Responsible ICT

Responsible ICT

Book chapter

14. Software sustainability assessment

Abstract

The Software Sustainability Assessment (SoSA) is an ethical reasoning method which can be used in order to identify and model the organizational, economic, environmental and social concerns of an organization. These four categories of concerns are also known as the “sustainability dimensions”. The SoSA method has arisen from the Causal Loop Diagram (CLD), which can be seen as the parent of this ethical reasoning method. The CLD is a business model which offers businesses the possibility to make complex system dynamics understandable by modeling the causal loop relations.

The Causal Loop Diagram is one of the main methods in sustainability science, therefore SoSA is based on the principles of CLD. To be precise, SoSA is an adaptation of a CLD to the ICT domain. By using this method, one can model the increasing or decreasing effects that one concern (or an ICT system) has on another concern. The method is used to identify all concerns that arise when using a certain system, and thereafter perform a trade-off analysis. With the trade-off analysis, one can retrieve an overview of the pros and cons of the analyzed system.

With the four sustainability dimensions, the concerns can be divided into subjects that the concern is about. The economic dimension focuses purely on the concerns that are either saving capital and value, or costing capital and value. The social dimension focuses on helping the current and future generations to have the same or greater access to social resources by pursuing generational equity. The third dimensions is the environmental dimension, which is used to define the concerns that aim to improve human welfare while protecting natural resources. The technical dimension completes the method and focuses on the long-term use of software intensive systems and their appropriate evolution in an execution environment that continuously changes.

All these concerns are placed into the model which is divided into three impact levels. The impact levels that the model consists of are: the life-cycle (direct) impact, the enabling (indirect) impact and the structural (socioeconomic) impact. The life-cycle impact consists of concerns that are directly impacted by the system. Resources that are used to produce a system are examples of concerns that can be placed into the direct impact level. The enabling impact assesses the ability that a user or a company gets when the ICT system is integrated. The concerns that are placed in this indirect impact level are often affected by the concerns located at the direct impact level. The structural impact refers to the long lasting effects that have resulted after a consolidation of the impact that occurred earlier.

With all the discussed elements, a modeler is able to execute the SoSA method. This is done in three steps. The first step is to identify the sustainability concerns. This is done with the key questions: “what are the relevant ethical or sustainability concerns?” and “are they within the project scope?”. When the relevant concerns are determined, the second step, which is classifying the sustainability concerns, can be done. This step consists of two steps where the first step is to locate the concerns in one of the three impact levels. When the concerns are placed in the proper level, the second step is to determine whether there are cross-dependencies and what direction and sign the dependencies have. When this step is finished the concept model is complete, but there is still a third and final step to be executed. This step makes the modeler rethink the elements and the relationships. This is done by asking yourself two questions: “does the concept model make you think of any other sustainability concerns?” and “can you think of any additional cross-dependencies between concerns?”. When the answer of one of the two questions is “yes”: loop back to step 1 until the model covers all the material concerns. When the model covers all, the concept model can be determined as the finalized model. When this step is reached, the SoSA method is successfully completed. It is also possible to execute it in a different order, but it is likely that it will result in a messier model, also because the concerns have to be adapted on the fly without being able to come back.

Knowledge clip


Jesse Borghardt, Stan de Reuver, Nena Schuitemaker, Mark Sorel

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