e-Learning Course on Green ICT Strategies: Part 15 - Revision

In Part 14 I considered incorporating the content for a new e-learning course on "Green IT Strategies", to be offered as part of the ACS Computer Professional Education Program. into the Wikiversity. That was in January 2009. Since then I have run the course twice for the Australian Computer Society, and once for the Australian National University. The course is also offered by Open Universities Australia and Athabasca University (Canada). The course was intended to align with Competencies based on Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). However in 2008 when I did this work, SFIA had no competences for sustainability. I joined a SFIA discussion list and floated the idea of adding sustainability job skills, but was told there were not IT specific roles and therefore would not be added to SFIA. So I used the most appropriate looking SFIA skills:

• Procurement & management support

  • Supply management

    • Procurement

  • Quality management

    • Compliance audit

• Strategy & planning

  • Business/IS strategy and planning

    • Business process improvement

    • Enterprise Architecture

  • Technical strategy and planning

    • Emerging technology monitoring

    • Methods and tools
      

I heard no more on the issue of sustainability for SFIA until May 2010, when a newsletter ("Sustainability skills for
Information Technology SFIA 4G", SFIA Foundation, May 2010) announced that SIFA Version 4 had added four new sustainability skills:

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)

These are under the category - subcategory of:

1. Strategy and architecture - Business/IT strategy and planning: Sustainability strategy SUST levels: 5 and 6
2. Strategy and architecture - Technical strategy and planning: Sustainability management for IT SUMI levels: 5 and 6
3. Business change - Business change management: Sustainability assessment SUAS levels: 4 5 6
4. Solution development and implementation - Systems development: Sustainability engineering SUEN levels 4 5 6

The SFIA Foundation have also made minor changes to the wording of other skills to take into account sustainability: STPL, BURM, EMRG, BUAN, DESN, ITMG, FMIT, CPMG, AVMT, SLMO, ITOP, NTOP, PROC, QUMG, CORE, TAUD, ASMG.

It is not clear at this stage how, to align the course to the new SFIA descriptions.