Keywords

1 Introduction

Despite the heightened concern of business organizations for environmental sustainability, strategic decision support systems have failed to prevail in practice. Environmental Management Information Systems (EMIS) have been designed for operational data storage and documentation purposes to support compliance with environmental directives. However, the increasing demand for comprehensive environmental reporting as well as proactive environmental management imply new challenges for the integration of EMIS into the established corporate Information Technology (IT) landscape. The joint IT-for-Green project [1] aims to develop a new, integrated, and service-oriented type of EMIS called Corporate Environmental Management Information System (CEMIS). The resulting information system supports practitioners with the implementation of environment-related workflows, such as life cycle assessment, environmental monitoring, and Sustainability Reporting (SR), by obtaining, processing, and disseminating information.

The ideas of environmental and sustainable development started to influence development of and research on Information Systems (IS) at the beginning of the 21st century on a wider international base. The first conferences on the topic, such as the International Conference on Information Technologies in Environmental Engineering (ITEE), the International Symposium Informatics for Environmental Protection (EnviroInfo), and the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS), took place in the years 2001–2003. Melville [2] and Watson et al. [3] published the first contributions to the concept of environmental sustainability in one of the leading IS journals, the MIS Quarterly. But even though a huge number of information systems have been successfully implemented for the operational level, strategic decision support systems have failed to be disseminated into business practices. This contradiction motivated us to investigate the following research question:

How can information systems successfully enable sustainable strategic decision-making within business organizations by collecting, storing, and processing information with appropriate means?

We answer this question by designing, implementing, and evaluating our CEMIS and by giving an example. Furthermore, we derive a reference architecture from the example. Our system is built in a modular manner, with service orientation as a major conceptual design element. In this context, service orientation means that the smallest units of the modules are realized as services (called Green Web Services); these services are published in the Green Service Mall (service registry). Following the service-orientation approach, functionality will be established and expanded via the integration of new or modified services to add any kind of functionality. The design science approach [4] is applied for realizing the software.

This chapter is structured as follows: In Sect. 2 a brief description of the IT-for-Green project is given. The status quo of environmental management information systems (EMIS) is described, based on a systematic literature review (Sect. 3). The results (IS artifacts) of our research are outlined in Sect. 4, followed by a discussion of design considerations of CEMIS in Sect. 5. A CEMIS reference architecture is presented in Sect. 6. Lessons learned are discussed in Sect. 7, and conclusions are drawn in Sect. 8.

2 IT-for-Green Project

The ubiquity of IT in modern society and the progressive merging of digital and physical systems have created the basis for companies contributing more systematically to sustainable development. Common objectives of sustainability-oriented management include a fundamental redesign of business processes, a general increase in transparency, and more efficient handling of energy and material resources.

The IT-for-Green project supports companies in increasing their resource and energy efficiency with the help of information technology—that is, by means of Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems (CEMIS). However, formerly conventional CEMIS merely serve to ensure compliance with environmental laws and regulations and hence fall short of the full potential that IT holds for environmental management. The new generation of CEMIS (CEMIS 2.0) needs a stronger strategic focus and is intended to provide more direct support to decision-makers within companies.

The project IT for Green aims at modeling the entire product life cycle supported by a CEMIS, including the input side (measuring the energy efficiency of a company’s ICT), the transformation phase (production/logistics and sustainable product development), and the output side (corporate communications and Sustainability Reporting, SR). To this end, three interlocked modules are developed as reference implementations for an innovative CEMIS 2.0. Participating companies may also procure the modules in the form of services via a Cloud Computing Mall.

Researchers of the IT-for-Green project are members of the innovation network ertemis [5], which consists of researchers from the Universities of Oldenburg (Prof. Jorge Marx Gómez and Prof. Wolfgang Nebel), Osnabrück (Prof. Frank Teuteberg), and Göttingen (Prof. Jutta Geldermann). The University of Lüneburg (Prof. Andreas Möller, Prof. Burkhardt Funk, Prof. Peter Niemeyer) is also involved as an associate partner. Industry partners include CeWe Color, Hellmann World Wide Logistics, Nowis, and erecon. Furthermore, over 30 companies contribute their practical expertise to IT-for-Green.

Ertemis aims to facilitate knowledge transfer between research and practice and to advance interdisciplinary research on CEMIS 2.0.

3 CEMIS Status Quo: A Literature Review

A common definition explains CEMIS as an organizational and technical system with the ability to collect, process, and supply environmentally relevant information in a company [6]. This definition omits the bigger picture since it does not incorporate any information from supply-chain partners or publicly available information which is needed to make well-founded decisions regarding environmental sustainability. By following the proposed holistic approach using the three modules described in a later section, Green IT measures can be enabled and leveraged.

Present CEMIS follow a rather operative approach with tasks such as legally required reporting [7], therefore there is little assistance when it comes to strategic decision support [8, 9]. Integration with other systems (e.g., ERP, CRM, and publicly available data) and automated sustainability reporting have been broadly discussed in the literature, but are yet to be implemented [10]. These are key components of the future CEMIS, since a contribution to sustainable development can be realized only if the causes and effects of ecological, social, and economic key performance indicators (KPI) are recognized and an efficient way of handling relevant data is developed.

An analysis of third-party funded projects in the field of corporate environmental management from the last decade has shown a need for action and research in the interest of society, politics, business, and science. None of the projects scrutinized aimed at supporting all parts of the environmental management cycle, including input (energy and material efficiency), transformation processes (production integrated environmental protection), and the output side (sustainability reporting and strategic decision support) in a holistic and integrated way. However, a cross-corporate inspection of the sustainability of entire supply chains (sustainable supply chains) has been a relevant topic in scientific literature, but has—as yet—not found its way into business practice. For one of the most advanced approaches to sustainable supply chains, see the chapter by Rizzoli et al. [42] in this volume.

The research network ertemis and the project IT-for-Green will, in contrast to other projects, focus on exactly these aspects (integration of the strategic level and sustainability needs) of the next generation of CEMIS. The new CEMIS systems will provide advantages for business users by enabling them to:

  • develop environmental production and reverse logistics processes,

  • develop hybrid products (integrated and associated services) focusing on sustainability ideas in order to open up new markets for sustainable products,

  • realize an interactive exchange of information between different stakeholders in the field of sustainability reporting based on new Internet technologies (blogs, wiki, semantic web, podcasts, etc.),

  • realize synergy effects, cost-cutting effects, strategic advantages etc. by offering or using green services from the cloud (green clouds/Green Service Mall) or based on service-oriented architectures, and

  • pinpoint complementary cause-effect relationships and their effects on different targets from a strategic perspective. Complementary in this case means that, for example, pursuing economic targets concurrently supports ecological ones.

Whereas traditional CEMIS might be regarded as rather isolated, function-oriented information systems [8], new CEMIS will take a holistic approach that guides organizations to a strategic orientation. In this way, next-generation CEMIS are—from our perspective—information systems that deal with material and energy efficiency, emission and waste minimization, reverse logistics, stakeholder support, legal compliance, and especially with strategic environmental management. As yet, such systems only exist as concepts within academic discussions and have not found their way into business practice. Therefore, research and knowledge transfer especially into small and medium enterprises (SME) is an important prerequisite for putting such systems into action. Ubiquitous ICT and continuous integration of digital and physical systems allow for a fundamental renewal of business processes regarding sustainable business development, for increased transparency as well as for better control of material and energy usage.

In order to map the entire life cycle of a product, we see a need [11] for three modules that in sum interact as a reference implementation and proof of concept for a next-generation CEMIS. These three modules are Green IT (focusing on energy efficiency in a data center), Green Production and Logistics (focusing on the transformation phase of the product life cycle), and Sustainability Reporting and Dialogue (focusing on sustainability communication). In order to build our research on a strong base of existing literature in the field, we conducted a systematic literature review [12, 13]. The literature review represents the “essential first step and foundation when undertaking a research project” [14], ensuring relevance by avoiding reinvestigation as well as rigor by effective use of existing knowledge [12]. In order to efficiently integrate the knowledge base, we followed the approach of a systematic and concept-centric review [13]. The literature search yielded 18 publications discussing the topic of EMIS/CEMIS in international peer-reviewed journals. The concept matrix depicted in Fig. 1 was developed on the basis of these contributions.

Fig. 1
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Concept matrix of EMIS literature

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We can see from the matrix that sustainable reporting systems (discussed in 9 publications) as well as key performance indicator based systems (7) and output-oriented systems (7) are the types of EMIS/CEMIS receiving the most attention within the scientific community. This result leads to the assumption that EMIS/CEMIS are increasingly applied within the stakeholder dialogue, i.e., to generate sustainability reports and information on the environmental output of business organizations.

The large number of key performance indicator based systems is evidence for the increased application of EMIS/CEMIS within decision-making, which is also documented by the fact that process data (11) are the main data sources of current EMIS/CEMIS. This evidence correlates well with processes being the most common boundary of the systems (9). Roughly the same number of publications studied refer to each of the environmental media (9–12), reflecting the need for comprehensive EMIS/CEMIS that do not focus on single-scope solutions. Emissions (14), energy (13), waste (10), and material flows (7) are the most frequently mentioned objects of EMIS/CEMIS. This can perhaps be explained by increased application of the systems within the context of energy and material efficiency, which also indicates that EMIS evolve into strategic control instruments rather than operational systems. Model development and simulation (10) as well as active data warehouses (8) are the most common software tools among EMIS/CEMIS. Whereas model development and simulation tools are evidence of a more predictive or proactive use of EMIS/CEMIS, active data warehouses display a continuous demand for documentation systems. The most intensively discussed application areas for EMIS/CEMIS are reporting (10) and logistics (9), followed by procurement (8), production (7), waste management (7), and life cycle assessment (6), indicating the diffusion of EMIS/CEMIS to business domains beyond the classical scope of environmental management. Even though EMIS/CEMIS are predominantly stand-alone solutions (9), integrated systems are increasingly discussed and implemented (6). This brief outline of the observations gained from the literature forms the basis for formulating the following objectives for the implementation of EMIS/CEMIS:

  • supporting the realization of eco-friendly production, logistics, and disposal processes,

  • enabling analysis of cause-effect relationships between economic and environmental objectives via energy and material flow management to enable sustainable strategic management,

  • promoting interactive exchange of information with various stakeholders via reports and documentation of product- and process-related environmental impacts,

  • integrating process databases and applications of different departments and locations, e.g., using web portals or cloud computing, and

  • enabling model development and simulation as well as storage of data by means of an active data warehouse.

The software prototypes developed and presented in the papers analyzed were not evaluated formally and quantitatively. Besides, it can be seen that the systems developed in the realm of corporate environmental management are for the most part operative rather than strategic. There is still a lack of integration measures, for instance, for integrating CEMIS with accounting and production. In addition, there is a shortage of reference and maturity levels for CEMIS that can be parameterized and configured. So far, the results of the analyzed contributions are basically concepts and prototypic implementations whose comprehensive introduction in companies is still lacking. The market situation of software designed to support corporate environmental protection is relatively fragmented and confusing. Despite the growing importance of the topics environment and sustainability in political, social, and commercial environments, isolated applications are still more common in practice than integrated CEMIS [8].

Within the context of a market study in advance of this contribution, the authors were able to identify 110 software products in the range of corporate environmental information systems. Thus, the structure of the covered application areas is very heterogeneous. The systems can mainly be assigned to the categories

  • environmental and environmental law databases,

  • environmental management,

  • environmental accounting, and

  • material flow analysis and compliance management.

According to a research report by the Fraunhofer Institute of Labor Economics and Organization (IAO), approximately 60 % of the respondents use software to support their corporate environmental management [40, p. 90].

According to another study, software support is so far mainly limited to the application of Microsoft Office Excel™. The majority of the companies have not yet installed specific CEMIS [15]. All surveyed companies have environmental management systems in place, in accordance with EMAS or ISO 14001, thus they systematically conduct environmental protection.

Although CEMIS could be an adequate approach to support environmental activities in companies, it must be emphasized that the present concepts have not been able to establish themselves in corporate practice. Rather, they are predominantly used as poorly integrated solutions [16].

Various research projects aim to integrate CEMIS and ERP systems and develop reference models. Such reference models are, for instance: ECO-Integral [17], production and recycling planning as well as monitoring [18], organizational models and information systems for production-integrated environmental protection (OPUS) [19], and the reference model for CEMIS in the realm of in-plant logistics [41]. Despite these efforts, the present reference models have not yet been implemented by the providers of commercial CEMIS software, or at best only to some degree [41, p. 24].

CEMIS have been broadly discussed in the literature for the last two decades from varying perspectives; therefore the above literature review was conducted to identify preliminary work that aids the development of the authors’ research. The results can be reviewed in Table 1 below.

Table 1 Overview of related works
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4 IT Artifacts Developed in the IT-for-Green Project

The IT-for-Green project, funded by the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE), concentrates on the design of ICT artifacts for corporate environmental and sustainability management. In this development project, the three universities Göttingen, Oldenburg, and Osnabrück collaborate closely with cooperation partners from the region Lower Saxony. The envisaged research results are constructs, methods, models, and instantiations in terms of design research [4]. In order to ensure the relevance of the research, the approach of consortium research was selected. The ICT artifacts resulting from current developments are displayed in Table 3. Since the beginning of the project in 2010, 30 artifacts have already been developed, and 21 papers on design research have been published. It can be seen that instantiations, the operationalized form of an artifact, as well as models make up the largest share of the development output. The disproportionally high number of instantiations (12) and the small number of methods (2) correlates with the observations in view of related works. The small number of constructs (2), as a highly formalized form of artifacts [4], indicates that research is distinctly applied and industry-oriented. Thus, the strong application and industry orientation of the external investors (EFRE/EU) is mirrored in the scientific project output. What is striking is the high number of models (14). A specific feature of models is the inherent description of the relationship between problem and problem solution [4]. Despite their relatively high degree of formalization, they can be of significant practical relevance [27]. The high number of models in connection with the high number of instantiations thus points to a practice-related approach as the primary focus of the research project. The artifacts construct (2) and method (2) account for only a minor share of development output. Numerically, publications at scientific conferences (12) constitute the largest proportion of all publications. Publications in magazines (1) and books (1) are less frequent (cf. Table 2).

Table 2 Artifacts produced in the IT-for-Green project
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5 Design Considerations of CEMIS 2.0

Both scientists and practitioners were invited to participate in a survey in order to determine properties of next-generation CEMIS (CEMIS 2.0). A total of 33 responses were completed within a timeframe of 3 weeks in August 2011 and subsequently analyzed by the authors using PASW Statistics 18 and Microsoft Excel 2010.

57.6 % of the respondents replied that they were scientists, the remaining 42.4 % indicated that they were practitioners. Additionally, practitioners were asked about their company’s business sector. The most frequent sectors are chemical, plastics, mining, or energy (41.7 %), printing (16.7 %), and services (16.7 %).

63.6 % of all participants are directly affiliated with the project; 3.0 % are affiliated with the research network carrying out this research, but not with the project itself; and 33.3 % are affiliated with neither the project nor the research network.

Respondents were asked to rate the importance of each design property on a scale from 1 (high) to 5 (low). In the analysis, the design properties were ranked in ascending order by their arithmetic mean, i.e., the sum of all prioritizations of each property, divided by the number of votes. Table 3 shows the ranks of the prioritized properties broken down by votes by researchers, by practitioners, and totals (R); arithmetic mean (AM); standard deviation (SD); differences in mean values (Dif); and the statistical significance of differences among the perceived importance of the properties between practitioners and researchers according to a t-test using independent samples and unequal variance (Sign). As mentioned above, each property was rated on a scale from 1 to 5, resulting in an expected mean of 3. However, the results show that the overall mean score is 2.17 (2.27 for researchers, 2.03 for practitioners); in fact, only 2 of the 47 properties received a total mean higher than 3. The lower the arithmetic mean, the higher the priority. For better legibility, means under 2 are highlighted in bold and means equaling or above 3 in italics; statistically significant differences are highlighted in bold as well. In addition, the means of the top five criteria of each group (researchers, practitioners, and total) are underlined.

Table 3 List of all design properties ordered by arithmetic mean
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Table 3 shows differences in perceived importance for researchers and practitioners. For example, the difference in the arithmetic means for researchers and practitioners for the property “Consistency and traceability/transparency of calculations, information, and reports” (#29) is 0.63 points. It ranks 7th for researchers and 1st for practitioners. According to a t-test, this discrepancy is statistically significant, whereas discrepancies for most other properties are not. The discrepancies can be partially explained by the observation that researchers generally rated properties as being more important than practitioners did. These circumstances illustrate how important feedback from practitioners is to scientists.

Figure 2 visualizes the top design properties (i.e., those with an arithmetic mean lower than 2) and groups them by the goal that is pursued by their fulfillment.

Fig. 2
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CEMIS 2.0 top design properties in categories

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These design properties form the functional and non-functional top-level requirements on which basis we designed the reference architecture of a CEMIS 2.0 (cf. Sect. 6).

6 Next-Generation CEMIS 2.0 Reference Architecture

Figure 3 is a schematic diagram of the CEMIS under development in the IT-for-Green project. The runtime environment forms the backbone of the system. It is organized in a modular and service-oriented manner and contains the following core building blocks: Green Service Mall, Workflow Engine, databases, Event Engine, and user interface.

Fig. 3
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CEMIS schematic diagram

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The smallest functional units of the system are realized as Green Web Services and are available via the Green Service Mall. The Green Service Mall provides a service repository that supports all service phases from discovery to invocation and is accessible online.

The registration of external and internal services at runtime permits the development of services that are not available in the stock version of the CEMIS. It is also possible to change or update services at runtime without changing non-involved services and without the need to shut down the whole system. This concept features high flexibility paired with a highly integrative character. Moreover, embedding environmental considerations into any desired business processes allows for intermixed usage by self-hosted services, non-environmental services (such as transforming data into reports), and external service providers.

The Workflow Engine allows users to combine services and processes to create workflows using a graphical editor and manages the execution of workflows. “Execution” means starting, pausing, and stopping workflows, including the persistence of data and the actual workflow state. The engine enables internal business processes of an organization to discover and invoke Green Web Services, regardless of their origin (internal or external service provider). Due to various heterogeneous data, the architecture supports different kinds of database technologies, such as relational databases or document-oriented databases (such as XML based databases). The Event Engine allows monitoring and ad hoc reporting of events by continuously comparing current states of user-selected indicators with “regular” behavior. Regular behavior in the current implementation is inferred from historical data, but can also be inferred from more complex methodologies (implemented as Web Services). If a collected data point varies significantly from historical means, predefined events may be triggered (e.g., sending a text message to a decision maker if the carbon footprint of a specific product is too high).

The user interface of the runtime environment visualizes the software and allows user interaction via a web browser. This means that the interaction is platform-independent and also that integration of an optimized mobile-device interface is possible. Interaction between a user and the runtime environment can be divided in two parts: the interaction between a user and the runtime environment itself and the interaction between a user and workflows. The interaction between a user and the runtime environment was implemented as a web application. The interaction between a user and a workflow needs more flexibility and is even more complex. We integrated a state-chart-based annotation language (SCXML) and extended the language with custom interaction elements (interaction states). Workflows are technically SCXML Documents which define service calls and the custom interaction elements. These custom interaction elements provide the possibility to render client-side HTML elements (or scripts such as JavaScript). This offers the opportunity to combine service calls with user-driven interaction in a flexible manner. Authorizations for specific functions (e.g., service calls, workflow execution) can be granted by using the rights and role system that is responsible for issuing permissions. The rights and role system does not restrict access to individual services, it hides the information from the unauthorized users (or groups) instead.

7 Lessons Learned and Implications for Theory and Practice

Prior to this contribution, 11 researchers of the IT-for-Green consortium research project were surveyed as to their experiences, and as a result, 11 success factors and problem areas for consortium research were identified. Table 4 shows the interviewees’ central statements. The success of the project is reflected in particular by positive statements made by the practitioners.

Table 4 Statements on the success factors and problem areas in consortium research
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8 Conclusions

The results of the literature reviews, the expert interviews, and the industry workshops in the project IT-for-Green made clear that there is a shortage of scientifically sound and practically tested concepts as well as maturity and reference models (best practices) that support sustainable corporate development on the basis of CEMIS 2.0. The currently available CEMIS almost exclusively serve to establish conformity with the environmental legislation relevant in a particular case (end-of-pipe solutions). Economic, ecological, and social performance factors (key performance indicators), that is, the environmental performance of companies, are accordingly documented only ex-post.

In addition, there is a lack of adequate control mechanisms in practice that render transparent and monitor the cause-effect relationships between economic, ecological, and social key performance indicators and that control the measures for the realization of the objectives of sustainable corporate development on the basis of CEMIS 2.0.

A first step toward realization of CEMIS 2.0 has been taken by means of the reference architecture at hand.

The experiences, success factors, and problems (lessons learned) discussed in this paper show current challenges of consortium research for future projects in the realm of CEMIS 2.0.