Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Global ICT Sustainability skills standard

Sustainability skills for Information Technology are being introduced into version 4G of the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).

In 2008 the Australian Computer Society commissioned me to wrote a professional e-learning course on green ICT. As this was part of an international program to improve the level of education of professionals, I was required to align my course with SFIA. This was difficult to do as there were no sustainability related job descriptions in SFIA. So I used the most relevant categoriese: Procurement & Management support and Strategy & planning. This worked well, the ACS program is now internationally accredited and the course has been run several times. The same course materials are used by Australian National University , Open Universities Australia, and Athabasca University (Canada).

I requested SFIA create some new sustainability course categories and this is now being done in SFIA Version 4G:
Sustainability – today’s challenge
Sustainability is now a serious part of IT. The use of energy, carbon and sensitive materials requires careful management. The many organisations using SFIA expect those needs to be reflected in the skills framework. SFIA’s comprehensive nature means that its operational and detailed skills can easily be seen to cover sustainability requirements and issues. However, in the management of sustainability the inclusion of four new skills will help incorporate sustainability thinking into the mainstream.
The four new skills are:
  • SUST Sustainability strategy (in Strategy and architecture)
  • SUMI Sustainability management for IT (in Strategy and architecture)
  • SUAS Sustainability assessment (in Business change)
  • SUEN Sustainability engineering (in Solution development and implementation)

... SFIA is owned by The SFIA Foundation, a not-for-profit body. Licence terms apply and are available on the SFIA website (www.sfia.org.uk).

From: Sustainability skills for Information Technology, SFIA Foundation, 2010

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