Sustainability indicators for information and communication technology solutions and services

We previously proposed sustainability indicators to evaluate information and communication technology solutions and services. These sustainability indicators are based on the following concepts: (1) the triple bottom line forms the basis of the evaluation criteria, (2) the same unit is used for every evaluation criterion, and (3) the sustainability indicators can be used to measure a diverse range of ICT solutions and services with different goals. The sustainability indicators are divided into four layers for simplicity, and the triple bottom line and “satisfaction” constitute the first layer. Since the notion of “society” is broad, this layer is further split into “safety”, “health”, and “comfort” then positioned in the second layer. The third layer includes indicators such as “information security” and “ubiquity” from the ICT perspective. In this paper, we propose a new layer consisting of improved sustainability indicators of “decreased social loss”, “decreased business cost”, “decreased user's cost”, “increased business chance”, and “decreased user's cost”. These indicators make it possible to distinguish positive/negative impact as well as target stakeholders of the provided additional value of the ICT solutions and services. We estimated the improved indicators using example ICT services.