Sustainability efforts in the ICT sector are still in their early stages. A study by LUT University and its partners has examined the implementation of sustainability in Finnish information and communication technology (ICT) companies. The study focused on sustainable coding practices and measurement.
According to LUT University’s junior researcher Laura Partanen, companies’ website descriptions of sustainability efforts rarely indicate whether they’re merely analysing their operations from a sustainability perspective or reporting on actions.
“This distinction may seem minor but ultimately reflects whether sustainability measures are actually implemented.”
Sustainability goals do not reach the ground level
Sustainable coding practices were examined in workshops from two perspectives: business operations and software development. Both examinations revealed that sustainability goals had not been purposefully set in all companies. Even when goals were in place, they did not systematically reach all levels of the organisation.
In the business perspective workshop, only a third of the participants confirmed that their organisation had clear environmental sustainability goals. All participants agreed that sustainability goals need to be translated into practice more effectively – right down to the software development level. In the software development workshop, nearly all participants reported that the business operations level had issued general environmental sustainability or energy efficiency guidelines, but only a fourth had encountered specific requirements for software development.
The workshops also looked at the distribution of responsibility. From the business operations perspective, responsibility is distributed nearly evenly among management or within a designated sustainability team and between individual employees. At the software development level, the responsibility for implementation falls mainly on individual employees or, to a lesser extent, the entire team.
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Sustainability analysis is not enough; changes are needed
“Sustainability goals are not yet widely integrated into practical measures, such as software development. Is it due to insufficient internal communication, where the message isn't conveyed from the top down, or is it a lack of knowledge and understanding of what sustainability means in practice?” wonders Jari Porras, professor of software engineering at LUT.
“In the worst case, companies only analyse their operations from the sustainability perspective instead of reporting on their actions. Sustainability analysis is a good way of setting goals, but impact is achieved by steering operations into a more sustainable direction.”
The study was part of the VISIIRI project launched in spring 2024. VISIIRI aims to establish a comprehensive picture of the climate and environmental impacts of the ICT industry in Finland.
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Laura Partanen
