Environmental Sustainability in Information Technologies Governance

Abstract

In the present day, many risk factors affect the continuity of a business. However, this situation produces a conducive atmosphere to approach alternatives that relieve this situation for organizations. Within these alternatives, environmental sustainability (ES) and information technologies governance (IT governance or ITG) stand out. Both alternatives allow organizations to address intrinsically common issues such as strategic alignment, generation of value, mechanisms for performance improvement, risk management and resource management. This article focuses on the fusion of both alternatives, determining to what extent current ITG models consider ES issues. With this purpose, the strategy followed was firstly to identify the relevant factors of ES present in the main approaches of the domain (ISO14001, GRI G4, EMAS, SGE21 and ISO26000). As a result, we identified 27 activities and 103 sub-activities of ES. Next, as the second main objective, we determined which of those factors are present in the main current ITG approaches (COBIT5, ISO38500 and WEILL & ROSS). Finally, we concluded through a quantitative study that COBIT5 is the most sustainable (i.e., the one that incorporates more ES issues) ITG approach.