While public awareness of environmental sustainability is growing, there is concern about the economic costs of shifting to a greener economy. In the case of climate change, a critical issue is the relationship of economic output to greenhouse gas emissions, which has been labeled carbon productivity. Increasing carbon productivity means that economic growth can be sustained while emissions are reduced. Information technology has great potential to enhance carbon productivity, as IT is used to increase the energy efficiency of buildings, transportation systems, supply chains and electrical grids. On the other hand, the production and use of computers is a fast-growing component of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, a fact that must be balanced against the benefits of IT use. Green IS refers to the use of information systems to achieve environmental objectives, while Green IT emphasizes reducing the environmental impacts of IT production and use. This article focuses primarily on Green IS. It reviews existing Green IS research, presents a model of IT investment and carbon productivity, and lays

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. In essence, sustainability is conservation, deployment, and reuse of resources in responsible ways—a responsibility that is geared toward the triple bottom line. The triple bottom line—people, planet, and profit—view of value creation balances commercial and societal goals in a way that all three Ps are addressed simultaneously rather than being seen as trade-offs or with one goal overriding the other two. Although consultants, vendors, and others have posited that information systems can play a significant role in sustainability, there is a dearth of rigorous research into these issues, which also motivates this special issue. Several perspectives might be adopted by researchers in guiding their work. First, there is the viewpoint that sustainability issues can be prioritized into three categories: generic, value chain, and competitive context (Porter and Kramer 2006). For example, the competitive context calls for a proactive strategic approach and may offer opportunities to illustrate the transformative power of IS. Second, the four dimensions of the sustainability portfolio (pollution prevention, product stewardship, clean technology, and sustainability vision) (Hart 1997) provide another angle for investigating the role of IS in sustainability. A third approach could be to examine the role of IS in achieving the three eco-goals: eco-efficiency (DeSimone et al. 1997), eco-equity (Gray and

While public awareness of environmental sustainability is growing, there is concern about the economic costs of shifting to a greener economy. In the case of climate change, a critical issue is the relationship of economic output to greenhouse gas emissions, which has been labeled carbon productivity. Increasing carbon productivity means that economic growth can be sustained while emissions are reduced. Information technology has great potential to enhance carbon productivity, as IT is used to increase the energy efficiency of buildings, transportation systems, supply chains and electrical grids. On the other hand, the production and use of computers is a fast-growing component of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, a fact that must be balanced against the benefits of IT use. Green IS refers to the use of information systems to achieve environmental objectives, while Green IT emphasizes reducing the environmental impacts of IT production and use. This article focuses primarily on Green IS. It reviews existing Green IS research, presents a model of IT investment and carbon productivity, and lays out suggestions for future research.

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The objective of this article is to develop a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) for Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM). The BSC provides a framework for simulation experiments which serve to evaluate benefits of sustainability investments for the partners within a recycling supply chain. A system dynamics approach was employed to perform the simulation experiments. First, the simulations help to identify the preconditions that must be met before environmental and social measures can lead to a long-term profit increase for all network partners. Second, they demonstrate how limitations of the traditional BSC can be overcome, especially regarding multi-causal relationships between key performance indicators. The model is based on the results of a literature review and information gathered in expert interviews. The limits of the analysis lie in the fact that the simulation

Within the field of information systems an interest in environmental issues has driven the agenda for research from green IT improvement to sustainable innovation. A challenge yet to investigate is how sustainable innovation involving a cluster of actors from multiple settings should be 1) designed and 2) orchestrated so that the innovation performed enables sustainable change. Processes for launching sustainable innovation should consequently be analysed in order to further investigate this notion. In northern Europe there is today a strong drive towards enabling initiatives utilizing mobile information technology improving the everyday transportation of people. This paper analysis the launch of a research and innovation cluster with the aim to develop information infrastructures and processes that stimulate distributed development of digital services for everyday travel. Events performed during the two-year start-up have been analysed identifying essential actions for network design and innovation orchestration, creating hypotheses, which enables further research about the establishment of sustainable innovation.

Although practitioners have begun to implement Green IT into their companies, the governance of Green IT varies significantly. No research has been done to explain these differences in Green IT governance. Building upon contingency theory and IT governance, we develop a contingency model for Green IT governance which demonstrates the fit between contingencies and the company-specific configuration of Green IT. In the first step, three archetypes of Green IT governance reaching from centralized over federal to decentralized are presented. In the second step, we identify from literature competitive strategy, firm size, organization structure, performance strategy, environmental impact of industry, environmental strategy, IT infusion, and IT diffusion as contingency factors determining the ideal type of Green IT governance. The contingency model for Green IT governance is validated based on insights from five case studies. With the enhanced understanding of how Green IT governance is shaped by contingency factors, organizations are able to select the most successful Green IT

Value creation that incorporates Environmental Performance Indicators (EPIs) requires collaboration among different supply chain entities. This especially holds for product-level indicators, since the required resources are scattered along the whole supply chain. Prevailing environmental information systems (EIS) do not support flexible collaboration among involved supply chain partners. The paper at hand provides a contribution in this area by proposing an innovative architecture artifact for inter-organizational EIS (IO-EIS). The architecture was developed by following the design science approach: The requirements on IO-EIS were extracted together with industry representatives based on three use cases. An in-depth and systematic literature research was applied to identify published critical success factors for networked information systems. The proposed architecture artifact was designed based on the findings of the two analysis steps.

Using the Source-Position-Performance (SPP) framework and the literature on information and communication technology (ICT) impact, we posit that the IS capabilities owned by citizens (i.e., source of advantage) lead to ICT penetration among them (i.e., positional advantage), which in turn affects the sustainability of the country (i.e., national performance). Based on secondary data from 120 countries, our results supported the hypothesized model. Specifically, IS capabilities owned by citizens in a country appears to be a significant enabler of ICT penetration among them, which in turn lead to the management of national performance in terms of economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Post hoc analysis indicates that ICT penetration among citizens partially mediated the relationships of IS capabilities owned by citizens with economic and social sustainability. In addition,

All too often, valuable knowledge is lost from organisations when experts leave — both the experts and their expertise represent valuable assets (Huber, 1999). When older experts leave the workforce, they take with them significant experience and critical knowledge essential to the smooth management of organisations (Hylko, 2005). Employers, however, are often unaware of who possesses expertise, or the nature of that expertise. The loss will be accentuated as members of the post-World War II baby boom cohort retire. Approaches to recover or recreate knowledge after it is lost are not sustainable in terms of prudent knowledge management. Organisations need to develop a deeper understanding of where expertise resides and how it is retained. This paper, presenting a limited set of results from a larger study, addresses the knowledge retention processes of an individual expert providing technical advice on a New Zealand construction industry helpline, in a leading scientific research organisation. Within the organisation, a single expert who possessed much personally-held undocumented knowledge was identified. Through detailed observations and peer interviews, the researchers learned much about the elements of his expertise, problem-solving processes and knowledge retention behaviour.