Sustainability

The Themes Linking IT, Sustainability and Business Processes

The key to understanding, developing and benefiting from sustainability strategies lies in recognizing these critical subthemes:

Sustainability and the Economic Transformation

Understanding the nature of the long-term transition, its consequences and the emerging regulatory environment is critical for long-term planning and success.

Sustainability and Its Impact on Business Processes

Over shorter timescales, the pursuit of IT-enabled efficiencies across IT and business processes, production and fixed assets builds a platform for continuous and disruptive improvement, efficiency gains and cost savings across an organization and its products and services.

Green IT

While leverage of IT-enabled strategies is critical across the sustainable business organization, vast cost, efficiency and performance gains continue to add substantial value within the IT organization.

Sustainability-Enabling Technologies and Services

In addition to the development of sustainability within the organization, a complex ecosystem of vendors offering enabling technologies and services is emerging.

Sustainable Components and Materials

The sustainability shift is creating markets for new technologies, components, products and byproducts that offer new efficiencies, opportunities and revenue streams.

Sustainability and the Energy Sector

Although IT and business organizations have traditionally focused on demand-side energy and resource management, the sustainable transformation placed a substantial focus on energy supply-side issues within the energy and utilities sector and across other industries.