Green IT Adoption Practices in Education Sector: A Developing Country Perspective

2.1. Green IT

The environmental challenges covering the rising carbon footprint emissions, depletion of natural resources and increasing waste ending in landfills is gaining more attention and discussion among public and private stakeholders (Hilty and Aebischer, 2015). These challenges resulted in the formation of accords in various regions to understand the implications of human safety, business, technology development, and environmental sustainability (Nisha et al., 2013). Conversely, it is a significant area of research in the information systems and environmental education. Thus, sustainability through Green IT was conceived as an important strategic focus for organizations today. GIT is an efficient resource consumption using IT infrastructure as well as applying managerial and human practices, and organizational policies towards sustainability (Molla et al., 2014). To date, many organizations have been proposing their GIT agenda (Ardito and Morisio, 2014), and anchoring it to the sustainability mission and vision (Hernandez and Ona, 2016), to realize the full benefits of GIT, both for economic and environmental performance. Previous studies suggest that adoption of GIT in organizations have been very limited (Khor et al., 2015), especially in developing countries (Hernandez and Ona, 2015). It requires technological and organizational readiness, and support from the external environment to progress from simple to broad – complex GIT adoption activities (Deng and Ji, 2015). Hence, there is a greater need to explore and initiate GIT adoption in organizations.