Analyzing the Barriers Affecting the Adoption of Green Computing: A Hybrid Method Approach

Abstract While there is a plethora of research on the firms’ efforts toward environmental sustainability, it has been found that green computing has not been so prominent due to some burdens that are hindering their development and rapid deployment. Accordingly, upon identification of twelve barriers from the literature and clustering them into three groups of adoption costs, technological barriers, and internal barriers, the mutual influences and the importance level of barriers were investigated using the data collected from fifteen experts in the field. The Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) together with the Matrice d'Impacts Croises Multipication Applique´ an Classment (MICMAC) analyses methods were used to investigate the mutual influences amongst the barriers. The results of the ISM and MICMAC revealed that firm size and legal barriers are the most fundamental and independent ones which have the greatest impact on the system. Moreover, the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method was applied to reveal the importance level of barriers and further depict cause and effect relationships among them. The DEMATEL results revealed that, from the perspective of the experts, adoption cost barriers are more important than the other dimensions (Ri+Ci = 32.888). Furthermore, transactional risk (Ri+Ci = 24.160), technological complexity (Ri+Ci = 12.647), and switching cost (Ri+Ci = 14.483) were identified as the most important barriers related to each dimension. This study's developed decision-making framework would assist managers and practitioners in comprehending the relationships between the barriers that have been identified and how they interact when trying to practice green computing initiatives.