The term sustainability is not yet common place but its usage is growing and efforts are underway to solidify it's meaning.  In brief, sustainability is the ability to maintain a level state.  In terms of IT Service Management, it implies that the current service management processes could be evaluated and possibly modified slightly to minimize the organizations environmental impact. K2 Solutions Group is working with various industry experts to formulate a sustainable service management model, based on ITIL that can be used across all industries to measure and report on how environmentally efficient an organization is operating.

Efforts are underway within the Object Management Group (OMG)^© to establish a Green Business Maturity Model (GBMM)^© that would help to provide IT organizations with a common language to use when measuring their environmental impact.  The GBMM identifies various components as contributing to the overall structure of the model, one of those components being business operations. We believe that a mature federated CMS built upon an industry model such as the CMDBf which is being worked on by the Distributed Management Task Force(DMTF) can not only support the sustainability efforts but actually help to advance them.

We recognize, however that all of these green and "sustainable" efforts are only attractive to organizations if there is a cost benefit to them. This is why we are taking a leadership role in the industry to identify where there might be some cost saving and/or cost avoidence opportunities so as to incorporate them into the our already understood accepted ITIL & ITSM processes.