Abstract-CallForAction-Seidel

=Call for Action: Investigating the Role of Business Process Management in Green IS=

Stefan Seidel, University of Liechtenstein, Principality of Liechtenstein, stefan.seidel@hochschule.li Jan vom Brocke, University of Liechtenstein, Principality of Liechtenstein, jan.vom.brocke@hochschule.li Jan Recker, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, j.recker@qut.edu.au

Watson et al. (2010) call IS researchers to investigate how the transformative power of IS can be leveraged to create an ecologically sustainable society. In this context, the notion of Green IS has emerged as the design and implementation of information systems that contribute to sustainable business processes. It thus appears both timely and relevant for IS researchers to investigate the role of business processes and business process management (BPM) for leveraging the transformative power of IS in order to create an environmentally sustainable society. BPM has emerged as an important sub-domain of the IS discipline that is of particular relevance to practice. Typically, BPM has focused on primarily economic targets. Contemporary organizations, however, increasingly become aware of the need to create more sustainable, IT-enabled business processes, considering their economic, ecological, and social impact. Exemplary ecological key performance indicators that increasingly find their way into the agenda of managers include carbon emissions, data center energy, or renewable energy. While recent years have seen a significant shift towards continuous process improvement as opposed to radical re-design, one may argue that creating sustainable operations will require organizations to fundamentally rethink the way they are doing business. As IS researchers, we should be particularly interested in the transformative power that IS can unfold in such endeavors. At the same time, there are many well-established techniques, including process modeling, process optimization, and workflow management that, if deliberately applied, may contribute to the design and implementation of Green IS.
 * Abstract **

The proposition that we put forward in this call for action is that only through process change, and the application of process-centered techniques, such as process analysis, process performance measurement, and process improvement, the transformative power of IS can be fully leveraged in order to create environmentally sustainable organizations and, in turn, an environmentally sustainable society. To investigate this further, we contend that IS researchers must consider process-related concepts when theorizing about the role of IT in the transformation towards sustainable organizations. This will not only allow us to better understand the transformative power of IS in the context of sustainable development, but also to proceed to more prescriptive, normative research that directly impacts on the implementation of sustainable, IT-enabled business processes.

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