GREEN IT CAPABILITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT 1 Rabiah Eladwiah Abdul Rahim 2 Azizah Abdul Rahman Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 1 rabiah.eladwiah@gmail.com 2 azizahar@utm.my ABSTRACT The concept of Green Information Technology (Green IT) has been widely discussed in recent times, but the question of how a firm can afford to implement Green IT in both IT and other business operations has yet to be examined. In addition, the question of whether Green IT has made any significant contributions towards sustainable development in organizations has not yet been studied. This study attempts to bridge this gap by viewing Green IT capability from the lens of Natural Resource-Based View. The two constructs derived from this theory, namely, as pollution prevention and product stewardship are discussed in this paper. Its application is extended into the IT context with reference to Green IT literature. This occurs among an early review of the utilisation of these constructs particularly for Green IT process management. The implications of the outcome of this study, both for the IS researchers and for the practicing managers, are discussed. KEYWORDS Green IT, environmental sustainability, Natural Resource-Based View and corporate sustainability. 1 INTRODUCTION Information Communication Technologies (ICT) can play a critical role in achieving the goals of sustainable development by enabling the transformation of economic, social and governance structures. It also supports fundamental changes in the values, attitudes and behaviour of individuals, as both citizens and consumers [1]. Sustainable initiatives for information systems (IS) have to be targeted at an integrated and cooperating set of people, processes, software and information technologies (IT) in order to support individual or organizational goals that contribute to the environmental, economic or social performance of a company [2]. Due to the growing global impact of IS on the economy, ecology and society, IS management is being increasingly challenged to take the concept of sustainability into account [3]. 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 [4]. 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 [5]. Drawing upon this, Table 1 categorises the environmental sustainability research appearing in IS into technical and administrative research. These journals are identified from literature that point out the IS journal 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 ISBN: 978-0-9853483-8-0 ©2013 SDIWC 80