Green IT Capability and Firm's Competitive Advantage

Introduction

The recent emergence of energy efficiency and cost effective IT equipment (known as Green IT) has been regarded as a social and technical arena of innovation (Davidson et al., 2011). The literature distinguishes between, namely: technical innovations, those that involve new technologies, products and services. It also includes administrative innovations, namely: those that involve procedures, policies and organizational issues (Tarafdar & Gordon, 2007). Drawing upon this, Table 1 categorises the environmental sustainability research appearing in Information Systems (IS) journals into technical and administrative research. These journals are identified from literature that point out the journals which published articles related to environmental sustainability. It shows that IS fields tend to focus more towards administrative issues, rather than on technological aspects which might be of interest to practitioners in the computer science area. Environmental capability is ongoing in operations management, marketing, and strategy, and although this is still a nascent area, a number of interesting findings have emerged (Hart & Dowell, 2010). However, discussions on environmental capability in IS context have been generally lacking to date.