Information Technology and Sustainable Business Growth

I have introduced the concept of sustainability in different platforms, and I have presented the topic of Secret to Sustainable Business Growth in my MBA defense in Cumbria, UK, in 2013. One of the questions that I added in my research; what is the strategy you should follow in order to grow and keep the business going. Maybe you're offering a service that not enough satisfy your customers, or maybe you've hit a wall and you do not understand your competitors. In any case, the plan just doesn't seem to be working, at least not as you hoped it would.

Today's global marketplace is forcing many companies to re-evaluate, find out innovate solutions and even collaborate their efforts just to keep up with demands of the business and services in the market place. 

For instance, in Information Technology sector we know the Information technology (IT) is essentially a tool to manipulate flow of information in business system. With the growth in need of IT services across the globe, we have found several companies have started venturing away from self-sufficiency in their way of conducting business to identifying specific processes that can be developed by some other company in order to reduce costs and focus on their core business.

Adopting sustainability is considered an important business strategy that affects your products and services in terms of cost-reduction opportunities, reputation, and revenue generation. Many people think that incorporating sustainable practices requires a significant transformational program, but the ultimate goal is to embed sustainability into business- as-usual activities.

Sustainable IT goes beyond using IT to reduce energy consumption. It’s also about helping the whole business meet its sustainability targets. From the other side, businesses considering sustainable IT face many questions such as: 

• Does the organization recognize IT as a significant contributor to its overall sustainability strategy?
• How does IT contribute to the organization’s sustainability goals?
• What more could IT do to contribute to those goals?
• Are there clear, measurable objectives for sustainable IT?

Nowadays, sustainability has considered as key factor for IT in several organizations to improve performance and growth. Numerous firms have worked to adopt different strategies in order to re-manage its organizational performance, enhance growth, and competitive advantage in terms of social and ecological sustainability, so the success of sustainability means raise the economic scale through the ability to innovate, as well as increased competitiveness by lowering costs and increasing profit as a result of better-quality and services. 

So to answer mentioned questions, I would follow Mines's research when he showed that a number of organizations are expected to jump on the Green IT bandwagon pushing the Green IT services market to an estimated US $4.5 billion by 2013. 

Therefore, the process of development green product or services is increasing attention as means to improve companies’ performance. CIOs have singled out “Green IT” in their organizations as the most important sustainable strategic technology. 

In order to achieve “How does IT contribute to the organization’s sustainability goals” question, I would say, Green IT initiatives will become mainstream and will move from niche projects to a part of core business practice. Therefore, working on new innovations in the field of green products and services will have an efficient role in supporting companies and economies towards environmental sustainability, For instance in 2010 and 2011 video conferencing efforts an environmental savings of more than 87,500 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Another example is cloud computing which is considered as core of IT infrastructure application network as green technology, it is an evolving paradigm which is enabling outsourcing of all IT needs such as storage, computation and software. 

The reason why cloud computing is a greener technology is that it looks to enhance and to better utilize computer resources which ensures the decline of physical resources and hardware components needed within firms as researcher states (Hafner and Zhang 2012).

To sum up, the concept of sustainable growth can be helpful for planning healthy corporate growth. This concept forces CEO's and managers to consider the financial consequences of sales increases and to set products and services growth goals that are consistent with the operating and financial policies of the company or organization