A Governance and Management Framework for Green IT

In recent years, Green Information Technology (IT) has grown enormously, and has become an increasingly important and essential area, providing multiple benefits to the organizations that focus on it. It is for this reason that there is an increasing number of organizations embracing the idea of Green IT. However, Green IT is a very young field and each organization implements it according to its own criteria. That is why it is extremely important to develop the bases or best practices of governance and management that allow organizations to implement Green IT practices correctly and standardize them. In this article, we propose the “Governance and Management Framework for Green IT”, establishing the characteristics needed to carry out the governance and management of Green IT in an organization, and perform audits in this area. This framework is based on COBIT 5, which is a general framework for the control and audit of different areas related to IT. The results obtained through different validations demonstrate the validity and usefulness of the framework developed in the field of Green IT, providing a complete guide to the organizations in their efforts to implement, control and/or improve the practices of Green IT in their processes and day-to-day operations.