management, the research group SSIM deals with questions concerning the sustainable use of non-renewable mineral resources (Metals & Minerals Informatics) as well as the identification of risks within the corresponding supply networks.