Sustainability is hip. When we look at the footprint of our actions in the world, IT (or ICT) is responsible for some of the carbon-dioxide emissions (don’t ask me how much, but I can imagine there’s a lot to win). It must be possible to reduce this by working more efficient and by creating more effective solutions.
Sustainability is also a strange concept. It’s a phrase that has a lot of meaning lied beneath it. What is Sustainable Development? What do we need to do with this concept and aren’t there any dimensions given how to test if something is sustainable? There’s a lot of information on the web about sustainable energy and other measurements, but nothing when you take a look in the services department.
The Cambridge Online Dictionary tells us the meaning of the adjective Sustainable.
sustainable adjective
• able to continue over a period of time
• causing little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time
The first explanation doesn’t say anything about ‘greenness’ of a solution, but the second explanation does. But is environment the only part of sustainability? Or are there more factors to be considered?
Wikipedia gives us further explanation on the subject. On Sustainability Wikipedia describes three ‘pillars’: environmental, social and economic. See, now we’re getting somewhere. So not only our environmental footprint is of the essence when we’re looking into sustainable software development, also the solution needs to make ‘a difference’ and the costs can’t be to much.
When we look into another, possibly related, concept, ‘Green IT’, we mainly hear about hardware which is energy efficient, or IT solutions that helps organizations to reduce CO2 emissions, like software that helps people to work from home. But we also must be able to ‘Greenify’ Software Development itself.
So, we need to create real and structural solutions that treats the environment and the people in it with respect, at low costs. Isn’t this Agile Software Development in it’s core? (help me out here.) Here I think about concepts like SOA integration of legacy systems, cloud-computing in order to balance hardware resources, Theory of Constraints analysis, remote development, and more.
