Conceptualizing the Quantification of the Carbon Footprint of IT-Services

This paper focusses on conceptualizing the quantification of the Carbon Footprint of IT-Services (CFIS). Initially, the increasing relevance of Carbon Footprint to the IS-community is pointed out. Based on literature review, we present related work that describes underlying concepts e.g. the Carbon Footprint of Products, Life Cycle Assessment as well as IT energy and performance measurement. We apply a transfer-oriented approach (design science) to propose a methodological framework for CFIS that is based on the phases of Life Cycle Assessment, and furthermore provide an example for the calculation. To our opinion the conceptualization of CFIS is an inevitable step to advance Green IS, since it quantifies dependencies between IT-Services, IT energy consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, the paper contributes to the IS community by providing an applicable and novel method to IT service providers for calculating the CFIS and by identifying further important research directions in this field.