Page 219 -

218 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure

find the downside in the business case for green IT. percent. The directive suggests that 2020 would be
The biggest obstacle to green IT is changing people’s a feasible deadline for achieving these goals, but
behavior and well-established practices. Nordea has set itself a deadline of 2016. If the orga-
Corporate social responsibility, of which low nization is to be successful in this, then IT in its vari-
environmental impact is a part, is now an integrated ous forms will definitively play a key role—both as
part in Nordea’s strategy to attract and retain both part of the problem and as part of the solution.
customers and skilled personnel. Guided by the
Sources: Based on 15 personal interviews with representatives of
European Union directive on energy use, Nordea has
Nordea during 2010; http://www.nordea.com.
set out to reduce energy consumption by 15 percent,
travel by 30 percent, and paper consumption by 50

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

1. What business, personal, and social costs are 3. What are the arguments against corporate social
involved when traveling by airplane between responsibility?
Copenhagen and Helsinki?
4. Why should firms be engaged in making the world
2. How can IT be both the culprit and the solution to more sustainable?
environmental problems?
Case contributed by Jonas Hedman and Stefan
Henningsson, Copenhagen Business School

AUTONOMIC COMPUTING

With large systems encompassing many thousands of networked devices,
computer systems have become so complex today that some experts believe
they may not be manageable in the future. One approach to this problem is
autonomic computing. Autonomic computing is an industry-wide effort to
develop systems that can configure themselves, optimize and tune themselves,
heal themselves when broken, and protect themselves from outside intruders
and self-destruction.
You can glimpse a few of these capabilities in desktop systems. For
instance, virus and firewall protection software are able to detect viruses on
PCs, automatically defeat the viruses, and alert operators. These programs
can be updated automatically as the need arises by connecting to an online
virus protection service such as McAfee. IBM and other vendors are starting
to build autonomic features into products for large systems.

MIS_13_Ch_05_Global.indd 218 1/17/2013 3:04:27 PM