Title: Green IS - information system framework to support environmental sustainability of firms

Authors: Somnath Debnath

Addresses: School of Business and Enterprise, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract: With increasing awareness of sustainability issues, businesses are being scrutinised to reduce their ecological footprints and resource intensity. Information technology and systems (IT/IS) being the backbone to support information needs of firms, cannot shy away from the responsibility of supporting firms with sustainability choices, much of which has remained confined to short-term strategies like reducing energy usage and carbon footprint of IT landscape. By leveraging process-oriented view of organisational functions, we explore how green IS can partner with the business processes (green or red) to encapsulate inherent and desired environmental considerations and bring other IS elements like technologies, systems and users together to interact. This, we postulate, not only introduces elements like uncertainty, complexity and dynamism, that characterises green IS (as a field of study) and differentiates it from traditional IS, but also challenges green IS to deal with a new and evolving information space.

Keywords: green IS/IT; green business process; sustainability; process-based theory; emergence.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2020.106797

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2020 Vol.34 No.1, pp.83 - 103

Received: 13 Oct 2017
Accepted: 29 May 2018
Published online: 21 Apr 2020 *

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