Environmental sustainability enabling information systems (original) (raw)
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Information Systems for Sustainable Organizations
2016
Nowadays sustainability is a broad and complex concept, which should be applied to any significant economic activity. Sustainable development involves environmental, economic and social aspects of long-term local and global processes implying an overall progress. Various contradicting requests arise which organizations should resolve in their projects and the proper information support becomes a key factor for this. In the context of the above, the goal of this paper is to examine how information systems within the organization contribute for sustainable development by providing appropriate information services. The monitoring and reporting of the organisational impact on sustainability is constantly required both by members and business partners. Thus, sustainability can be viewed as a new dimension of information system assessment.
Information Systems and Environmental Sustainability: Towards Global Changes
Abstract: Information systems and information technologies can play an important role in fostering changes leading to positive effects on the environment. We articulate a framework showing how the pursuit of environmental sustainability involves changes focused at different levels (eg, individual, organizational, and societal) and targeted towards different goals (eg, preventing pollution, product stewardship, cleaner technology).
Environmental Sustainability and Information Systems: The Similarity
Application of information technology and environmental planning share two very important characteristics: they are both concerned with planning, evaluating, and directing human activity in a wider context, and this activity is multiaspectual, mul- timodal, and multidisciplinary in scope. Further, the ideal in both cases is sustainable, long-term activity that brings overall good rather than harm. This paper discusses the multiaspectual nature of environmental sustainability and shows briefly how this understanding can be translated to the field of information systems.
From green to sustainability: Information Technology and an integrated sustainability framework
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 2011
Sustainability has increasingly become important to business research and practice over the past decades as a result of rapid depletion of natural resources and concerns over wealth disparity and corporate social responsibility. Within this realm, the so-called triple bottom line seeks to evaluate business performance on its impacts on the environment and interested stakeholders besides profitability concerns. So far, Management Information Systems research on sustainability has been somewhat constrained in the realm of green IT, which focuses mostly on the reduction of energy consumption of corporate IT systems. Using the resource-based view as the theoretical foundation, the manuscript develops an integrated sustainability framework, illustrating the integration of human, supply chain, and IT resources to enable firms develop sustainability capabilities, which help firms deliver sustainable values to relevant stakeholders and gain sustained competitive advantage. Particularly, the role of automate, informate, transform, and infrastructure IT resources are examined in the development of sustainability capabilities. The work calls for a bold new role of IT in sustainability beyond energy consumption reduction. Implications for future research and management practice on IT and sustainability are also discussed.
Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2006
Environmental management information systems (EMIS) is defined as 'organizational-technical systems for systematically obtaining, processing, and making available relevant environmental information available in companies'. Such systems evolved out of a growing need to manage environmental information in response to internal and external pressures such as regulations, consumers, stockholders, and changes in the business environments. While over the past decade EMIS have proliferated in the corporate landscape, these systems have received little attention within the information systems research community as whole. The objective of this paper is to serve as a tutorial providing a conceptual overview of EMIS, highlighting organizational and technical issues, as well as research opportunities. In this paper we suggest that there are significant and relatively untapped research synergies existing between information systems and environmental management for sustainable development at the organizational and technical levels.
Information Systems and Environmental Sustainability
As the future of our ecosystem and society is dependent on our ability to reverse or limit the effects of global climate change, sustainability issues have come to the societal and governmental forefront. Organizations, governments, and cross-national bodies are turning their attention to the question of how we can create a sustainable society. Sustainability is a complex term that can encompass environmental, economic, and societal issues.
Information Systems for Sustainable Business Development
during Oct 11-12, 2011. The conference proceedings contain written versions of selected contributions presented during the conference. The conference theme was Information Systems for sustainable business development. The conference provided a forum for discussion on current issues and challenges as well as recent and future developments across a wide range of areas in Information Systems. More than thirty papers were presented in the following six tracks: Trends in Information Systems E-commerce and E-business Challenges Knowledge Management and IS industrial applications Trends in Web technologies IS Security and Mobile Computing E-Government issues and solutions The Conference invited following key note speakers and one talk on industrial application of IS in Oman:
Information Systems Solutions for Environmental Sustainability: How Can We Do More?
Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 2016
We contend that too few information systems (IS) academics engage in impactful research that offers solutions to global warming despite the fact that climate change is one of the most critical challenges facing this generation. Climate change is a major threat to global sustainability in the 21st century. Unfortunately, from submissions of our call for papers presenting IS solutions for environmental sustainability, we found only one paper worthy of publication. Given that IS have been the major force for productivity increases in the last half-century, we suggest that IS scholars should immerse themselves in creating solutions for environmental problems. Moreover, information is a perquisite for assessing the state of the environment and making appropriate decisions to ameliorate identified problems. Indeed, the IS scholarly community needs to help create a sustainable society. While there is an emerging body of IS scholarship under the banner of green IS, we strongly believe that we need to step up these efforts. Our experience indicates that the emergence of green IS as an academic discipline is still by far too slow relative to the needs of society. Too few people are working on green IS given its importance, and fewer still are publishing papers about IS solutions that could contribute to dealing with climate change. In this editorial, we speculate on some reasons for why and explore how the IS discipline can grasp the opportunity to contribute to one of the most important societal challenges of our time. We identify the major barriers that we assert curtail the involvement of IS scholars in green IS research; namely, incentives misalignment, the low status of practice science, data analysis poverty, identification of research scope, and research methods. We discuss each barrier and propose solutions for them.
Environmental Sustainability in Organizations: The Information Technology Role
2012
This study explores the role of IT in improving environmental sustainability of organizations using an interpretive analysis of the environmental IT implementation processes of three early innovators. The technology, organization, and environment framework and a six-stage IT implementation model guided our data analysis. Factors and outcomes at the various implementation stages were extracted. We find that IT was implemented primarily to measure and report the sustainability impact of organizations; however, the information that resulted from these systems increased organizational commitment to environmental sustainability and led to the development of sustainable practices in these organizations.
Information systems as determinant of ecological sustainability
2014
Sustainable economic development is possible only by ensuring a balance of all three dimensions: economic, social and environmental sustainability. As a result of the impact of human society on nature, interest in environmental sustainability and analysis of all possible determinants increased in the last decades of the twentieth century. Also, numerous initiatives have emerged from the tendency to stop or slow down the destruction of the natural resource. Economic science is also involved in research of all available resources. The aim of this paper is to present the possibilities of information systems in the process of improving environmental sustainability from the perspective of the organization, keeping in mind that environmentally friendly product and services do not provide a competitive advantage, because of the higher costs. Information systems make can improve the position of these organizations through increased eco-efficiency, eco-equity and achieving eco-effectiveness. This paper covers the possible ways in which information systems and technology (ICT) impact on these concepts. The possibilities of automating, information and transforming are covered. Special emphasis is given to the situation in this field in Serbia.