Designing IT systems according to environmental settings: A strategic analysis framework

In the past, IT system design is mainly driven by two essential factors: technical merits and costs. Environmental consideration only emerges in most recent discussions under the label of green IT. As the evaluation of environmental and climate impact involves too many parameters, some of which are indirect and hidden, it is very hard to make rationale analysis without the support of a holistic strategic analysis framework In this paper, we propose to extend the goal-oriented requirements modeling language. GRL, to model the rationality behind IT system design, in particular, how the environment related considerations come into play in such design decision making. It can be adopted as a strategic analysis framework to facilitate concrete decision makings under different environmental settings. Example real world scenarios are used to illustrate how the proposed approach can help improve the state of the practice. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.