Sustainability also brings challenges

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For example, it could develop software with a low ecological footprint and implement it on a large scale or take appropriate criteria into account when tendering for contracts. Given the high number of employees in public administration and the increase in remote collaboration, sustainable IT services (e.g. web conferencing tools) also offer enormous potential for reducing energy and therefore costs.

New, energy-intensive technologies, constantly growing amounts of data and regulations in general make planning in relation to information technology a complicated issue anyway. However, public administration faces particular challenges as it is notoriously unable to act as flexibly as private companies and also often has to contend with budget cuts.

In addition, the introduction of Green IT measures involves a great deal georgia consumer email list of effort, as the status quo of ICT must first be determined in order to create a reliable data basis for further analyses and the derivation of measures.


Steps to introduce Green IT measures, Source: Zarnekow & Kolbe (2013)

For the public sector, this means getting an overview of around 5 million employees and their end devices. In addition, data on structural factors such as building energy efficiency must be collected and the energy consumption of end devices and data centers must be determined. To do this, however, the necessary infrastructure with appropriate measuring devices and monitoring tools must first be created. Unfortunately, a successful survey is only half the battle: measures and savings potential must be identified on the basis of the data, which is not always straightforward, however, as often only summarized measured values ​​are available.


Public administration must manage all of these steps in parallel with other large and constantly changing projects such as federal IT consolidation. In addition, there is often a lack of human resources and employees often have neither the time nor the necessary expertise to understand and implement green IT measures in the required depth. In addition to appropriate budgets for sustainability issues, there is a lack of competence centers that can convey interest and understanding across departments in order to arouse intrinsic motivation among employees.