The environmental impact of information and communications technologies (ICT) might be a two way
street. On the one hand, each stage of the ICT lifecycle has a potential to contribute to the damage of
the environment. On the other hand, ICT can provide some of the best tools not only in measuring and
reporting greenhouse gas emissions, waste and water use within core enterprise and value chain
processes but also in reducing them. The application of environmental criteria to ICT is commonly
referred to as Green IT. It is attracting IT management’s interest but has hardly been researched.
This paper aims to explore the extent to which Green IT has penetrated business consciousness. The
contributions of the paper reset on offering a snapshot of Green IT diffusion, on proposing and
empirically exploring a Green IT Matrix and Motivation classifications and on testing some of the
theoretical propositions regarding the influence of institutional forces and organizational motivations
in the adoption of Green IT.