Ethical Procurement and Green IT Strategy: Integrating Sustainability into Enterprise Technology Management

Abstract

Enterprise technology has become a material sustainability issue in its own right: data centres and networks draw significant and growing energy; device fleets embody carbon, conflict minerals, and labour risk across opaque supply chains; and accelerating refresh cycles feed one of the world’s fastest-growing waste streams. Yet in most organisations, the two functions that could act on this — IT management and procurement — pursue sustainability separately, with IT focused on operational energy efficiency and procurement on supplier codes of conduct, leaving the largest impacts (embodied emissions, lifecycle extension, end-of-life integrity) in the gap between them. This paper develops an integrated framework for ethical and green enterprise technology management structured around the technology lifecycle: demand governance (whether to buy at all), sourcing (what and from whom), operation (how efficiently), lifetime management (how long), and end-of-life (what happens after). For each stage we specify decision principles, management practices, and governance instruments, and we consolidate these into a reference table linking stages to practices and to the maturity conditions under which each becomes feasible. We argue that the pivotal, least-practised interventions are demand governance and lifetime extension — because avoided and deferred purchases dominate lifecycle impact — and that embedding sustainability criteria into procurement scoring, contract clauses, and asset-management policy converts espoused ESG commitments into enforceable operating decisions. Implications are drawn for CIO–CPO collaboration, ESG reporting integrity, and research on green IT maturity.