Exploring Digital Sustainability Metrics: Developing a Comprehensive Framework to Measure Sustainable Digital Practices

Abstract

Digital sustainability is inevitable for today’s environment and sustainability. Digital technologies can help to manage sustainability effectively and efficiently. it’s also important to understand the progress of sustainability and how technologies help to make digital sustainability practices successful. Measuring digital sustainability is a complex task and it requires consideration of all the influencing factors to have an accurate measurement of progress. It requires the standardization of sustainability components and factors across industries as technology changes and evolves rapidly. This research article explores the essential factors of environmental, social, and economic factors. We also considered technology factors as one of the determinants of measurement as it supports all other factors to make it successful and measurable. This paper also proposes a framework to measure the score of digital sustainability based on factors of each component.  the significant factors, usage, and limitations and proposes a formula for calculating a Digital Sustainability Score. This framework can be customized, and factors can be prioritized based on business requirements. This measurement will help the companies to understand the status of digital sustainability practices, and this can be tuned based on sustainability goals. There are many challenges to measuring digital sustainability as it requires the collection of data for each factor, in-depth knowledge, and deployment of significant resources. While this framework is an attempt to understand all the major factors and requires a specific focus on industry. Though this paper addresses Social, environmental, economic, and digital technology factors, it requires a more comprehensive framework and a separate list of factors for each specific industry.