| dc.description.abstract | Sustainability is becoming an important subject for organizations these days aiming to perform well in a competitive environment. It is no longer only about making money; people now expect organizations to contribute to a sustainable environment in different ways. At the same time, IT is becoming crucial for organizations in supporting business processes. However, IT also has a huge impact on the environment through its entire lifecycle. Another problem is that sustainable IT is not yet a well-researched topic. Therefore, it is not widely known which capabilities organizations should focus on successfully making their IT sustainable and at the same time apply IT to lower the impact of their business processes on the environment. For Utrecht University (UU) and more specifically the Information and Technology Services department (ITS), this topic is also an important issue. Sustainability is one of the main strategic themes of Utrecht University and therefore the ITS department needs to pay attention to how sustainable their IT is. Therefore, the main goal of this thesis is to define an auditing protocol for measuring the maturity level of sustainable ICT in the ITS department. A common tool these days for organizations assessing capabilities in a certain domain are maturity models. Originating from software development, maturity models are now used in a wide range of domains. To be effective, maturity models need to contain the right capabilities in a certain domain to provide valuable information for the users. When a domain is not yet mature, like in the case of sustainable ICT, it can be hard to specify a complete conceptual framework for a maturity model. For this issue, we have developed a comparison method that allows users to systematically compare the concepts of frameworks to the concepts of one reference framework to determine what concepts are not present in the reference framework. Based on these missing concepts, the reference framework can be improved and extended to include those concepts if these are deemed to be a valuable addition. Using this comparison method, we compared one central framework, the Surf Green ICT Maturity Model (SGIMM), with several other frameworks in the field of sustainable ICT. This comparison helped us determine which subjects were not in the SGIMM. These topics were analyzed through interviews, literature and discussion to determine possible improvements. Using the resulting information, we extended the SGIMM with several concepts related to ‘People’ and laid the foundation for other future improvements that were out of scope for this project. We tested the improved SGIMM in an audit at ITS, with ITS scoring quite low overall. ITS mentioned that this was caused by sustainability currently not being a priority for ITS. However, reactions were positive towards the model and clear actions were defined for improving the maturity level of ITS. It was decided that the focus should be on improving the people and strategy domain. Furthermore, we recommend setting up several projects to investigate further elaboration on the suggested improvements in the SGIMM and generalization of the proposed comparison method | |
