Towards a Reference Model for ecological IT Service Management

The incorporation of ecological objectives in the design of information systems has gained increasing attention by IS research in recent years. Nevertheless, from the perspective of IT Service Management (ITSM), comprehensive approaches are still warranting attention. The objective of this paper is therefore to develop a process for the management of ecology in ITSM. By using the method of reference modeling, the widely-used IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is extended by a new process category, called Ecology Management. Based on a requirements analysis, four ecology management processes are introduced: Resource Substitution Management, Resource Efficiency Management, Resource Demand Management, and Ecological Transparency Management. In addition, interrelations to the existing ITIL processes are built by defining ecological concepts, like Green Incidents, or Green SLAs. These results are validated for the example of Green Incident Management in the related consortium research project. An important limitation is the focus on ITSM.