Contribuição à formação de critérios de seleção de projetos de tecnologia da informação verde

Abstract

Sustainable development is no longer just a set of philanthropic actions undertaken for the good of the community but instead it enters definitely on the agenda of business strategy. According to the definition of sustainable development it is possible to point out that technology and science are factors that provide the ability to better understand our natural systems and that technology and social organization can help to manage and improve processes to a new era of economic growth. Information technology (IT) can be seen as a discipline that works on sustainable development in a negative way, which is a consumer of natural resources. However, IT also provides tools and systems that help reduce effects on the environment, with consequences that reach also the social and economic environment. Organizations which seek market differentiation by orientation of sustainable approach composes sustainable stock market indices that make performance monitoring of economic, social and environmental which should be observed by these companies and incorporated into their selection criteria of projects portfolio. Considering the importance of sustainability in the current context and especially in information technology, this work seeks to identify the criteria for sustainable IT that are used in selecting the portfolio of infrastructure projects of information technology in organizations that support sustainable development. Goal is to identify and understand the criteria for green IT in the academic literature that are used in the selection of project portfolios of information technology, especially those facing the infrastructure segment. Projects of information technology can be seen as sources of new competitive advantage in activities automation and as to decrease the variations of the results of production processes. This feature has increased the number of IT projects placed for the evaluation of companies that go beyond the physical and financial ability to undertake them, requiring a process of selection that is always connected to the strategic dimension and has defined criteria for such. Portfolio management methods have been developed to answer the question of which projects have to be selected. Focus of this study looked at the literature of portfolio selection criteria that can be applied to both categories of infrastructure projects. Method used in this work is the case study, characterized by qualitative assessment. Selected organizations should be engaged with sustainable development and therefore it is used as a criteria for choosing organizations whose shares comprise sustainability indexes such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the Índice de Sustentabilidade Empresarial. Results achieved show that from eighteen criteria for Green IT identified in literature research, ten can be validated as effectively able to distinguish projects. It was also identified that criteria for Green IT are used along with technical assessments, but are not considered as decision points. Research pointed that cost and performance outweigh sustainability as drivers of decision.