158 Int. J. Intercultural Information Management, Vol. 4, Nos. 2/3, 2014 Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. A 360 degree carbon audit of the ICT industry Easwar Krishna Iyer* and Bhavana Rao Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai 603102, Tamil Nadu, India Email: easwar@greatlakes.edu.in Email: bhavana.pgpm14c@greatlakes.edu.in *Corresponding author Abstract: Computing and communications have altered the way in which the world works and lives today. Captured within a single acronym, ‘ICT’ has majorly shaped the growth and sustenance of every other industry in this planet. But growth invariably comes with a price. The high energy consumption of the ICT industry and its attendant environmental fallouts threatens to undo the positives that the industry is otherwise associated with. This paper does a 360 degree Carbon Audit of the ICT Industry. The tool used for the audit is the Bow-Tie Diagram, a risk evaluation tool. The paper does a threat-consequence mapping of the increasing carbon footprint of the ICT industry. Five threats and three consequences are identified. Then using literature survey, the paper delineates twenty five barriers that can help in containing the carbon footprint of the ICT industry. Seventeen of the 25 identified barriers are on the threat side and the remaining eight are on the consequences side of the Bow-Tie. Keywords: carbon audit; energy conservation; ICT industry; bow-tie diagram; threats; consequences; barrier management; cloud computing; green IT. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Iyer, E.K. and Rao, B. (2014) ‘A 360 degree carbon audit of the ICT industry’, Int. J. Intercultural Information Management, Vol. 4, Nos. 2/3, pp.158–182. Biographical notes: Easwar Krishna Iyer is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Strategy in Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai. He has three post graduations, one each from IIT Kharagpur, Great Lakes Institute of Management and University of Houston. His latest post-graduation from UH is on Energy Management. He is a regular speaker in various industry and academic forums in India and abroad. His current research areas include cloud computing, risk management, green computing, social media analytics and technology convergence. Bhavana Rao worked with Professor Easwar for her empirical study on Green IT in Great Lakes Institute of Management and passed out from the institute’s one year PGPM programme in 2014. This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper titled ‘Analysis of datacenter ecosystems for green IT implementation using cloud computing’ presented at the ‘International Conference of Business Management and Information Systems (ICBMIS)’, Dubai, November 2013.