Estimating the economic value of reusable green ICT practices

Abstract

Despite environmental concerns becoming increasingly urgent as a global issue, cost reduction is still the most important economic goal for many companies. Explicitly showing economic gains would be one of the most effective ways to motivate companies to optimize their use of ICT resources by means of sustainable software systems or green ICT practices. In this paper we propose using the e 3 value technique (originally meant to model enterprises and end-users exchanging things of economic value) to estimate and quantify the business value of sustainable software and green ICT practices. We report the experiment we carried out to challenge the e 3 value technique. In this experiment, we modeled a green ICT practice (investing a desktop virtualization software to improve energy efficiency) in a simplified yet realistic context. The results show that the applied practice would lead to an overall 47% reduction of expenses and 20% reduction of electricity consumption. Such quantification facilitates the comparison among alternative green practices and ICT-based decision making. In addition, we show that the use of e 3 value technique not only supports communication of green practices among different types of stakeholders, but also facilitates reuse of the same green practice in different organizations having different ways of implementing them. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.