This project is a study of green Information Technology (green IT), which has emerged as a cutting-edge form of sustainable technological innovation and one of the key social and business phenomena in the past few years. The research will be grounded in a process view of communication and change and move to explore the values of environmental sustainability, the high tech industry's evolving orientation and struggle toward environmental sustainability, and their adoption of changes in organizational behavior surrounding various types of green IT innovation. Intellectual merit The study will address the following primary research questions: What are the meanings of green IT and IT greening? Why are high-tech firms adopting green IT innovation and why can green IT be structured as a necessity or an opportunity? How are high-tech firms adopting green IT innovation and what communication processes are involved in both the discursive and practice change of IT greening and organizational change? The project proposes a mixed method using qualitative case studies to inform a quantitative study of industry-wide green IT innovation. The case study will also be supplemented with a preliminary set of interviews with green IT experts and change agents from diverse organizations and agencies. As the main methodology, the case study will involve several comparative case studies of selected IT firms using a combined method of in-depth interviews, critical document review, and participant observation. Broader impact With empirical data from a leading-edge technological and organizational innovation, this project will help advance academic inquiry in the fields of communication, science-technology-society, organizational change, technological innovation, and business and environment. The project also bears crucial meanings by providing valuable lessons and reality check for business and organizations at large as they consider strategies about how to move towards being environmentally sustainable as well as economically viable through green IT.
This project is the first organizational communication study that characterizes the landscape of green IT strategy formation in IT companies. A series of three sequential studies were conducted with first-hand data collected. The researcher explored the field of green IT by interviewing key people involved, discovered the inside stories of green IT adoption by three first-mover Silicon Valley firms through a comparative case study, as well as examined factors influencing the green IT development in a survey study with 106 IT organizations. The major comparative case study uncovered three unique stories of green IT development with each following a distinctive model. One firm followed an emergent model where grassroots efforts played a key role in forming the strategy. The second exhibited a deliberative model following a somewhat more traditional top-down approach to initiation. The third firm appeared committed to a somewhat postmodern or bifurcated pattern, where a green IT strategy is underway but has yet to achieve a unified commitment. Each model is accompanied with different primary motivation (s), communication style, and types of organizational cultures. The survey study demonstrated a dynamic and promising landscape for the development of green IT strategy in the IT industry. The surveyed organizations have developed a wide variety of green IT strategies. While most of them initiated green IT quite recently, a large number of them reported that the development had been quite solid. The survey study uncovered that IT organizations that had developed quite solid green IT strategies all have developed matching internal green initiatives such as environmental sustainable business practice and policy, conceptualized green IT as a holistic organizational strategy that covers business, environmental, and social dimensions, and possess a high level of InnoPreneuriship culture. This is the most significant finding of the project. The focus of the project is examining how motivations, meaning construction of green IT, organizational cultures, and communication of green IT influence its development as well as how the development may contribute to organizational cultural change. Some key findings are summarized here. First, new motivations were found including "IT and energy efficiency", "employees’ beliefs and passion", and "a due driver of cost savings and environmental sustainability". Among them, the pragmatic motivation – "IT and energy efficiency" is ranked as the number one driver, the two other motivations, however, were considered less important. Interestingly, the second most important motivation found is "social and environmental responsibilities", while "financial reasons" was not considered a highly important motivation. Second, green IT is often constructed as a holistic strategy covering pragmatic business, environmental, and normative dimensions, although it is still considered primarily as a pragmatic business strategy rather than a CSR strategy. Third, culture is found to play a crucial role in the development of green IT strategy. Forming a strategy as special and value-laden as green IT is requires the presence of several cultural characteristics in the organizations including participation, collaboration, and InnoPreneuriship cultures. This echoes the finding that green IT strategy requires some degree of grassroots efforts that introduce and circulate the idea and call for active involvement from passionate employees. This finding calls for the attention to the cultivation of grassroots efforts in promoting green IT as it is being developed as a mixed strategy. Meanwhile, developing a green IT strategy requires a company pursue a set of initiatives to green its internal IT infrastructure, facilities, and people’s awareness and behaviors that matches its external marketing efforts. This speaks of an active attitude that organizations have toward developing green IT as a true commitment with a holistic nature. Furthermore, the successful development of green IT strategy can help the company generate green cultural changes as well as more collaboration inside and outside of the company. Last but not least, communication plays a central role in the development of green IT strategy. While both effective and reserved communication styles were observed, all organizations believe that internal and external communication need to match in order to have successful development of green IT. The project helps us gain a deeper understanding regarding how green IT develop through a variety of organizational strategic initiatives to cope with a sustainability crisis, business change as well as the emerging need for corporate environmental sustainability. It examines an industry in a formative stage of development with implications that promises to at least modify, if not make major changes, in the relationship of industry to the environment as a stakeholder. Green IT initiatives are renewing a spirit of environmentalism in the corporate world. It is promoting new thinking about technology-- a shifting of focus from developing products that are fast and speedy to understanding how the technologies can be used to enhance sustainability. Green IT may not be truly green sometimes, but culturally it acts as a source of inspiration, driving people to be cognizant of doing better.
