SME and Green-IT – A decision model

Abstract

Because of the enduring warnings of experts and the continuous impact of the climate change, sustainability has become a major concern of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). The information technology sector offers a variety of products that address sustainability. These range from environmental management information systems (EMIS) to hardware (e.g. energy efficient CPUs) as well as software components (e.g. hyper-visors). As "sustainability" and especially the buzz- in almost every IT marketing campaign, a useful evaluation becomes even harder. Due to their special constraints in terms of size, focus, skills, capital, and applied decision methods, SMEs struggle even harder than large enterprise to purposefully evaluate complex technologies. This article provides a structured evaluation model of IT-based sustainability technologies for SMEs. The model is based on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) and comprises different decision categories such as flexibility, risk, strategy, and cost / benefits as well as respective subcategories (e.g. implementation of a sustainability strategy) that we found to be important in the context of IT, SMEs, and sustainability.