Organizational research in the field of Green IT: A systematic literature review from 2007 to 2016

Abstract

The environmental effects of Information Technology (IT) and business sustainability have been a catalyst for the growth of Green IT. This growth has resulted in a considerable amount of attention from business practitioners, Information System (IS) researchers and politicians in the field. Many researchers from different academic backgrounds have attempted to investigate and understand the concepts of Green IT, from both the individual and the organizational perspectives. However, few attempts have been made to incorporate the findings of previous surveys and to assess the current state of research in this field. In this research, we conduct a literature review to examine Green IT research to gain a better understanding of the Green IT field between 2007 and 2016. We categorize the published papers and present some novel research opportunities and areas that need to be developed. To provide extensive quantitative and qualitative results, we follow a review protocol integrating two different stages (automatic and manual) and cover all of the studies from this period. Accordingly, from the review study, we identify 131 papers addressing Green IT that were reviewed to extract relevant information on a set of research questions. We observe that the current studies cover numerous research themes under Green IT research, particularly initiation, approaches and strategies, the adoption framework, and benefits, with other themes gaining scarce attention. By presenting research questions, we aid scholars in determining rigorous academic research directions for studying this phenomenon. The results of this study provide a roadmap to guide future studies on Green IT and highlight directions for the successful implementation of Green IT in organizations.