Currently, all public development initiatives are expected to consider environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, social sustainability, and, more broadly, the UN’s sustainable development goals. This requirement also applies to periodically renewable or replaceable IT systems and services. However, little is known about how the development goals are actually addressed in IT. As public sector organizations are obliged to acquire new systems through public procurement procedures, we collected all Finnish ICT-related calls for tenders from a public repository in May 2024. By qualitatively analyzing 106 calls for tenders, we aimed to understand how the sustainability goals appear and are addressed in public ICT acquisitions. Surprisingly, only 7,55% of the calls mentioned the goals indirectly in their descriptions. Even more surprising was the absence of generic reasons and motives for the renewal initiative. Only 9,43% of the calls clearly stated the objective of the system renewal or provision. These low numbers have several consequences. First, they illustrate that sustainability goals are not considered in the IT field in practice; They are dead letters there. Second, the absence of explicit motives for the system renewal makes it challenging to design, develop and implement the system and reach and assess whether the initiative has reached its goals. This could be one of the main reasons why so many IT projects are said to fail – not knowing why they were developed makes it impossible to assess whether they have reached their targets.